Democracy depends on the free exchange of ideas. Help sustain it with a tax-deductible donation today.
Walter Johnson teaches history at Harvard and is a contributing editor at Boston Review. His latest book is The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States. His Boston Review essay “Guns in the Family” was included in the 2019 Best American Essays.
The McCloskeys are also only a symptom of how racism is served by private property.
St. Louis is a microcosm of American structural racism.
Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains.
An interview with historian Nell Irvin Painter.
A historian and rapper reflect on their shared activism and the place they see for allies in the long struggle for racial justice.
A childhood steeped in guns shows that toxic masculinity and racism are at the heart of U.S. gun culture.
The spectre of Dred Scott is haunting St. Louis.
What can W. E. B. Du Bois and the black radical tradition tell us about Trump's election and radical political action today?
How the history of slavery prompts us to rethink our notion of justice.
A political and literary forum, independent and nonprofit since 1975. Registered 501(c)(3) organization. Learn more about our mission
For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster—with work by Jorie Graham, Ilya Kaminsky, Solmaz Sharif, Juan Felipe Herrera, and much more.
Newsletter subscribers get our latest essays, reading lists, and exclusive editorial content (plus 10% off our entire store).
For National Poetry Month, sign up for our newsletter and get a digital copy of our out-of-print chapbook Poems for Political Disaster.