New Books In Native American Studies

St. Louis, Missouri is the city with the highest rate of police shootings in the United States. It’s the city with an 18 year difference in life expectancy between Black and white neighborhoods which stand just 10 miles apart. It’s the city where, after Mike Brown was shot in 2014, the Black Lives Matter movement was born. It is also, now, the city whose history offers essential lessons about the history of the United States as a whole, thanks to Walter Johnson’s indispensable new book The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States (Basic Books). The book tracks how anti-Blackness in America has long had everything to do with imperialism, working as much by removal as by predation. Imperial racism was at play when 19th-century settlers demanded Native land west of the Mississippi as compensation for abolition, when they tried to make the end of slavery would go hand in hand with the removal of free black people, or when they massacred black workers for strike-breaking inst