To understand the history of St. Louis’s bricks is to unearth systems of power, economy, dispossession, decline, and manifest destiny; the storybook decorative brickwork we see today becomes a tale as complex—and as sinister—as American history itself.
To Hughes, America has never achieved its potential. Never reached the supposed promises enumerated in the nation’s founding documents.
I get sentimental about places, especially forgotten ones like Monarch Park. They’re a bit of a bummer, a bit sobering, a bit sad. But I think it’s a good kind of sadness.
Excerpted from How to Become an American: A History of Immigration, Assimilation, and Loneliness, by Daniel Wolff, published December 2022 by University of South Carolina Press.
Hundreds of angry miners crowded around the machine, several attacking it with hammers and axes. Finally, fifteen sticks of dynamite were placed under the motor, and a firing wire and exploders attached. A few minutes later there was a terrific blast and the shovel was reduced to a tangled mass of wreckage.
Once the cobwebs are cleared off old journals, long-forgotten records consulted, and the veil of stereotypes pierced, a remarkable world is discovered.
The idea that non-white immigrants are, generally speaking, new to the Midwest could not be further from the truth.
You can put your finger on a map and trace it down the Ohio River. From Steubenville to Paducah, it’s nearly a thousand miles, an artery pumping through the heart of America.
The language at times was tinted with ominous undertones.
In nineteenth-century upstate New York, demons came knocking.
In the 1970s, Chicago's Uptown neighborhood was a hotbed for people looking for something better—and their music.
In the 1980s, the Flint, Michigan-based Center for New Work proposed a radically different industrial future.