Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution

Professor Ronald Angelo Johnson (Baylor University) joins the CPH to discuss his new book Entangled Alliances: Racialized Freedom and Atlantic Diplomacy During the American Revolution.

In Entangled Alliances Ronald Angelo Johnson brings to light the fascinating story of American patriots and rebels from Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) allying against European tyranny. The book 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.