Nick Cullather is an American historian and professor of history at

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universi ...

. His research interests include US diplomatic history and intelligence, and he is notable especially for his studies of the role of the

CIA The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

in coups and nation building in Latin America.

Biography and career

Cullather graduated from

(AB 1981) before working as press secretary for US Representative Lee H. Hamilton in the 1980s. He received his Ph.D. from the

University of Virginia The University of Virginia (UVA) is a public research university in Charlottesville, Virginia. Founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, the university is ranked among the top academic institutions in the United States, with highly selective ad ...

in 1993. Cullather was recruited by the CIA as a graduate student in 1992 to investigate documents pertaining to PBSuccess, the operation that led to the

1954 Guatemalan coup d'état The 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état was the result of a CIA covert operation code-named PBSuccess. It deposed the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz and ended the Guatemalan Revolution of 1944–1954. It installed the mi ...

, as part of a larger review meant to determine which documents could be declassified. The result of that study was ''Secret History: The CIA's Classified Account of Its Operations in Guatemala, 1952-1954''. Many of the documents discussed in the book had already been publicized by

Philip Agee Philip Burnett Franklin Agee (; January 19, 1935 – January 7, 2008)Will Weissert"Ex-CIA Agent Philip Agee Dead in Cuba" Associated Press (sfgate.com), January 9, 2008. was a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) case officer and writer of t ...

and others; Cullather's study, "the facsimile reproduction of an internal agency study", was released in 1997 before the CIA, in mid-1998, "aborted the entire declassification process". Cullather's study, according to Lars Schoultz, is "an exceptionally valuable document-not simply a lucid chronicle of who did what to whom, but a vivid cautionary tale about how the cloak of secrecy allowed government officials to avoid questions of perspective, of proportion, and of right and wrong". Historian

Greg Grandin Greg Grandin (born 1962) is a professor of history at Yale University. He previously taught at New York University. He is author of a number of books, including ''Fordlândia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City'', which was ...

called it "an extremely important scholarly and pedagogical work". Cullather's study of

Philippines–United States relations The relationship between the United States and the Philippines has historically been strong and has been described as a "special relationship". The former Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, however, was supportive of a foreign policy that is l ...

, "Based on extensive research in U.S. and Philippine archives", was the subject of his 1994 book ''Illusions of Influence: The Political Economy of United States-Philippines Relations, 1942–1960''. He argued that these relations were not as dominated by the United States as conventional wisdom dictates, that the client-patron relationship is often a complicated dynamic (for instance, the US were interested in military bases while the Philippines sought to control their own economy), and that "American influence--so often portrayed as fact in United States documents--is in many ways illusory". Cullather was an editor at ''

The Journal of American History ''The Journal of American History'' is the official academic journal of the Organization of American Historians. It covers the field of American history and was established in 1914 as the ''Mississippi Valley Historical Review'', the official j ...

'', and is interviewed as an expert in a movie on gold mining in Guatemala, ''Gold Fever''.

Selected works

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References

External links

Cullather's faculty page at IU
{{DEFAULTSORT:Cullather, Nick Living people 21st-century American historians American male non-fiction writers Historians of the United States Year of birth missing (living people) Historians from Indiana 21st-century American male writers