Max Paul Friedman
Max Paul Friedman is a professor of history and an affiliate professor of international studies at American University. His first book, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (2003), won the Herbert Hoover Prize in U.S. History and the A.B. Thomas Prize in Latin American Studies. He is also the author of Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations (2012) and a coeditor, with Padraic Kenney, of Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics (2005). His articles on diplomatic, political, social, cultural, and intellectual history have appeared in Atlantic Studies, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Diplomatic History, German Life and Letters, International Security, Journal of American Studies, Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Journal of Policy History, Journal of Social History, Mexican Law Review, Modern Intellectual History, Procesos: revista ecuatoriana de historia, Revue française d’études américaines, and The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and has won the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations' Bernath Article Prize and Bernath Lecture Prize for excellence in scholarship and teaching in the field of U.S. foreign relations.
FEATURED LECTURE
Anti-Americanism and U.S. Foreign Relations
OAH Lectures by Max Paul Friedman
France is America's oldest ally that some Americans love to hate. Disputes over the Iraq war led to an outpouring of anti-French actions, boycotts, and jokes familiar to historians of the Franco-American relationship. This lecture explores the sources of cultural and political tension between France and the United States, and how these differences have played into serious diplomatic conflicts since the Vietnam War.
For nearly two centuries, the Monroe Doctrine was a pillar of U.S. foreign policy, excluding foreign powers from intervention in the Western Hemisphere and claiming a special leadership role for the United States in the Americas. As part of an effort to improve relations with Latin American countries, the Obama administration announced that the era of the Monroe Doctrine was over. This lecture explores what made the Monroe Doctrine so controversial over the years, and its place in the future of U.S.-Latin American relations.
Many Americans see a hostile world plagued by “anti-Americanism.” Experts in and out of government insist that “anti-Americanism” comes from foreigners who are envious or unhappy about America’s modern society and democratic nature. This lecture shows how the concept of “anti-Americanism” has been misused for more than 200 years to stifle domestic dissent and dismiss foreign criticism, damaging U.S. interests from the nineteenth century to Vietnam and the twenty-first century wars in the Middle East.