American Antiquarian Society
185 Salisbury Street
Worcester, MA 01609
United States
In this hybrid program, Ronald Angelo Johnson offers new interpretations of the American Revolution by analyzing diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric transformation. Drawing from his 2025 book, Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution, he discusses the dynamic ways in which English and French language newspapers from 1758 to 1783 informed and inspirited revolutionary Atlantic inhabitants in British North America (later the United States) and French Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) toward freedom, liberty, and equality.
Ronald Angelo Johnson is the 2026-2027 Mellon Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American Antiquarian Society and the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Professor of History at Baylor University. His latest book is Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution (Cornell University Press, 2025). At AAS, Johnson is working on the book 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. Johnson was a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellow at AAS in 2023-24 and was elected to Society membership in October 2014.