"Toasted ravioli. Bread Co. The Cards. Ribs. Gooey butter cake.
These are all the best parts of home, what makes me fiercely proud to say I'm from St. Louis. But St. Louis is also a town built on genocide, racsim, and a living legacy of segregation. What does it mean to love a hometown with a foundation like that? It's heartbreaking to reckon 'home' with the bloodshed it was built on, but necessary for the city to build anything brighter for the future. If you love St. Louis like I do, this is necessary reading."
Publisher Basic Books
Publication Date 2021-07-06
Section New Titles - Paperback / US History / All Staff Suggestions / Nonfiction Suggestions / Lily R.
Format Paperback
ISBN 9781541619586
A searing and "magisterial" (Cornel West) history of American racial exploitation and resistance, told through the turbulent past of the city of St. Louis.
From Lewis and Clark's 1804 expedition to the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, American history has been made in St. Louis. And as Walter Johnson shows in The Broken Heart of America, the city exemplifies how imperialism, racism, and capitalism have persistently entwined to corrupt the nation's past.
St. Louis was a staging post for Indian removal and imperial expansion, and its wealth grew on the backs of its poor Black residents, from slavery through redlining and urban renewal. But it was once also America's most radical city, home to anti-capitalist immigrants, the Civil War's first general emancipation, and the nation's first general strike—a legacy of resistance that endures.A blistering history of a city's rise and decline, The Broken Heart of America will forever change how we think about the United States.
