Benjamin H. Johnson
Graduate Programs Director and Professor
Benjamin H. Johnson (Ph.D., Yale, 2000; M.A., Yale, 1996, B.A., Carleton College, 1994) is a Professor in History and the School of Environmental Sustainability at 黑料门University Chicago. Dr. Johnson's primary areas of research and teaching include environmental history, North American borders, and Latino history. He has taught courses on North American and world environmental history, natural disasters, immigration and ethnicity in the United States, and 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 postrevolutionary Mexico. His most recent book is Texas: An American History (Yale University Press, 2025), which explores the powerful and often unpredictable ways that Texas has had such a powerful influence on U.S. history.
Johnson’s other primary interest is in the social and political history of American environmentalism, the subject of his book Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation (Yale University Press, 2017). He has also become active in public history, co-founding the organization , which is dedicated to bringing public attention to the enduring legacies of 1910s racial violence through such measures as the erection of historical markers and museum exhibits.
Johnson’s 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 is a former editor of The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and also serves as co-editor of the at the University of North Carolina Press and the Journal of Texas History.
Research Interests
Environmental history, North American borders, and Latino history
Courses Taught
HIST 104: Global History since 1500
HIST 212: United States Since 1865
HIST 279: Climate and History
HIST 297: U.S. Environmental History
HIST 496: Race, Violence and Memory in US History
Publications/Research Listings
(Yale University Press, 2025)
(Yale University Press, 2003)
(Yale University Press, 2008)
(Yale University Press, 2017)
(Duke University Press, 2010) with Andrew Graybill
(Cengage Learning, 2011) with Pekka Hämäläinen