So what does it all add up to? What is the new Cold War history- that is, histories of the Cold War written after the Cold War ended- all about?įirst, it is clear now that, contrary to what historians and theorists of international relations expected when the Cold War began, democratic governments behaved more realistically throughout than did their authoritarian counterparts.

And with the end of the Cold War and at least the partial opening of documents from the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, the fit between our representations and the reality they describe has become a lot closer than it once was. But we can represent the past, just as cartographers approximate terrain. Historians can no more reconstruct what actually happened than maps can replicate what is really there. We will never have the full story: we don’t have that for any historical event, no matter how far back in the past. Or, at least, we know a good deal more than we once did. We were in something like the position of those puzzled poseurs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, wondering what in the world was going on and how it was all going to come out. We had no way of knowing the final outcome, and we could determine the motivations of only some- but by no means all- of the major actors. In contrast to the way most history is written, Cold War historians through the end of the 1980s were working within rather than after the event they were trying to describe. I like this quotation from the other Marx because it suggests how limited our view of the Cold War, until quite recently, has actually been. Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. His most recent book is We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997). Lovett Professor of History at Yale University. We now know more than we did ten years ago, but less than we will know in the future. New evidence both from the former Soviet Union and the West is overturning received opinions. Now is a particularly exciting time to be taking stock of this major issue of American and world history. Over 40 teachers from 17 states and two foreign countries met at this History Institute to hear five experts present the best and latest thinking about the Cold War and its lessons. The Cold War has always been the subject of intense debate- was it necessary, was it just, why did it happen, and how did it end- and has been a challenging topic for teachers.

The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis