ABSTRACT
To John Lewis Gaddis, the end of the Cold War meant that historians had a duty “to account for the rise, flourishing, and decline of the Russian-American global hegemony.” With We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, he aimed to meet this obligation, asking whether the conflict had to happen in the first place and setting out a clear definition for a “new Cold War history” that future scholars could explore and debate. Gaddis weaved his principal goal of presenting his new history into a much more detailed account of some of the most significant and controversial events of the early Cold War. Gaddis explores different events and themes relating to the early Cold War in each chapter of We Now Know. Gaddis argues that new evidence proved that the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin played the main role in the beginning of the Cold War.
