Ronald Angelo Johnson
Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History & Associate Professor
Areas of Specialtization
Early America, Diplomacy, African Diaspora, Haiti
Education
Ph.D., Purdue University
M.Div., Boston University School of Theology
M.A., Johns Hopkins University (SAIS)
B.A., Texas State University
Academic Interests & Research Narratives
My research embraces a transnational approach to the history of the early United States in the Atlantic world, with emphases on the African diaspora, diplomacy, race, and religion.
I am currently writing the book Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom & Atlantic Connections during the American Revolution with Cornell University Press. Entangled Alliances is a US history of the American Revolution that examines the transnational, contemporary acts of rebellion, by colonists—white and Black; free and enslaved—in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (which later becomes Haiti). It is a story of the evolution of revolution and the influence of race, as contested views of freedom competed for supremacy in the Atlantic world.
I serve as the co-editor of the Journal of the Early Republic.
Selected Publications
Books
Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance (UGA Press, 2014)
In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (UGA Press, 2021), co-edited with Ousmane K. Power-Greene.
Articles
“Africans and Immigrants: Haitian Contributions to the African Protestant Movement in Early America,” Revue Française d’Études Américaines 164 (2020): 38-57.
“‘A Very Curious Game’: The Racialized Public Diplomacy of Toussaint Louverture in the United States,” Journal of Caribbean History 53, no. 1. (2019): 82-116.
“Haiti's Connection to Early America: Beyond the Revolution,” History Compass 16, no. 3 (2018), DOI 10.1111/hic3.12442.
Book Chapters
“Natural Rights: Haitian-American Diplomacy in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions,” in A Companion to U.S. Foreign Policy, Colonial Era to the Present, ed. Christopher Dietrich (Wiley-Blackwell, 2020), I, 93-112.
“Enslaved by History: Slavery’s Enduring Influence on the Memory of Pierre Toussaint,” in Traces and Memories of Slavery in the Atlantic World, ed. Lawrence Aje and Nicolas Gachon (Routledge, 2019), 170-187.
Follow Dr. Johnson on:
Threads: @ronaldangelojohnson
Instagram: @ronaldangelojohnson
LinkedIn: Ronald Angelo Johnson