This presentation traces the history of the border, showing that in its early decades it united the two countries more than it divided them, and explains how it became a source of friction despite the continued close ties between Mexico and the United States.
Benjamin H. Johnson is Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of History at Loyola University Chicago.
He is the author of numerous works on the U.S.-Mexico border and environmental history, including Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (2003), Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place (Yale University Press, 2008), Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive Era Conservation (2017) and Texas: An American History (2025).
Johnson is also a member of “Refusing to Forget,” a public history project dedicated to commemorating the legacies of border violence in the 1910s. The project has received awards from the Western History Association, the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians.
Johnson previously served as co-editor of the Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, currently co-edits the Journal of Texas History and the Weber Series in New Borderlands History at the University of North Carolina Press, and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.
