Max Paul Friedman is Professor of History at American University in Washington, DC. A graduate of Oberlin College and the University of California at Berkeley, he worked as a journalist for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition” programs before becoming a historian. He has won more than fifty awards, grants, and fellowships, including a Guggenheim.

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) uncovered the little-known effort by U.S. officials to seize some 4,000 suspected Nazis from 15 Latin American countries and intern them in special camps in Texas, in a program that anticipated today’s incarceration of terrorist suspects at Guantánamo--including the misidentification of suspects through faulty intelligence and local corruption, and the evasion of legal and constitutional practices in the name of national security. The book, based on research and interviews from Colombia to Switzerland, received the Herbert Hoover Prize in U.S. History and the A.B. Thomas Prize in Latin American Studies. Reviewers called it a “pathbreaking” work, “international history at its best,” which “set a new standard for research.”

His second book, Rethinking Anti-Americanism: The History of an Exceptional Concept in American Foreign Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2012), integrates foreign relations history with the first comprehensive study of the term “anti-Americanism” in American politics and policy from 1776 to the present. The book presents new evidence on nineteenth-century U.S. intervention in Mexico; the U.S. role in two coups d’état in Guatemala; Charles de Gaulle’s efforts to promote a peaceful settlement in Vietnam; and the rise of transnational movements for peace and human rights in the 1920s, 1960s, 1980s, and 2000s. It shows how frequently the concept of “anti-Americanism” has produced analytical failures about conditions abroad, contributing to ineffective policy decisions that increased hostility toward the United States. Leading scholars in the field found the book “stunning,” “masterful,” “eloquently written with a keen eye to cultural nuances,” “lucid and commanding,” “original and convincing,” “an impressive achievement.”

He is co-editor, with Padraic Kenney, of Partisan Histories: The Past in Contemporary Global Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), a study of the way political actors in different countries mobilize carefully constructed versions of national history to achieve their current goals. Focusing on the movement of traumatic memory into the public sphere after war, Cold War, or dictatorship, this book shows that politicians and policy makers often have at least a threefold relationship to history: they are greatly influenced in their thinking by narratives about the past; they deploy these narratives to generate support and undermine opposition; and they turn to interpretations of the past as an unparalleled source of legitimacy in justifying their actions.

Friedman’s twenty-two articles and chapters have appeared in such venues as Atlantic Studies, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Diplomatic History, German Life and Letters, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Journal of American Studies, Journal of Policy History, Journal of Social History, Modern Intellectual History, Oral History Review, Procesos: revista ecuatoriana de historia, Revue française d’études américaines, and The Americas: A Quarterly Review of Inter-American Cultural History. The Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations has recognized his work with the Bernath Lecture Prize for “excellence in teaching and research in the field of foreign relations,” and the W. Stull Holt Fellowship, awarded for “conceptual depth and originality” in “broadening the definition of what American foreign relations encompasses.”