Books like We Now Know by John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis’s definitive account of the Cold War explains how post‑1945 allies became foes, the forces that drove the conflict, and the leaders whose decisions ultimately brought it to an end.

A comprehensive reassessment of U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union during and after World War II, grounded in newly available archival sources.

Two decades ago, historian John Lewis Gaddis published The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, a pioneering work of scholarship that sought to explain how Americans found themselves, at the moment of their victory in World War II, facing a long, difficult, and dangerous struggle with an erstwhile ally, the Soviet Union. That struggle has finally concluded in a manner as abrupt, and with a victory as decisive, as the one Americans celebrated in 1945. In The United States and the End of the Cold War, Gaddis provides one of the first explanations of how this happened; he also considers what this outcome suggests about War history--and the post-Cold War future. The United States and the End of the Cold War contains significant new interpretations of the American style in foreign policy, the objectives of containment, and the role of morality, nuclear weapons, and intelligence and espionage in Washington's conduct of the Cold War. It reassesses, in ways sure to be controversial, the leadership of two distinctive cold warriors, John Foster Dulles and Ronald Reagan. It employs new methodological techniques to account for the sudden and surprising events of 1989. And it provides the clearest view yet of what a world without the Cold War is likely to be. Written with the vigor, authority, and adventurousness readers have come to expect from Gaddis's work, The United States and the End of the Cold War offers important new insights into how we got to where we are, and where we may be going.

"Without the Cold War, what's the point of being an American?" As if in answer to this poignant question from John Updike's Rabbit at Rest, Stephen Whitfield examines the impact of the Cold War - and its dramatic ending - on American culture in an updated version of his highly acclaimed study. In a new epilogue to this second edition, he extends his analysis from the McCarthyism of the 1950s, including its effects on the American and European intelligensia, to the civil rights movement of the 1960s and beyond. Whitfield treats his subject matter with the eye of a historian, reminding the reader that the Cold War is now a thing of the past. His treatment underscores the importance of the Cold War to our national identity and forces the reader to ask, Where do we go from here? The question is especially crucial for the Cold War historian, Whitfield argues. His new epilogue is partly a guide for new historians to tackle the complexities of Cold War studies.

From the Shadows: Robert M. Gates's Account of the Cold War and Presidential Policy Making