Geoffrey W Jensen

As a Twentieth Century Americanist, my teaching and research investigates the confluence of several historical forces in recent American history: presidential leadership and Cold War civil rights reform; the African American pursuit for civil rights reform; war or even the threat of potential Cold War conflict and how that shaped the country; the omnipresent influence of the American south on domestic, foreign policy, and military affairs of the United States; and the rise of conspiracy, conspiratorial rhetoric, and the power it wielded in Twentieth Century American society. As a scholar, I have presented my research on several different occasions and I have authored over a dozen book reviews for H-War (H-Net), The Journal of Military History, and The Strategy Bridge.

My most recent work, The Racial Integration of the American Armed Forces: Cold War Necessity, Presidential Leadership, and Southern Resistance (Forthcoming Kansas, 2023) examines the intersection of these forces as it applies to the racial desegregation of the American military during the volatile years of the Cold War. As opposed to past studies that largely discuss the situation from the viewpoint of the trials and tribulations of African American military personnel or those within the burgeoning civil rights movement who were desperate to use the armed forces as a social and political laboratory, I examine the topic from that of the perspective of the necessity of waging the Cold War, how that motivated, in part, American presidents to act, and how southerners fearful of the military becoming a trojan horse for racial and societal reform within their own region and its racial zeitgeist grabbed onto the strings of various Cold War conspiratorial beliefs to knit together a challenge against the reform effort.