William Appleman Williams (1921-1990, born in Atlantic, Iowa) was one of the 20th century's most prominent historians of American diplomacy. His major body of writings was published while he was on the faculty of the History Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Williams was considered a patriarch of a newly-emerging movement in search of "radical, but not really Marxist interpretations"⁽¹⁾ of American history. Williams considered the United States as much responsible for the Cold War as was the Soviet Union. Fearful of a loss of markets in Europe, American politicians, Williams argued, had exaggerated the threat of world domination from the Soviet Union, which was a country decimated by the Second World War. Williams' view of the Cold War's beginning was widely shared by both European and American Marxists, but his interpretation of American diplomatic history was novel. Williams inspired a generation of revisionist historians on the Cold War, including Lloyd Gardner and Walter LeFeber, and he provided the rationale for the American New Left's rejection of American participation in the Vietnam War.

Wiliams' The Tragedy of American Diplomacy is described as one of the most influential books written on American foreign policy.

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' 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.

Bibliography

• American-Russian Relations, 1781-1947, 1952
• The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1958, 1972
• Contours of American History, 1961
• The Shaping of American Diplomacy, 1966, 1967
• Roots of the Modern American Empire: A Study of the Growth and Shaping of a Social Consciousness in a Marketplace Society, 1969
• America Confronts a Revolutionary World, 1976
• Empire as a Way of Life, 1980

Note (1): Jonathan M. Wiener, "Radical Historians and the Crisis in American History, 1959-1980," Journal of American History, 76:1 (June 1989): 400. Cited in [1] (http://members.tripod.com/~MILTENOFF/WAWilliams.html) (external link).