Through A Wide Lens

摘要

Given his name, the young Jefferson Adams might have grown up to be a politician. Instead, he became something more useful-a historian. Having established himself as a respected purveyor of European History to the students (one of whom is now Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago) at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, he developed a specialty in East German intelligence history. Beginning in the late 1980s, he published a series of articles on the East German Ministry of State Security (Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit, MfS, or Stasi) in this journal. In 2009, his broader Historical Dictionary of German Intelligence was well received. In Strategic Intelligence in the Cold War and Beyond, he has further widened the scope of his work, moving beyond research-driven activity into a more personal and philosophical approach to well-known events.