PositiveThe NationThe 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 ... A key strength of Johnson’s work is his reminder that even as the Great Compromise of 1877 brought Reconstruction to a formal end in the South, class conflict threatened to tear the nation apart again—and as was the case in the Civil War era, St. Louis was at the forefront of this bitter struggle ... as Johnson reminds us...we might look to the example of radical St. Louis for lessons on how to rise above our country’s reactionary and racist heritage.
Henry Louis Gates
RaveThe NationOne of the strengths of Stony the Road is the ample room it gives to showing the racist imagery prevalent in popular magazines, political cartoons, and other cultural products of the era. With so much already written about Reconstruction’s achievements, this may be the book’s most important contribution: drawing links between the political and intellectual racism of the 19th and the 20th centuries and their racist popular culture, and then showing how black Americans struggled against them ... Stony the Road...gives us a powerful narrative of just how fragile the triumphs of American history truly are.
