Cold War Legacies and Contemporary Dilemmas

Did the Cold War truly end in 1991? In Part III of The Unfinished Cold War Lecture Series, Professor Melvyn Leffler provides some surprising answers to this question while discussing the Cold War roots of today’s international conflicts.

Melvyn P. Leffler is a world-renowned expert on the Cold War and serves as the Edward R. Stettinius Professor in the Department of History at the University of Virginia.

He is author most recently of an analysis of the Cold War, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War, which draws on extensive research in American and Soviet archives and offers an account of the forces that constrained Soviet and American leaders in the second half of the 20th century.

Leffler is also author and editor of many other books and articles on U.S. foreign relations. His volume on the national security policy of the Truman administration, A Preponderance of Power, won the prestigious Bancroft Prize and many other awards. Leffler has also written on U.S.-European relations in the inter-war years and on the policies of the George W. Bush administration. He is now co-editing, with Odd Arne Westad, the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War.

Leffler has served as the President of the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations and has been the recipient of senior fellowships from the Norwegian Nobel Peace Institute, Woodrow Wilson International Center, United States Institute of Peace, Kluge Center of the Library of Congress, and Lehrman Institute. In 2002-03, he was the Harmsworth Professor at the University of Oxford, and, this past fall, he was a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Christ College, Cambridge.

This lecture is sponsored by the UCSB Center for Cold War Studies and International History and by the Global & International Studies Program.