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Frontispiece from the book Saint-Domingue, ou Histoire de Ses Révolutions, ca. 1815.Wikimedia

Hear from historian Ronald Johnson, author of Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution.

This book brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny. 

Attendees will have the opportunity to submit questions and have their books signed.

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Explore the Revolutionary Alliances That Shaped the Fight for Freedom

Entangled Alliances is a reinterpretation of the American Revolution through analysis of diplomacy in the emerging United States during decades of hemispheric transformation.

The American Revolution occurred between two of the greatest achievements in diplomacy of the eighteenth century: the peace treaties at Paris in 1763 and 1783. In Entangled Alliances, Johnson draws on original multilingual sources to offer readers fresh, lively stories in a timely study. While modern understandings of freedom are often linked to the US Declaration of Independence, Johnson argues that the desire of Black Atlantic inhabitants for liberty and their will to resist slavery predated the fateful standoff between minutemen and redcoats at Lexington and Concord.

Entangled Alliances is a US history of the American Revolution, fusing the search for freedom by Black and white founders in the United States and Saint-Domingue into a coherent story of collective resistance during the most explosive twenty-year period of the eighteenth century.

About the Author

Ronald Angelo Johnson holds the Ralph and Bessie Mae Lynn Chair of History at Baylor University. His next book, 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. 

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

Johnson serves as the co-editor of the Journal of the Early Republic.

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Sponsored By Ford Philanthropy

Mount Vernon has enjoyed a very special relationship with the Ford Motor Company dating back more than 90 years. We are grateful for their generous support and we applaud their abiding respect for American heritage.