Johnson, Walter - Ferguson's Fortune 500 Company: Why the Missouri city - despite hosting a multinational corporation - relied on municipal fees and fines to extract revenue from its poorest residents (Article)

April 26, 2015

Walter Johnson. The Atlantic. 2015. Link to Article

	Walter Johnson Winthrop Professor of History, Professor of African and African American Studies I have written a history of the Mississippi Valley between the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War entitled River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Imperialism in the Mississippi Valley (2013). While retaining a focus on the immediate experience of slavery and mastery, this book also embeds the history of slavery in the U.S. in the histories of global capitalism (especially the cotton trade and the Atlantic money market) and U.S. imperialism (the Louisiana Purchase, the illegal invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s, and the effort to reopen the Atlantic Slave trade on the eve of the Civil War). I am currently writing a book about the 1841 revolt aboard the slave ship Creole. Read more...

Walter Johnson
Winthrop Professor of History, Professor of African and African American Studies

I have written a history of the Mississippi Valley between the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War entitled River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Imperialism in the Mississippi Valley (2013). While retaining a focus on the immediate experience of slavery and mastery, this book also embeds the history of slavery in the U.S. in the histories of global capitalism (especially the cotton trade and the Atlantic money market) and U.S. imperialism (the Louisiana Purchase, the illegal invasions of Cuba and Nicaragua in the 1850s, and the effort to reopen the Atlantic Slave trade on the eve of the Civil War). I am currently writing a book about the 1841 revolt aboard the slave ship Creole.