Walter Johnson

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

St. Louis seems to define America’s past—but does it offer insight for the future?

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

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

The undefeatable South.

The author of "Cahokia Jazz" reflects on the similarities between historical fiction and science fiction, and the imaginative space opened by archival silences.

A landscape has come into being through a constellation of resistances to these strategies of control.

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

A history of imperial forgetting.

Scholarly accounts of slavery have been changing, but these correctives sometimes say more about historians than the historical subjects they're writing about.

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.

We need to do far more than “give voice to the voiceless" to win justice.

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.

In the antebellum South, the slave trader’s office was a site of desire.

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

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

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

David Brion Davis’s philosophical history.