Entangled Alliances: A Conversation with Dr. Ronald Angelo Johnson

Welcome back to Season 5 of The Past, the Promise, The Presidency, which features brief interviews with historians about their newest books.

This episode features Dr. Ronald Angelo Johnson, Ralph & Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History & Associate Professor at Baylor University. Dr. Johnson will be with us here at SMU this coming Monday, March 9, to talk about his new book, Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution. Johnson offers an important and fascinating take on diplomatic history. His book explores relationships between concepts of “freedom” that animated nineteenth-century revolutions in present-day Haiti and the United States, while emphasizing the crucial roles of Black historical actors in both places. 

Center for Presidential History Research Assistant, Kennedy Moore, was joined by Assistant Director Susie Penman for a conversation with Dr. Johnson. 

Ronald Angelo Johnson holds the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History at Baylor University, and specializes in early America, diplomacy, the African diaspora, and Haiti. Entangled Alliances (Cornell University Press, October 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. Dr. Johnson is currently working on two book projects: the first, We Are All Equal: Turmoil and Triumph in the Early United States and Revolutionary Haiti (under contract with Princeton University Press), is a diplomatic history of race and revolution, illustrating that Americans and Haitians shared important understandings of liberty. The second, 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.

Kennedy Moore is a junior at SMU, double majoring in public policy and music with a minor in public policy and international affairs. Kennedy is a President's Scholar, Pre-law Scholar, and Meadows Scholar. At SMU, Kennedy is involved in Hegi Board Fellows, Meadows Chorale, the Tower Center's premier undergraduate research journal The Dialogue, and works at SMU's Center for Presidential History. Kennedy is interested in educational equity and national defense. She aspires to work for a federal agency to research and create policies to protect our education system and recenter citizens' voices in policy. 

Susie Penman is Assistant Director of the SMU Center for Presidential History. Her area of research is southern studies, with her doctoral work specifically focused on law and politics in New Orleans in the late 20th century. Her current manuscript project studies the office of Orleans Parish District Attorney Harry Connick, Sr., exploring how local ideas about crime and punishment shifted during the three decades that he served as DA. At the Center for Presidential History, she oversees all of CPH’s oral history projects.