Lecturer BIO :John Lewis Gaddis is Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution. Educated at the University of Texas in Austin, Professor Gaddis has also taught at Ohio University, the United States Naval War College, the University of Helsinki, Princeton University, and Oxford University. During the 2000/1 academic year, he is back at Oxford as George Eastman Visiting Professor at Balliol College.

Professor Gaddis's books include: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (1972, second edition 2000); Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History (1978, second edition 1990); Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (1982); The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War (1987); The United States and the End of the Cold War: Reconsiderations, Implications, Provocations (1992); and We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (1997).

Professor Gaddis is on the advisory board of the Cold War International History Project, served as a consultant on the CNN television ocumentary "Cold War," and is currently working on a book on istorical methodology, as well as a biography of George F. Kennan.

This lecture will begin with a short history of American thinking on the issue of whether the United
States should try to spread democracy elsewhere, focusing especially on the tension between the
idea that people should determine their own forms of government, on the one hand, and belief in the
superiority of American institutions, on the other. It will then examine the actual expansion of
democracy throughout the world during the 20th century, with a view to determining the extent to
which American actions - deliberate or otherwise - helped to bring about this result. The lecture will
conclude with an assessment of prospects for this trend toward global democratisation in the 21st
century, and with an evaluation of arguments for and against the proposition that sustaining it is or
should be a vital national interest for the United States.

Copyright © 2001, James Lewis Gaddis