Benjamin H. Johnson is an Associate Professor in the History department and serves on the faculty steering committee for LALS. His primary areas of research and teaching include Mexican-American history and the history of North America’s borders. He has taught courses on North American and world environmental history, natural disasters, immigration and ethnicity in the United States, and on border and transnational history more generally. His first book, Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (Yale University Press, 2003) offered a new interpretation of the origins of the Mexican-American civil rights movement. He continued his interest in Mexican American history in Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place (Yale University Press, 2008), a collaboration with photographer Jeffrey Gusky, and in journal articles about the ties between Mexican-American politics and Mexico after its 1910-1920 revolution.
Working with collaborators at other universities, Johnson developed a museum exhibit, “Life and Death On the Border,” and an ongoing public history commemoration, “Refusing to Forget,” to mark the centennial of some of the worse racial violence in the nation’s history, which took place along the U.S.-Mexico border in the 1910s. The exhibit received international press attention and won an award from the American Association for State and Local History. He is a frequent presenter to high school students and teachers on topics relating to borders and Mexican-American history, and will be convening a faculty seminar on North American borders in the summer of 2017 sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. In addition to updating his Latina/o history course and teaching an honors course on North American borders, Johnson is starting a new book about the challenges that U.S. democracy has experienced in incorporating Latina/os as equal citizens. Johnson’s other primary interest is in the social and political history of American environmentalism, the subject of his current book “Escaping the Dark, Gray City:” How Conservation and the Arc of the Progressive State. His essays have been published in such venues as The Journal of American History, Environmental History, Reviews in American History, and History Compass. His edited volumes include Steal this University: The Labor Movement and the Corporatization of Higher Education (Routledge, 2003), and The Making of the American West (ABC-CLIO, 2007). He co-edited Bridging National Borders in North America (Duke University Press, 2010) with Andrew Graybill, and Major Problems in the History of North American Borderlands (Cengage Learning, 2011) with Pekka Hämäläinen. He also serves as co-editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era.
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