The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Editor’s note: This is the third entry in this month’s theme at The Metropole, Urban Indigeniety By Coll Thrush I came to history through a bit of a side door, but it was an urban one. I had always been interested in a sense of place, which in my case meant salmon, cedar, and suburbia. […]
Read More
The Metropole/Urban History Association Graduate Student Blogging Contest exists to encourage and train graduate students to blog about history—as a way to teach beyond the classroom, market their scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities. This year, the contest prompt is slightly different than it has been in the past. From topical themes like “life […]
Read More
McGruder, Kevin. Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Carla DuBose-Simons In his latest work, Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem, Kevin McGruder continues to explore the processes by which Harlem became the “Culture Capital” for African Americans. This book, which follows his first book, Race […]
Read More
Editor’s note: This is the second post in The Metropole’s May theme on Urban Indigeniety By Nathaniel F. Holly On a rainy November afternoon in 1972, a number of South Carolina’s most prominent citizens huddled together in a Charleston park to hear the recitation of a ghost story popularized during the state’s tricentennial celebrations a […]
Read More
Editor’s note: The Metropole theme for May is Urban Indigeniety. This is our first post of the month, an overview of the field. By Kent Blansett, Cathleen D. Cahill & Andrew Needham Today, 70 percent of Indigenous peoples in the United States, a population of more than 3.7 million people, live in cities. In Canada, […]
Read More
Gene Morales Lecturer, History Texas A&M University-San Antonio @gtmorals Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research examines the 1968 HemisFair, a World’s Fair created in San Antonio, Texas, during a pivotal year in U.S. history. My family is what drew me to the project. I had always heard stories […]
Read More
Fischer, Anne Gray. The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Reviewed by DeAnza A. Cook Making sense of systemic violence in modern American cities requires reckoning with sexual criminalization and its entangled carceral effects throughout this nation and beyond. Anne […]
Read More
Martinko, Whitney. Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Reviewed by Stephanie Gray The practice of historic preservation is and always has been political. While “the politics of preservation” are time and place specific, in Whitney Martinko’s Real Estate: Market Morality […]
Read More
By David S. Rotenstein There is a historic house in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where Anna Tito Mecca Zizza lived for almost 30 years. She cooked family dinners there and helped raise the children of her large extended family inside its walls and in its yard. Anna grew old inside the house, and she died there after […]
Read More
Felix Cowan PhD Candidate Department of History University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research is on the Russian penny press in the early twentieth century: small, accessible, hugely popular newspapers that sold for a single kopeck per issue and targeted the Russian Empire’s growing […]
Read More
The Metropole 