Presidents Day Lecture 2024 – Tim Borstelmann on “John F. Kennedy and Africa: When Colonialism Met the Cold War”

For Presidents Day, prize-winning historian Tim Borstelmann will speak on John F. Kennedy and his diplomatic initiatives with several newly independent African nations. In 1962, Kennedy and a meeting with a Soviet official in New York City inspired Glassboro State College faculty and students to launch Operation Uganda, one of the most ambitious humanitarian efforts ever attempted in southern New Jersey. This is the third event spotlighting Operation Uganda during the University’s Centennial celebration.

Sponsored by the Department of History and the College of Humanities & Social Sciences, this event is free and open to the public. Please consider arriving early both to secure your seat and to view the Department of History's annual Student Research Poster Session.

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About the speaker

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. Borstelmann holds a B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) from Stanford University (1980) and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Duke University (1986, 1990). 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). In 2012, Princeton University Press published his book, The 1970s: A New Global History from Civil Rights to Economic Inequality. In 2015, Borstelmann served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations and won the Annis Chaikin Sorensen Award for Outstanding Teaching in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. In 2021, he won the Tonous and Warda Johns Family Book Award, given by the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, for his most recent book, Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners (Columbia University Press, 2020).