"When it comes to the history of racism and exclusion in the United States, St. Louis wasn't unique...what it was, Johnson says, was more extreme...Johnson is a spirited and skillful rhetorician, juggling a slew of historical facts while never allowing the flame of his anger to dim...As he ably shows, so much exploitation lies in the details."—New York Times The Broken Heart of America a book for our times.”—Los Angeles Review of Books The Broken Heart of America will never view the history of the region the same way again."—St. Louis Post-Dispatch The Broken Heart of America is an outraged dissection of a malignant pattern Johnson discerns in the way white St. Louis treated Native Americans and then Blacks...Comprehensive and convincing in its particulars."—Boston Globe Smithsonian National Book Review Dissent The Broken Heart of America tells the best story of America that we have in the spirit of W.E.B. Du Bois. Walter Johnson is one of our very few great US historians!"—Cornel West, New York Times–bestselling author of Democracy Matters The Broken Heart of America isn't a dispassionate treatment of historical facts: Johnson has written a searing history that matters deeply to him, a native son, and it should matter to all of us."—Eddie S. Glaude, author of Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original The Broken Heart of America is a deep history of the United States' continental empire with St. Louis at the center of economic and military operations. This may be the most important book on U.S. history you will read in your lifetime."—Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy Tef Poe, musician, activist, and cofounder of Hands Up United
Johnson is a spirited and skillful rhetorician, juggling a profusion of historical facts while never allowing the flame of his anger to dim…The story he's telling has so many elements that it makes sense he would immerse himself in the intricacies of tax increment financing and municipal bond debt. As he ably shows, so much exploitation lies in the details.
The New York Times - Jennifer Szalai
02/10/2020
This exhaustive and politically minded history of St. Louis, Mo., by Harvard history professor Johnson (Soul by Soul ) indicts the city’s treatment of its minority residents. Opening with the 1804 Lewis and Clark Expedition, which set out from St. Louis and led to the forcible removal of Native Americans from their lands, Johnson details Missouri’s admission to the U.S. as a slave state; the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in the Dred Scott case, which originated in St. Louis; and the emergence of ragtime music from the “barrooms and bordellos” of the city’s Deep Morgan district. In later chapters, he explores how the redevelopment of the city’s riverfront and the construction of the Gateway Arch in the 1960s displaced black residents, and argues that the 2014 police shooting death of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson, Mo., and the unrest that followed “exemplif the history of structural racism” in the region. Johnson makes a persuasive case that “St. Louis has been the crucible of American history,” and his celebration of the city’s defiant black culture heightens the book’s potency. Progressive readers interested in African-American and Western history will savor this incisive and troubling account. (Apr.)
07/01/2020
In this latest work, Johnson (River of Dark Dreams ) examines St. Louis as a case study for a compelling reinterpretation of American history. From appropriation of Native American lands by Europeans to 21st-century police violence, the city's history is viewed through the lens of racial capitalism, described by Johnson as white supremacy plus empire, extraction, and exploitation. Johnson explains how, in the history of St. Louis, racial capitalism is evident in the violent resistance to biracial labor organizing in the early 20th century, in midcentury zoning laws and restrictive covenants that enforced residential segregation, and in more recent corporate tax incentives that decimated state and local government budgets. Though presented chronologically, Johnson effectively traces the continuous threads that run through this history, comparing 19th-century Indian removal to 1960s urban renewal, and an antebellum murder of a free Black woman to the 2014 shooting of Michael Brown in nearby Ferguson. VERDICT Although focused primarily on the history of St. Louis and surrounding areas, this well researched and thoroughly documented work is too important to be dismissed as a strictly regional history. Highly recommended for all readers interested in American history.—Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
This intense, detailed audiobook can be a difficult listen. It deals with one of the most pervasive and painful topics in U.S. history and culture—racism. With a measured and earnest delivery, narrator Jamie Renell leads listeners through 250 years of prejudiced and purposefully harmful national and local policy against Native Americans and African-Americans—all related to the city of St. Louis or its environs. The city was the jumping off point for innumerable Indian wars and ethnic cleansings. The 1853 Dred Scott decision that sent freed slaves back to their masters originated in St. Louis. Most recently, in 2014, Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer in nearby Ferguson, illustrating how privilege, money, and violence continue to fuel racial inequality. Heartbreaking, urgent, essential listening. B.P. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
This intense, detailed audiobook can be a difficult listen. It deals with one of the most pervasive and painful topics in U.S. history and culture—racism. With a measured and earnest delivery, narrator Jamie Renell leads listeners through 250 years of prejudiced and purposefully harmful national and local policy against Native Americans and African-Americans—all related to the city of St. Louis or its environs. The city was the jumping off point for innumerable Indian wars and ethnic cleansings. The 1853 Dred Scott decision that sent freed slaves back to their masters originated in St. Louis. Most recently, in 2014, Michael Brown was shot dead by a white police officer in nearby Ferguson, illustrating how privilege, money, and violence continue to fuel racial inequality. Heartbreaking, urgent, essential listening. B.P. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
★ 2020-01-26
“This book,” writes Johnson, a Missouri native, “traces the history of empire and racial capitalism through a series of stages, beginning with the fur trade in the early nineteenth century and following all the way down to payday lending, tax abatement, for-profit policing, and mass incarceration in our own times.” In a narrative of unrelenting, justified outrage grounded in impressive scholarship, Johnson proceeds mostly chronologically. He begins in early-19th-century St. Louis, a city that served as a base for a violent white-dominated government and military, which murdered Native Americans in massive numbers, with impunity, while driving them away from their long-established homelands. After the eradication of Native communities, they turned their violent intentions toward black communities. Many of those black residents had lived in metropolitan St. Louis for generations; tens of thousands more had arrived from the Deep South hoping to escape the aftermath of slavery. Instead, they encountered a slavery of sorts based on low-wage employment; segregated, substandard housing, transportation, and schooling; and frequent emotional and physical violence. Johnson explains the nature of structural racism, including how it flows naturally from rampant capitalism. Although occasional passages qualify as theoretical—and may only appeal to fellow historians—every chapter includes searing, unforgettable examples. White men often portrayed as heroes are shown by Johnson to be bigots, including Lewis and Clark and Thomas Hart Benton, but the author also exposes plenty of unsavory characters who will be unknown to readers without a familiarity with St. Louis history. Johnson offers plenty of evidence from the current century, as well, including the police murder of Michael Brown in the suburb of Ferguson. The epilogue offers hope, however minimal, that residents can imagine “new ways to live in the city, to connect with and care for one another, to be human.”
A well-rendered, incisive exploration of “a history of serial dispossession and imperial violence."
