Menu
The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
Top of the pile
77
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
91/100Critics
43/100Scholars
96/100Author:
Walter Johnson
Publisher:
Basic Books
Date:
April 14, 2020
A Harvard professor of African American Studies offers a portrait of pervasive exploitation and radical resistance in America, told through the turbulent history of St. Louisâa city he sees as exemplary of how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past and present.
What The Reviewers Say
The book represents a triumph in telling together the stories of settler violence and racism that had traditionally eluded historians. Johnson’s insistence on rooting today’s racism in yesterday’s conquest of indigenous people and enslavement of kidnapped people from Africa makes The Broken Heart of America a book for our times.
Johnson is a spirited and skillful rhetorician, juggling a profusion of historical facts while never allowing the flame of his anger to dim. Sometimes his metaphors can get a little overheated.
Even for people who have spent their whole lives in this area, Walter Johnson’s way of connecting the dots of racial strife across the American centuries, and having the message spell out St. Louis, will throw a new, not particularly flattering light on familiar events. Readers of The Broken Heart of America will never view the history of the region the same way again.
Walter Johnson doesn’t mince words in his blistering new book.
