Traditionalist Scholars on the Origins of  the Cold War

 See, inter alia, Arthur Schlesinger, "Origins of the Cold War," Foreign Affairs 46, no. 1 (October 1967): 22-52; Herbert Feis, From Trust to Terror: The Onset of the Cold War, 1945-50 (New York, 1970); Adam Ulam, The Rivals: America and Russia since World War II (New York, 1971); Ulam, Expansion and Coexistence, 2nd, ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973); George Kennan, Realities of American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954); Philip Mosely, The Kremlin and World Politics (New York, 1960); Robert Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973); Robert Ferrell, "Truman Foreign Policy: A Traditionalist View," in Richard Kirkendall, ed., The Truman Period as a Research Field (Columbia, 1974); William Taubman, Stalin's American Policy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982); Bruce Kuniholm, The Origins of the Cold War in the Near East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Hugh Thomas, Armed Truce (New York, 1987); Henry Kissinger, Necessity for Choice (New York, 1961).  While John Lewis Gaddis spent most of his career as a post-revisionist, he has recently switched to the traditionalist camp (We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997)); see also Douglas MacDonald, "Communist Bloc Expansion in the Early Cold War," International Security 20, no. 3 (Winter 1995-96): 152-88; R. C. Raack, Stalin's Drive to the West, 1938-1945 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
 Traditionalists emphasizing Stalin's pursuit of power and security over ideological ends are Randall Woods and Howard Jones, The Dawning of the Cold War (Athens, GA.: University of Georgia Press, 1991); Vojtech Mastney, Russia's Road to the Cold War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Mastney, The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Louis Halle, The Cold War As History (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); John Spanier, American Foreign Policy Since the World War II (New York: Praeger, 1973); Norman Graebner, Cold War Diplomacy, 2nd ed. (New York, 1977).  While there is no sustained empirical work on cold war origins from hegemonic stability theorists, they would emphasize Russia's desire as a rising state to overcome the restrictions set by the hegemon.  Still, since Russia did not move close to parity for many years, why the cold war arose so quickly is apparently inexplicable within this model.
 

Revisionist Scholars

 See Gabriel Kolko, Politics of War (New York: Pantheon, 1990 [1968]); Joyce and Gabriel Kolko, The Limits of Power (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, rev. ed. (New York, 1962); Walter LeFeber, America, Russia, and the Cold War (New York, 1967); Thomas McCormick, America's Half Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989); D. F. Fleming, The Cold War and its Origins, 1917-1960, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY.: 1961); David Horowitz, ed., Containment and Revolution (Boston, 1968); Lloyd Gardner, Architects of Illusion (Chicago, 1970); Barton Bernstein, "American Foreign Policy and the Origins of the Cold War," in Bernstein, ed. Politics and Policies of the Truman Administation (Chicago, 1970); Gar Alperovitz, Atomic Diplomacy, rev. ed. (London: Pluto, 1994); Alperovitz, The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb (New York: Vintage, 1995); David Horowitz, The Free World Colossus, rev. ed. (New York, 1971).  For early critiques, see Robert W. Tucker, The Radical Left and American Foreign Policy (Baltimore: Johns Hokpins University Press, 1971); Charles Maier, "Revisionism and the Interpretation of Cold War Origins," Perspectives in American History 4 (1970): 313-47; J. L. Richardson, "Cold War Revisionism," World Politics 24 (1972): 579-612; Robert James Maddox, The New Left and the Origins of the Cold War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).  For recent consideration, see Melvyn Leffler, "Interpretative Wars over the Cold War, 1945-60," in Gordon Martel, ed., American Foreign Relations Reconsidered, 1890-1993 (London: Routledge, 1994), 108-11, 114-17.
 

Neorevisionist Scholars

 See John Lewis Gaddis, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972); Gaddis, Strategies of Containment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982): Gaddis, "The Emerging Post-Revisionist Synthesis on the Origins of the Cold War," Diplomatic History 7 (Summer 1983): 171-90; Gaddis, Long Peace (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Geir Lundestad, "Empire by Invitation? The United States and Europe, 1945-1952," Journal of Peace Research 23, no. 3 (1986): 263-77; Lundestad, The American Non-Policy Towards Eastern Europe, 1943-1947 (New York, 1978); Scott Parrish, "USSR and the Security Dilemma" (Ph.D diss., Columbia University, 1993); Robert McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Daniel Yergin, Shatter Peace, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990); William Wolhforth, The Elusive Balance: Power and Perceptions During the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Wolhforth, "New Evidence on Moscow's Cold War," Diplomatic History 21, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 229-42; Thomas Paterson, Soviet-American Confrontation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Robert Pollard, Economic Security and the Origins of the Cold War, 1945-1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); J. Samuel Walker, "Historians and the Cold War Origins: The New Consensus," in Gerald Haines and Walker, American Foreign Relations (Westport, 1981).  For a recent discussion of post-revisionism, see "The Origins of the Cold War: A Symposium," led off by Howard Jones and Randall Woods's "Origins of the Cold War in Europe and the Near East: Recent Historiography and the National Security Imperative," with commentaries by Emily Rosenberg, Anders Stephanson, and Barton Berstein, in Diplomatic History 17, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 251-310.  Neorealism aligns closest to this post-revisionism, although neorealists would seek to exclude some of the unit-level variables introduced by historians.  For neorealists, the zero-sum nature of bipolarity forced each superpower, out of prudence, to mistrust and thus arms race.  For some additional perspectives not captured above, see Leffler, "Interpretive Wars," in Martel, American Foreign Policy Reconsidered.  On Leffler's work, which some consider post-revisionist, see below.
 

Melvyn Leffler's Work

  Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992); Leffler, "The American Conception of National Security and the Beginnings of the Cold War," American Historical Review 89 (April 1984): 346-81; Leffler, "National Security," in "A Round Table: Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations," Journal of American History 77 (June 1990): 143-51; Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994); Leffler, The Struggle for Germany and the Origins of the Cold War, Occasional Paper no. 16 (Washington, D.C.: German Historical Institute, 1996); Leffler, "Adherence to Agreements: Yalta and the Experiences of the Early Cold War," International Security 11, no. 1 (Summer 1986): 88-123; Leffler, "The United States and the Strategic Dimensions of the Marshall Plan," Diplomatic History 12 (Summer 1988): 277-306; Leffler, "Strategy, Diplomacy, and the Cold War: The United States, Turkey, and NATO, 1945-1952," Journal of American History 71 (March 1985): 807-2; Leffler, "Inside Enemy Archives: The Cold War Reopened," Foreign Affairs 75, no. 4 (July-August 1996): 120-35; Leffler, "Was the Cold War Necessary?," Diplomatic History 15, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 265-75.