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Kenton Clymer
Kenton Clymer

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News Release

Contact: Tom Parisi, Office of Public Affairs
(815) 753-3635

February 24, 2005

History chair wins prestigious book prize

DeKalb, Ill. — A new book penned by Kenton Clymer, chair of the NIU Department of History, has won the prestigious Robert H. Ferrell Book Prize for distinguished scholarship in the history of American foreign relations.

Clymer conducted research on three continents over the course of 11 years for the two-volume work, titled "The United States and Cambodia, 1870-2000" (Routledge, 2004).

The Ferrell Book Prize was established to honor Robert H. Ferrell, professor of diplomatic history at Indiana University from 1961 to 1990. It carries a cash award of $2,500. The prize will be awarded to Clymer at an April 2 luncheon of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

Judges praised his work as a critical account of an important relationship little studied by historians.

"The book contains fresh revelations on nearly every page," wrote Andrew J. Rotter, chairman of the prize committee. "Sensitive to the nuances of the U.S.-Cambodia relationship, the book nevertheless achieves an admirable balance between detail and the larger context of Asian and world geopolitics. And it explains, with clarity and conviction, the role played by U.S. government policy in the advent of the hideous Khmer Rouge regime."

Most of the archival research for the book was done in the United States, but Clymer also visited the Cambodian National Archives and spent three summers in Australia. From 1965 to 1969, as the Vietnam War escalated, the Australian embassy represented the United States in its diplomatic relations with Cambodia.

"There has been a fair amount written about U.S.-Cambodian relations as it relates to the Vietnam War," Clymer said. "I wanted to put the whole thing into context by creating a comprehensive history of diplomatic relations between the two countries, which hadn’t been done before."

Clymer is the author of three other books and numerous articles. His tenure as chair of the Department of History began in July. Prior to that, he spent nearly a year in Beijing on his third Fulbright Scholar Award.

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