Person

Walter Johnson

Related Excerpts

The construction of the famous Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri.

The City That Embodies the United States’ Contradictions

In the history of St. Louis, we find both a radical and reactionary past—and a more hopeful future too.
St. Louis arch

The Arch of Injustice

St. Louis seems to define America’s past—but does it offer insight for the future?
A black and white picture of Clint Eastwood

Cowboy Confederates

The ideals of the Confederate South found new force in the bloody plains of the American West.

Is Capitalism Racist?

A scholar depicts white supremacy as the economic engine of American history.

The Price of Union

The undefeatable South.
Profile of a young Black man with a proud expression. Photograph by Helen Cammock from her exhibition, I Will Keep My Soul.

All Water Has a Perfect Memory

A landscape has come into being through a constellation of resistances to these strategies of control.
A painting of an old gas station with modern police units in the forefront.

Organized Plunder

In the absence of tax dollars, American cities like Baltimore are now funding themselves by fining the poor instead of taxing the rich.
Picture of the statue of Black Hawk.

Remembering Black Hawk

A history of imperial forgetting.
Watercolor painting of enslaved people walking barefoot on a forced march, with white men on horseback at the front and back of the line.

Reparative Semantics: On Slavery and the Language of History

Scholarly accounts of slavery have been changing, but these correctives sometimes say more about historians than the historical subjects they're writing about.
Statue of Stonewall Jackson, on its side in slings and propped up by tires, in front of its graffiti-covered pedestal.

What the 1619 Project Got Wrong

It erases the fact that, for the first 70 years of its existence, the US was roiled by intense, escalating conflict over slavery – a conflict only resolved by civil war.
107th U.S. Colored Troops posing for a picture

People, Not “Voices” or “Bodies,” Make History

We need to do far more than “give voice to the voiceless" to win justice.
A map of the eastern US, with a line from Washington DC to St. Louis.

The Ill-Fated Idea to Move the Nation's Capital to St. Louis

In the years after the Civil War, some wanted a new seat of government that would be closer to the geographic center of a growing nation.

A Slave Trader’s Office Decor and the Pornography of Capitalism

In the antebellum South, the slave trader’s office was a site of desire.
U.S. soldiers in the Civil War.

Expanding the Slaveocracy

The international ambitions of the US slaveholding class and the abolitionist movement that brought them down.

Is the Greatest Collection of Slave Narratives Tainted by Racism?

How Depression-Era racial dynamics may have shaped our understanding of antebellum enslaved life.

By Which Melancholy Occurrence: The Disaster Prints of Nathaniel Currier, 1835–1840

Why Americans living in uncertain times bought so many sensational images of shipwrecks and fires.

The Problem of Slavery

David Brion Davis’s philosophical history.