The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Catherine E. Clark, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City and Photographs, 1860-1970. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xii + 328 pp. $75.00 U.S. ISBN: 9780190681647. By Sun-Young Park Has ever a modern city been so iconic, so universally recognizable, as the Paris that boomed during the latter half of the […]
Read MoreBy Neal D. Polhemus October 18, 1976, the date President Ford signed Public Law No. 94-545, is generally considered the birthday of Congaree National Park. But the campaign to save the rapidly disappearing old-growth forests across America, specifically those in the Congaree River floodplain, began much earlier.[1] A more fitting birthday would be October 25-26, […]
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Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print Love at Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy, and Risk in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin By Tyler Carrington. Oxford University Press, 2019 An inquiry into the sometimes risky ways of finding love in the big city. The 1914 murder of […]
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The Urban History Association/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest was established to promote blogging among graduate students–as a way to teach beyond the classroom, market their scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities. The theme of the third annual contest was “Life Cycles,” inspired by The Metropole‘s third rotation around the sun. Grad students […]
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We all tell ourselves that we do what we do, whatever it is one does, because we derive some level of satisfaction from said vocation. We don’t do it for glory or fame (or even a modest twitter following, I mean if we pick up a few followers in the process is that so wrong […]
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Benjamin Heber Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) 311 pp. $40, ISBN: 9780300115505 By Alan Lessoff Urban historians should take particular note of Benjamin Heber Johnson’s Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation, which returns the city to the center […]
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With September coming to an end, we bid farewell to Toronto. However, we would be remiss not to provide you with a quick review of our September 2019 Metropolis of the Month. The Indigenous City: Indigeneity and Toronto’s Past and Present Though we usually provide an overview of a city’s history, other times we focus […]
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Featuring Toronto as The Metropole’s Metro of the Month was the perfect excuse to sit down and devour that city’s newest cultural export: Kim’s Convenience. The CBC Television show is now on Netflix, where blog co-editors Avigail Oren and Ryan Reft got down to the work of bingeing it over the course of a week. […]
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By Jennifer Bonnell Flying into Toronto, I am always struck by the density and reach of its urban tree canopy. In addition to the mature trees of its leafier, privileged neighborhoods, the city wraps itself around the forested, forking ravines of three major river valleys: from west to east, the Humber, Don, and Rouge River […]
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Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives, edited by Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Sixteen essays on Arabic poetry and prose which invite a literary exploration of Mosul, Cairo, […]
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