The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Avigail Oren We decided to change up the theme of this year’s Graduate Student Blogging Contest because we wanted to encourage storytelling. Graduate coursework and advising generally prepares historians to write persuasive, evidence-based arguments, but only some programs and advisors emphasize the elements of narrative—scene, character, dialogue, voice, style—that can make a piece of […]
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Amezcua, Mike. Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Reviewed by Emiliano Aguilar In December 2019 the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) received considerable backlash for painting over murals at the 18th Street Pink Line station. The murals—painted in 1998 by a partnership of artist Francisco […]
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This is the latest installment in the Disciplining the Nation series, a history of urban policing, incarceration, and criminalization in the United States as told through essential and teachable primary source documents. You can read the introduction to the project here, and previous installments here and here. If you’re a scholar of the carceral state and have an illustrative […]
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Editor’s note: This is the fifth and final post in The Metropole May theme, Urban Indigeniety. Additional entries in the series can be found at the conclusion of this article. By Maurice Crandall In the predawn hours on the last Saturday of each February, members of the Yavapai-Apache Nation (YAN or “the Nation”) gather at […]
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Anne Gray Fisher Assistant Professor of U.S. Gender History University of Texas – Dallas @annegrayfischer Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? The Streets Belong to Us traces the history of sexual policing—the ways people’s bodies and their presumed sexual practices are surveilled and targeted by law enforcement—on city streets in the modern […]
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Editor’s note: This is the fourth entry in this month’s theme at The Metropole, Urban Indigeniety. Additional entries in the series can be found at the conclusion of this article. By Sasha Maria Suarez Ignatia Broker (White Earth Ojibwe) remembered that to get a “toe-hold” in mid-twentieth century Minneapolis, newly arrived Indigenous peoples had to […]
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Editor’s note: This is the third entry in this month’s theme at The Metropole, Urban Indigeniety. Additional posts in the series can be found at the conclusion of this article. 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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Editor’s note: This is the second post in The Metropole’s May theme on Urban Indigeniety. Additional entries in the series can be found at the conclusion of this article. 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 […]
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