Just Like Us: The American Struggle to Understand Foreigners

Americans’ ideas of their differences from others have shaped the modern world—and how Americans have viewed foreigners is deeply revealing of their assumptions about themselves.

Just Like Us is a pathbreaking exploration of what foreignness has meant across American history. Thomas Borstelmann traces American ambivalence about non-Americans, identifying a paradoxical perception of foreigners as suspiciously different yet fundamentally sharing American values beneath the layers of culture.

Husker scholar Tim Borstelmann will argue that despite a resurgence of U.S. nativism in the past few years, historical events since World War II have shaped a primarily inclusive perspective among most Americans that these “outsiders,” in their hearts, aren’t all that different.

Tim Borstelmann
E.N. and Katherine Thompson Professor of Modern World History
University of Nebraska-Lincoln