| William Appleman Williams |
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Information AboutWilliam Appleman Williams |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT WILLIAM APPLEMAN WILLIAMS | |
| 1921 births | |
| williams, william appleman | |
| 1990 deaths | |
| american historians | |
| historians of the united states | |
| oregon state university faculty | |
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Williams tacked a course as a historian which departed from traditional history. Whereas many U.S. historians wrote the story of the U.S. in terms of the spread of freedom, Williams argued that the U.S. had also spread as an empire. Williams believed that the United States was as much responsible for the Cold War as was the Soviet Union . Williams argued that American politicians, fearful of a loss of markets in Europe , had exaggerated the threat of world domination from the Soviet Union. Amid much criticism, Williams made no moral distinction between the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin and the democratically elected leadership of U.S. presidents. Williams inspired a generation of historians to re-think the Cold War, including Lloyd Gardner and Walter LaFeber , who along with Williams argued that the Vietnam War was neither democratizing nor liberating but was an attempt to spread American dominance. Wiliams' ''The Tragedy of American Diplomacy'' is often described as one of the most influential books written on American Foreign Policy , particularly by academics on the Political Left . BIOGRAPHY Williams was born and raised in the small town of Atlantic, Iowa . He earned a degree in engineering at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis . After serving in the Pacific in World War II, he moved to University Of Wisconsin-Madison to begin graduate studies. He earned a Master's Degree and a PhD there and came under the influence of the great historians Fred Harvey Harrington , Merle Curti , and Howard K. Beale . After teaching at various other colleges, he returned to Madison in 1957 to teach in the History Department. After witnessing the turmoil of the 1960s and 1970s in Madison and tiring of the grind of teaching graduate students, he moved to the Oregon State University in 1968 to spend the rest of his career teaching undergraduates. He served as President of the Organization Of American Historians in 1980 . He retired in 1988 and died in Oregon in 1990 . CRITICISM The first serious critique of Williams's work was offered by Robert W. Tucker in 1971 , followed by Robert James Maddox in 1973 , and by Howard Schonberger in 1975 . Tucker’s arguments challenged those of Williams by arguing that United States foreign policy had been generally passive, rather than aggressive, before 1939. Tucker’s arguments were elaborated and expanded later by other scholars. Maddox in ''The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War'' criticized Williams, Lloyd Gardner , and other revisionist scholars for pervasive misuse of historical source documents and for a general lack of objectivity. In 1986 , Arthur Schlesinger Jr. criticized Williams from a liberal perspective in ''The Cycles of American History''. REVIVAL Some of Williams' ideas about the imperial nature of American foreign policy have been reivived by Andrew Bacevich , who uses them as a starting point for his own critique of US policies since the end of the Cold War in ''American Empire''. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jonathan M. Wiener, "Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959-1980," ''Journal of American History'', 76:1 (June 1989): 400. Cited in {Link without Title} (external link). |
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