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David Fromkin

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Professor David Fromkin.

David Fromkin is a noted author, lawyer, and historian, most known for his definitive account of the creation of the modern Middle East, A Peace to End All Peace (1989), in which he recounts the key role that European policy toward the Middle East between 1914 and 1922 played in the creation of the situation that exists there today. The book was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Fromkin has written seven books in total, with his most recent in 2004, Europe's Last Summer: Who Started The Great War in 1914?

A graduate of the University of Chicago and the University of Chicago Law School, he is University Professor, Professor of History, International Relations, and Law at Boston University, where he is also the Director of The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Long-Range Future. Fromkin also sits on the editorial board of the Middle East Quarterly, a publication of the Middle East Forum think tank. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Before his career as a historian, Prof. Fromkin was an attorney and political adviser. In the 1972 Democratic primary campaign, he served as a foreign-policy adviser to candidate Hubert Humphrey. As an attorney, he served as both prosecutor and defense counsel in the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps, then as an associate at the law firm of Simpson Thacher & Bartlett.

Selected bibliography

  • The Question of Government: An Inquiry into the Breakdown of Modern Political Systems (1975)
  • The Independence of Nations (1981)
  • A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922 (1989) ISBN 0-8050-0857-8, ISBN 0-8050-6884-8 (paperback)
  • In the Time of the Americans: FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marhsall, MacArthur, The Generation that Changed America's Role in the World (1995) ISBN 0-394-58901-7, ISBN 0-679-76728-2 (paperback)
  • Europe's Last Summer: Who started the Great War in 1914? (2004) ISBN 0-375-41156-9, ISBN 0-375-72575-X (paperback)

Trivia

File:Frmkn2.JPG
A picture of Frmkn the dog.
  • David Fromkin has a dog named after him, a Norfolk Terrier named frmkn (pictured right), with the vowels removed to distinguish him from the eponymous professor. The two have met on several occasions, and apparently the dog is more fond of Professor Fromkin than the other way around.