Author and historian John Lewis Gaddis to give lecture April 21

MIDDLEBURY, Vt.-Author and historian John Lewis Gaddis will give a lecture titled “The Past and Future of American Grand Strategy” at Middlebury College on Thursday, April 21, at 8:15 p.m. Gaddis is a professor of history at Yale University and author of a number of books, including “The U.S. and the Origins of the Cold War: 1941-1947” (1972, second edition 2000) and “Surprise, Security, and the American Experience” (2004). His talk is Middlebury’s annual Charles S. Grant Memorial Lecture and will take place in Dana Auditorium in Sunderland Language Center on College Street (Route 125). The lecture is free and open to the public.

Gaddis has been Robert A. Lovett Professor of History and Political Science at Yale University since 1997. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees and began his teaching career at the University of Texas in Austin. He also has taught at the United States Naval War College, Princeton University, Ohio University and Oxford University, and has been a fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based Woodrow Wilson Center.

Gaddis’ books include: “Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretative History” (1978, second edition 1990); “Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy” (1982, revised and expanded edition, 2005); “The United States and the End of the Cold War: Reconsiderations, Implications, Provocations” (1992); “We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History” (1997); and “The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past” (2002). In 1973 he received the Bancroft Prize and the Stuart L. Bernath Prize.

Gaddis teaches Cold War history, grand strategy, international studies, and biography at Yale, where he was the 2003 recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa William Clyde DeVane Award for undergraduate teaching. He is on the advisory board of the Cold War International History Project, and he is currently working on a short history of the Cold War, as well as a biography of the late George F. Kennan.

The Charles S. Grant Memorial Lecture

The late Charles S. Grant was a gifted and much loved teacher and esteemed scholar at Middlebury College in the 1950s until his untimely death in 1961. Shortly thereafter, several of his colleagues and friends in the Middlebury community formed a committee and created a fund that eventually became large enough to establish an annual lectureship in American history as a tribute to him. Many of the most prominent American historians of the past 35 years have delivered Grant lectures. Previous speakers range from David McCullough, author of the best-selling biography “John Adams,” to Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., who served from 1961-1963 as special assistant to President John F. Kennedy.

For more information, contact Travis Jacobs of the Middlebury College History Department at 802-443-5315.

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