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"Know Your Enemy" Wins Diplomatic History Prize Print E-mail

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Know Your Enemy: The American Debate on Nazism, 1933-1945 by Michaela Hoenicke Moore has been awarded the Myrna Bernath Book Award of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR). Know Your Enemy, which appeared in the Publications of the German Historical Institute series earlier this year, traces American assessments of the Nazi regime and the impact of Nazi rule on German society, beginning with the first press accounts of Hitler's seizure of power and following through to wartime depictions of the German enemy. The author gives particular attention to the debate within the Roosevelt administration on the nature of Nazism and shows how that debate shaped the administration's efforts to mobilize popular support for the American war effort as well as its plans for dealing with defeated Germany. The Myrna Bernath Book Award is awarded biennially to the best book in the field of international history written by a woman. The award was announced at the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians in Washington, DC, on April 10.

Know Your Enemy is "a massively and meticulously researched study of a topic central to our understanding of twentieth-century United States international history," the selection committee for the Myrna Bernath Book Award wrote in its citation. "Drawing on an enormous range of sources, Professor Hoenicke Moore successfully melds social and cultural approaches with more classic diplomatic history, providing a model of the best that can be done in international history." The selection committee called attention to Hoenicke Moore's "convincing revisionist account of the debate within the American government during 1944 and 1945 over the future treatment of Germany"; in "challenging the long entrenched interpretation" of that debate, Hoenicke Moore "forces the reader to reconsider the context in which historical orthodoxies are created and accepted."

Michaela Hoenicke Moore is an assistant professor of history at the University of Iowa. She has taught at the John F. Kennedy Institute for North American Studies at the Free University, Berlin, the University of North Carolina, and York University, Toronto. The author of numerous articles, she also edited the collection The Uncertain Superpower: Domestic Dimensions of U.S. Foreign Policy After the Cold War with Bernard May. Know Your Enemy is available from Cambridge University Press.