Promise and Peril in Post-1968 Washington, DC — “When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellions and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation’s Capital”

While not completely ignored among urbanists, for a city of its size and significance, Washington, DC—or at least its post-1968 incarnation—remains an under-historicized metropolis. To be fair, historians like Scott Berg and J. D. Dickey have tackled its beginnings in the nineteenth century. James H. Whyte, Ronald Johnson, Carol Gelderman, Sharon Harley, and others have […]

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Announcing the Seventh Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest

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’s theme is Stumble. We are looking for blog posts about: efforts in urbanism that have stumbled […]

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Transcribing Labor: A New Transcription Campaign Focusing on the AFL Records at the Library of Congress.

When the American Federation of Labor (AFL) first took shape in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it did so as waves of immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Latin America washed over the United States’ shores, bringing increasing ethnic, racial, and religious diversity to the nation. However, immigration intersected with large scale industrialization, and […]

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The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radical Planning—A Review of “Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning”

Sevilla-Buitrago, Álvaro. Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. Reviewed by Mohamed Gamal-Eldin and Marianne Dhenin Historian Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago delivers a provocative account of how planning has shaped our world in his debut single-author monograph, Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning, recently released from […]

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Edo City-State & Fractal Design

Editorial note: This post is part of our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Likam Kyanzaire Benin City sits at the eastern end of Nigeria, not far from its commercial capital Lagos. The site is home to the […]

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David Clem: Building Genetown

Editor’s note: This post is part of our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Robin Wolfe Scheffler On a warm, late-June evening in 1976, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, City Council gathered to contemplate the unprecedented act of banning a […]

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Museum Mice and Pizza Rats: Evolution of the City

Editor’s note: This post part of our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Nuala Caomhánach The concerned look on their faces was enough to make me turn around and go home. Standing at the doorway of my shared […]

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Astronomy on the Flats: How the Moons of Mars and the Death of a President Altered the Late Nineteenth-Century Washington, DC, Landscape

Editor’s note: This post is part of our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Vincent Femia Simon Newcomb often arose from his bed in the middle of the night to walk two miles to the Naval Observatory grounds. […]

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Science and the City: An Overview and Bibliography

A sepia-tone image showing a lab with two large, curtained windows, a clock hanging on the wall between them, and desks dotted with lab equipment. A desk in the foreground has a tray with a rabbit-sized animal lying belly-up. It is set in a decorative frame and has a black university stamp on the lower right-hand corner

Editor’s note: This is the first post in our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Can Gümüş-İspir and Marianne Dhenin When Egyptian engineer and administrator Ali Mubarak traveled to Paris in the 1860s, he took a much-anticipated tour […]

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