Maine Perspective Front Page
Pulitzer Prize-Winning Book Dedicated to Late UMaine Professor
The Pulitzer Prize-winning book by John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, is dedicated to Howard Schonberger, UMaine professor of history who died in 1991 at the age of 51.
In the dedication to his friend and colleague, Dower notes that Schonberger was a man "who never lost sight of the ideals of peace and democracy."
Dower is the Elting E. Morison Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has written many books and articles on modern Japanese history and U.S.-Japan relations. Dower first met Schonberger in 1974 at the University of Wisconsin. Schonberger was already on the UMaine faculty, and spent three summers at Wisconsin where his wife, Ann, director of the Women in the Curriculum and Women's Studies Program, was completing her Ph.D.
Howard Schonberger was a scholar of American foreign policy history. Dower and Schonberger were both enthusiastic and immensely engaged in their research, and spent hours talking together about Japanese history. As scholars of the Occupation, the two also were compatible in their progressive politics and commitment to social justice.
The Howard Schonberger Peace and Social Justice Memorial Lecture was established at UMaine to honor his scholarship and activism. The first lecture in 1992 was delivered by Dower.
In addition to receiving a recently announced Pulitzer, Embracing Defeat has received the National Book Award for Non-Fiction, the Bancroft Prize in American History, the John K. Fairbank Award for Asian History, the Mark Lynton History Prize, and the PEN-New England L.L. Winship Award.