Who is Walter LaFeber?
Walter LaFeber, a Cornell University history professor and author whose unvarnished version of American diplomacy drew hundreds of students and spectators to his Saturday morning lectures, and whose acolytes went on to influence the nation’s foreign policy, died on Tuesday in Ithaca, N.Y. He was 87.
Was LaFeber a revisionist?
At Wisconsin, he was a student of Fred Harvey Harrington and William Appleman Williams and became a proponent of a revisionist version of US diplomatic history that emphasized economic motivations over security, power, and morality as the main driver of American foreign policy.
What led to the revisionist history of the Cold War?
“Revisionist” accounts emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War in the context of a larger rethinking of the United States role in international affairs, which was seen more in terms of American empire or hegemony.
What did revisionist Marxists believe?
In the 1940s and 1950s within the international communist movement, revisionism was a term used by Marxist-Leninists to describe communists who focused on consumer goods production instead of heavy industry; accepted national differences instead of promoting proletarian internationalism; and encouraged liberal reforms …
What is the revisionist argument of the Cold War?
In the 1960s and 1970s, the revisionists stressed that American expansionism was the cause of the Cold War. They pointed out that, at the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union was severely weakened, whereas the United States prospered and possessed a monopoly on the atomic bomb.
What is the difference between revisionist and post revisionist?
The revisionist vision produced a critical reaction of its own. In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of historians called the post-revisionists argued that the foundations of the Cold War were neither the fault of the U.S. nor the Soviet Union. They viewed the Cold War as something inevitable.
Who founded revisionism?
Eduard Bernstein
revisionism, in Marxist thought, originally the late 19th-century effort of Eduard Bernstein to revise Marxist doctrine.
Who was to blame for the Cold War?
The United States and the Soviet Union both contributed to the rise of the Cold War. They were ideological nation-states with incompatible and mutually exclusive ideologies. The founding purpose of the Soviet Union was global domination, and it actively sought the destruction of the United States and its allies.
What did the post-revisionists believe?
The post-revisionist vision In the 1970s and 1980s, a group of historians called the post-revisionists argued that the foundations of the Cold War were neither the fault of the U.S. nor the Soviet Union. They viewed the Cold War as something inevitable.
What is an example of revisionism?
The Nazi Holocaust is one of the most well-known examples of historical revision or denial. The deniers’ argument was that the Nazi regime’s murder of some six million Jews during World War II did not occur.