Faculty Interview - Tim Borstelmann
Department of History
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06/03/2019
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This is an interview with Prof. Tim Borstelmann
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- [00:00:07.080]I'm Tim Borstelmann,
- [00:00:09.190]and my research interests have mostly been
- [00:00:12.100]in the area of US foreign relations, the US and the world.
- [00:00:16.090]So my most recent book was on the 1970s
- [00:00:19.630]a global history of the 1970s of the United States
- [00:00:22.570]and sort of a global context.
- [00:00:24.820]Before that, a couple books on race and foreign relations.
- [00:00:28.734]That's my long term interests that's been on
- [00:00:32.390]issues of equality and inequality especially as
- [00:00:34.950]those relate to the American relationship to the
- [00:00:37.320]rest of the world.
- [00:00:47.240]Sure, I have a book that's in process
- [00:00:49.940]with Columbia University Press
- [00:00:52.080]and it's to be entitled "The Hearts of Foreigners:"
- [00:00:55.147]"How Americans Understand Others"
- [00:00:57.950]so this is a book that's sort of a sweeping over view
- [00:01:02.610]of the American relationship with people
- [00:01:06.340]who are not Americans.
- [00:01:07.830]That is to say people who are immigrants to the
- [00:01:10.180]United States and not yet having citizen status
- [00:01:12.970]as they're new or they're refugees, or they're people
- [00:01:15.220]that live in other countries.
- [00:01:16.420]In a sense the book is really an effort to
- [00:01:18.350]tie together immigration history
- [00:01:19.700]as well as foreign relations history
- [00:01:21.930]two histories that are usually seen as somewhat
- [00:01:24.220]separate from each other.
- [00:01:35.310]I think I've probably always been curious about
- [00:01:39.590]the question of how the people of this country
- [00:01:42.710]think about the rest of the world
- [00:01:45.320]in the most elemental sense of what is the nature
- [00:01:48.080]of other people?
- [00:01:48.913]Are they culturally similar or different?
- [00:01:50.650]Or how do they come to be different than they are?
- [00:01:54.410]Behind this are questions of human nature
- [00:01:56.410]and how Americans understand that and cultural
- [00:01:58.890]difference, I've been curious about that
- [00:02:01.130]for probably decades, but this project emerged
- [00:02:04.320]out of a more concrete effort to put together
- [00:02:07.670]a presidential address for the society for
- [00:02:09.940]Historians of American Foreign Relations,
- [00:02:12.360]that I did about four years ago.
- [00:02:15.090]And the book is really a fleshing out
- [00:02:17.310]of that, a larger version of that specific project.
- [00:02:32.262]Hmm, well my early books were heavily rooted
- [00:02:35.360]in traditional archival research and
- [00:02:37.780]presidential libraries and national
- [00:02:39.420]archives, that sort of thing.
- [00:02:40.930]And then this book that I'm working on now
- [00:02:44.270]about foreigners is different because it's
- [00:02:46.900]by definition a large interpretive overview
- [00:02:49.140]in the sense that it's an extended essay.
- [00:02:50.520]So that means that it's much more dependent on
- [00:02:54.190]secondary sources, large literatures that I'm trying to
- [00:02:59.160]grasp the full scale of so I think that makes it
- [00:03:03.410]a little different than what I was doing early on.
- [00:03:05.330]I think I feel as I've moved along in my career
- [00:03:08.740]more of a responsibility to think in broad terms
- [00:03:11.630]about larger questions and also to do so in shorter
- [00:03:15.900]books because our readership has
- [00:03:18.720]dropped off for large books.
- [00:03:29.240]Hmm, I think what I'm intrigued by maybe
- [00:03:33.950]most of all is the way it turns out that Americans
- [00:03:36.850]in the broadest sense seem to have been both
- [00:03:41.020]very ethnocentric, very impressed with their
- [00:03:43.670]own culture and their own nation, their own power,
- [00:03:47.670]their own goodness in the world on the one hand,
- [00:03:51.050]which makes them seem like a not very likable people
- [00:03:57.380]and then on the other hand at the same time
- [00:03:58.850]they've tended to be rather
- [00:03:59.990]universalistic in their sense of who could become
- [00:04:03.290]an American or who could be like Americans.
- [00:04:05.790]So their both sort of exclusive and
- [00:04:11.270]inward looking on the one hand and spectacularly
- [00:04:15.200]inclusive and outward looking on the other hand
- [00:04:17.410]and how they pull that off is a fascinating story that
- [00:04:22.130]I try to elucidate in this book.
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