United States History

Thomas (Tim) Borstelmann has been the Elwood N. and Katherine Thompson Distinguished Professor of Modern World History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln since 2003. He spent the previous twelve years as a member of the History Department at Cornell University. His research focuses on the intersection of United States domestic history and international history. His first book, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (Oxford University Press, 1993) won the Stuart Bernath Prize of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations for the best first book in American diplomatic history. Borstelmann has also published The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena (Harvard University Press, 2001) and has coauthored a major U.S. history textbook, Created Equal: A Social and Political History of the United States (Pearson, 5th edition, 2016). His most recent book is The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality (Princeton University Press, 2012). In 2020, Columbia University Press will publish his next book, Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners. In 2015 he served as President of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR).