Join Our Team!

As The Metropole enters its third year of publishing, we are looking to grow! We want to bring readers more great content, and we want to include more devoted urbanists in the blog’s operations–on the editorial side and with marketing and publicity. Why join in this work? Well, as UHA Member Walter Greason pointed out […]

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Money Matters

Our focus on the new edited volume, Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century continues as University of Maryland historian David M.P. Freund explores economic policy notably the government’s role as “monetary sovereign.” Freund recently discussed his research and the value of applying heterodox economic analysis to the study of […]

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Fiscal Fright in NYC: A Review of Kim Phillips-Fein’s Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics

Kim Phillips-Fein. Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. 417pp. $9.98. (Paperback)  Review by Michael R. Glass By 1965, a $255 million gap had opened in the New York City budget. To cover the city’s operating expenses, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. decided to “borrow now, […]

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Rethinking “Old Shanghai”: A Review of Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City

­ By Taoyu Yang Isabella Jackson. Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 274 pp. $99.99 (cloth). No Chinese city has attracted as much attention from academics and the public as Shanghai. The most cosmopolitan of Chinese cities, Shanghai for generations has been central both to China’s development and […]

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All Stick No Carrot: Racism, Property Tax Assessments, and Neoliberalism Post 1945 Chicago

Our focus on the new edited volume, Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century continues as we discuss race and property tax assessments with University of Virginia historian, Andrew Kahrl who contributed the essay, “The Short Ends of Both Sticks: Property Assessments and Black Taxpayer Disadvantage in Urban America.” […]

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Member of the Week: Hong Zhang

Hong Zhang Associate Professor of History University of Central Florida Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?  My current research focuses largely on the history of Tianjin in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Located about 120 kilometers southeast of Beijing, Tianjin is one of the four centrally administered province-level municipalities […]

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Beyond the Political History Paradigm: The new edited volume Shaped the State and Urban History

“Political history — a specialization in elections and elected officials, policy and policy making, parties and party politics — was once a dominant, if not the dominant, pursuit of American historians,” professors Frederick Logevall and Kenneth Osgood noted in a controversial 2016 New York Times editorial. “But somewhere along the way, such work fell out […]

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