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 ... a major contribution to African American studies, but in ways careful to take expansion and anti-Indian violence into account as well ... a striking illustration of the connections of militarism and racism.

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 ... He also errs on the side of rolling, multiclausal explications where a sharper indictment might sometimes do. But 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.

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 ... Johnson bolsters his case using a litany of familiar names and events placed in an often-unfamiliar context ... Just because Johnson teaches at Harvard doesn’t mean the writing in The Broken Heart of America is stodgy or academic. He moves the story along briskly and chronologically and shows an occasional flair ... Johnson generally sticks to his main thesis, though some readers may find his discussions about labor union activities and communist influence a little too long and a little too off-point ... Then, surprisingly, Johnson pivots to optimism ... he sees the roots of a better future.

Walter Johnson doesn’t mince words in his blistering new book ... an outraged dissection of a malignant pattern Johnson discerns in the way white St. Louis treated Native Americans and then Blacks, a pattern he sees as relevant to us all ... It’s a shameful story, and Johnson tells it lucidly in appropriate detail. Readers who pay attention will emerge from his book knowing a lot more ... Johnson's...occasionally simplistic ... Mind you, Johnson backs up his assertions with documentation, though he sometimes over-reads the evidence ... Overheated and overstated though it sometimes is, Johnson’s narrative is also comprehensive and convincing in its particulars ... A more measured tone might make The Broken Heart of America more persuasive for readers who don’t already share Johnson’s views, but there’s no denying his moral passion, or the terrible history that inflames it.

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 study demonstrates both the power of the model and its limitations ... For his purposes, St. Louis is a case study in the pervasiveness and the longevity of racism outside the formal boundaries of slavery ... Indeed, as Johnson moves through the twentieth century, he consistently treats what are often taken to be national trends as toxic gifts from St. Louis ... Racial capitalists conquered the West; racial capitalists waged the Civil War; racial capitalists industrialized St. Louis, and then deindustrialized it, at every step exploiting black people just as brutally as slaveholders did. It’s a big, all-explanatory theory that is serviced by the tone of Johnson’s account, which is forcefully didactic at every moment. The Broken Heart of America is a history populated by good guys and bad guys—many more of the latter ... Johnson’s propensity for pasting condemnatory labels on his characters displays a concern that, without his firm guidance, readers may not draw the proper conclusions from the material he is presenting. He is disinclined to describe any situation as ambiguous ... Johnson is as insistently moralizing in his way as previous generations of romantic, heroic historians of the West were in theirs.

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 ... 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.

He vividly describes...neighborhoods, personalities, and historical conflicts while emphasizing how segregation, disinvestment, and race-based economic extraction eventually set the stage for Ferguson ... At once gentle and dystopian, Johnson’s history of an American city issues an important warning to not ignore the rotten spots in the country’s foundation.

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 ... Although occasional passages qualify as theoretical—and may only appeal to fellow historians—every chapter includes searing, unforgettable examples ... 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 ... A well-rendered, incisive exploration of 'a history of serial dispossession and imperial violence.'