Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations - Softcover

Friedman, Max Paul

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521683424 ISBN 13: 9780521683425

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2012

Synopsis

"Anti-Americanism" is an unusual expression; although stereotypes and hostility exist toward every nation, we do not hear of "anti-Italianism" or "anti-Brazilianism." Only Americans have elevated such sentiment to the level of a worldview, an explanatory factor so significant as to merit a name - an "ism" - usually reserved for comprehensive ideological systems or ingrained prejudice. This book challenges the scholarly consensus that blames criticism of the United States on foreigners' irrational resistance to democracy and modernity. Tracing 200 years of the concept of anti-Americanism, this book argues that it has constricted political discourse about social reform and U.S. foreign policy, from the War of 1812 and the Mexican War to the Cold War, from Guatemala and Vietnam to Iraq. Research in nine countries in five languages, with attention to diplomacy, culture, migration, and the circulation of ideas, shows that the myth of anti-Americanism has often damaged the national interest.

About this title

Book Description:

Many Americans see a hostile world plagued by "anti-Americanism." Experts in and out of government have explained that anti-Americanism comes from foreigners who are envious or unhappy about America's modern society and democratic nature. This book challenges the conventional wisdom, based on research in nine countries, revealing how the concept of anti-Americanism has been misused for more than 200 years to stifle domestic dissent and dismiss foreign criticism from the War of 1812 to the Cold War, from Vietnam to Iraq.

About the Author:

Max Paul Friedman is a historian of US foreign relations at American University in Washington, DC. After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, he held a Woodrow Wilson Postdoctoral Fellowship, an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship and taught at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Florida State University and the University of Cologne. His first book, Nazis and Good Neighbors: The United States Campaign against the Germans of Latin America in World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2003) won the Herbert Hoover Prize in US History and the A. B. Thomas Prize in Latin American Studies. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations awarded him the Bernath Article Prize and the Bernath Lecture Prize for his scholarship, which has appeared in Atlantic Studies, Diplomacy and Statecraft, Diplomatic History, German Life and Letters, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the Journal of American Studies, the Journal of Social History, Modern Intellectual History, the Oral History Review, Procesos: revista ecuatoriana de historia, Revue française d'études américaines and The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History, among other publications. He is co-editor, with Padraic Kenney, of Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics (2005).

About this edition

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0521683424
• ISBN 13: 9780521683425
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 374