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.

Once slavery is positioned as the foundational institution of American capitalism, the country’s subsequent history can be depicted as an extension of this basic dynamic. This is what Walter Johnson does in his new book.

The Broken Heart of America begins with the ancient Indigenous city of Cahokia and then turns to the Lewis and Clark expedition...a story that Johnson uses to great effect.

He vividly describes...neighborhoods, personalities, and historical conflicts while emphasizing how segregation, disinvestment, and race-based economic extraction eventually set the stage for Ferguson.

This exhaustive and politically minded history...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..

In a narrative of unrelenting, justified outrage grounded in impressive scholarship, Johnson proceeds mostly chronologically.