About the Author

Walter Johnson is Winthrop Professor of History and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

Reviews

"River of Dark Dreams" is at its best when it focuses on the day-to-day lives of slaves in
the valley. Johnson empathizes with his subjects, allows them to speak for themselves
through written records they left behind, and is a gifted enough writer to make the past
come alive in his prose...Few books have captured the lived experience of slavery
as powerfully as River of Dark Dreams.""
--Ari Kelman"Times Literary Supplement" (07/26/2013)

Johnson shows in horrific detail how the culture of slave society--intellectual, social, sexual--arose out of the imperative of more and more cotton cultivation. In a brilliant chapter titled 'The Carceral Landscape, ' Johnson's book reads as a kind of scholarly companion to Quentin Tarantino's studiously gothic film Django Unchained."..What makes Johnson's book more than a catalogue of horrors is its account of how slave-owners, too, were caught in the cycle of fear...As new technologies (not only the cotton gin) and new markets (Europe as well as the industrializing North) drove the expansion of cotton production against any and all compunction, talk of ending slavery, which had once been central to debate about the future of the republic, became a deadly threat to the economy of the South and, to a significant degree, of the whole nation...Johnson's point is not to equate the suffering of slaves with the anxiety of slaveholders; but his book has the effect of showing their interdependence in a way that makes the abstractions of political history--'property, ' 'expansion, ' even 'slavery' itself--feel vivid and immediate.
--Andrew Delbanco"New Republic" (08/19/2013)

The artistry of River of Dark Dreams" lies in the close-up--in Johnson's mesmerizing attention to the 'material' in historical-geographical materialism. In the pointillist style so dexterously displayed in his reconstruction of the New Orleans slave market, Soul by Soul," Johnson zooms in on the 'nested set of abstractions' that made the Cotton Kingdom run: money, markets, maps, labor...River of Dark Dreams" delivers spectacularly on the long-standing mission to write 'history from the bottom up': from the soil tangy and pungent with manure, and the Petit Gulf cotton plants rooted into it, and the calloused fingers plucking its blooming, sharp-edged bolls. This is a history of how wilderness became plantations that became states, nations, and empires--of how an overseer's lashes sliced into a slave's back turned 'into labor into bales into dollars' into visions of America's future in the world... Johnson recreates the grinding, sometimes deadly work of moving in the Mississippi Valley with such originality that it doesn't much matter that the analytical payoff rests largely in metaphor...Whereas Johnson's analysis of steamboat imperialism turns on metaphor, his detailed description of slavery acts as a rebuke to the oversimple metaphors that are used to describe slaves' lives and labor: money and markets.
--Maya Jasanoff"New York Review of Books" (10/10/2013)

Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams" shows how the Cotton Kingdom of the 19th-century Deep South, far from being a backward outpost of feudalism, was a dynamic engine of capitalist expansion built on enslaved labor.
--A. O. Scott"New York Times" (09/27/2013)

This most impressive piece of history writing will be a source of inspiration and debate for many years to come. It demonstrates the national significance of regional history and the transnational scope of 'slave holding agro-capitalism.' It has an overarching story to tell and argument to make, but many of its meaty chapters take a vital area of research and decisively reorder it.
--Robin Blackburn"Dissent" (07/01/2013)

Johnson (history, African and African American studies, Harvard; Slavery's Ghost: The Problem of Freedom in the Age of Emancipation) has written a book as big and bold as the Mississippi River valley region it surveys. In it, he maps the various interlocking connections among slavery, land surveys and speculation, steamboats, capital and credit, cotton planting, and more to show how President Jefferson's promise of an "empire for liberty" to come from the Louisiana Purchase became instead a place of people grasping for advantage, gouging for wealth, and gaining through will and brutality. Readers will find Johnson's discussions of steamboat technology, adaptations of new strains of cotton, and credit and market arrangements especially compelling as he makes the case for a modernizing, slave-based cotton empire that sought to extend its reach across the continent and, through violence, to claim Central America and Cuba as well. -VERDICT An essential book for understanding the dynamism and direction of American economic ambitions and the human and environmental costs of the physical, political, and social energy that drove such ambitions and ended in civil war.--Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.