Ronald Angelo Johnson

Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History

On Research Leave 2026-27 - Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society

Areas of Specialization

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 latest book Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2025) is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric transformation. It brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny. Entangled Alliances received the Texas Institute of Letters Honor Award for Most Significant Scholarly Book and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award.

I am currently working on the book manuscript We Are All Equal: Turmoil and Triumph in the Early United States and Revolutionary Haiti (under contract with Princeton University Press), a diplomatic history of race and revolution, illustrating that Americans and Haitians shared important understandings of liberty. My next book project Shades of Color: Haitian Immigration and Black Identity in Early America examines successive generations of Haitian immigrants to the United States from the Haitian Revolution throughout the nineteenth century.

My first book was Diplomacy in Black and White: John Adams, Toussaint Louverture, and Their Atlantic World Alliance. I am the co-editor of the book In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World.

I am steward of the Ella Wall Prichard Fund for Early Black Baptist History (EBBH), which supports the study, research, and documentation of Black Baptist life and thought in North America up to 1866.

After enlisting in the US Air Force, I was a first-generation college student who served as a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analyst, a diplomat in Luxembourg and Gabon with the US Department of State, an ordained pastor in the National Baptist Convention USA, and a US Navy Reserve chaplain (lieutenant).