Walter Johnson (historian)

Walter Johnson (born 1967 in Columbia, Missouri) is an American historian, and a professor of History and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University, where he has also directed the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History.

Walter Johnson was born in Columbia, Missouri in 1967.

His father, Walter L. Johnson, was a professor of economics at the University of Missouri.

The auditorium in which he taught was later named in his honor.

His mother, Mary-Angela Johnson, was director of the Children's House Montessori School, and a member of the boards of both the Columbia Housing Authority and the Boone County Public Library.

His brother is the noted angling author and horseman Willoughby Johnson.

Johnson is married to Harvard historian Alison Frank Johnson.

They have five children.

Johnson was educated at the University of Missouri Laboratory School, West Junior High School, and Rock Bridge High School, all in Columbia, Missouri.

Johnson holds degrees from Amherst College, the University of Cambridge, and Princeton University, where he received a Ph.D. in History under the direction of Professor Nell Irvin Painter in 1995.

Johnson began his teaching career in the History Department at New York University in 1995, and taught there until 2006.

He enlarged that through research and made it the topic of his 1995 Princeton Ph.D. dissertation.

In this book, Johnson took up and engaged with many of the themes which had occupied historians of slavery in the thirty years before it was published.

The book was among the first in the historiography of slavery in the United States to place the question of capitalism and the market at the heart of its investigation of slavery.

By demonstrating the extent to which slaveholders' identities were embodied in their slaves, it also explored the master-slave dialectic and the relationship between slaveholding households and the slave market.

By following slaves’ efforts to forge human connections amidst the violent dislocation of the slave trade, it provided an account of the ability of "the slave community" to reproduce itself over time and space.

It explored slaveholders' gendered fantasies about the slave market, describing the questions they asked and the examinations they made in the slave market.

In this way, it investigated the daily reproduction of racist ideas about medicine, management, and sexuality in the institution that was at the heart of the slaveholding economy.

By recovering traces of slaves' efforts to shape their own sales, it altered the central symbol of slavery's brutality by placing it in a history of opposition, resistance, and manipulation.

In noting the vulnerability of slaveholders' identities, which were dependent upon slaves for their performance, Johnson sought to explain the extraordinary violence that characterized all of antebellum slavery.

Walter Johnson’s Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market breaks down the New Orleans slave market, specifically how slave traders turned humans into products for sale.

Johnson begins by describing the daily practice of slave pens, how slaves were treated and categorized in ways to make them more appealing to slave traders.

This practice of categorizing slaves is what allowed traders to differentiate the monetary value of each slave.

As Johnson put it “This daily dialectic of categorization and differentiation was the magic by which the traders turned people into things and then into money” (pg.11).

Once Johnson established this point, he explains how traders begin to prepare slaves for sale.

The process itself begins before they ever reach shore.

In fact, the treatment they receive is modified as they begin to approach their destination.

Everything from the way they are restrained, the clothes, hygiene even the diet they receive gets altered to make the slaves more appealing to the buyers.

Johnson goes on to elaborate on the treatment of slaves once they are sold at auctions.

A major point he discusses is the detailed records kept by these slaveholders.

His first book, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market was published by Harvard University Press in 1999.

The book won several prizes: the American Studies Association’s John Hope Franklin Prize; the Organization of American Historians’ Frederick Jackson Turner and Avery O. Craven Prizes; the Southern Historical Association’s Francis B. Simkins Prize; the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic’s SHEAR Book Prize; and the Thomas J. Wilson Prize from Harvard University Press.

It was also a selection of the History Book Club.

Johnson based Soul by Soul upon the records of the Louisiana Supreme Court, the nineteenth-century narratives of former slaves, slaveholders’ personal records, and the economic documentation produced by the trade itself.

He developed the book over years, beginning with ideas he explored first in a seminar on Southern History taught by Nell Irvin Painter.

In 2000, he accepted a joint appointment in NYU's American Studies program, which he directed during the academic year 2005-2006.

In 2006 he was inducted into the Rock Bridge High School Hall of Fame, along with NASCAR Superstar Carl Edwards.

In 2006, Johnson accepted an appointment as Professor of History and African and African American Studies at Harvard University.

In 2008, he became the Winthrop Professor of History, and in 2012 he assumed the directorship of the Charles Warren Center for the Study of American History.

Johnson's work focuses on the history of slavery, capitalism, white supremacy, Black resistance, and US imperialism.