The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Rosemary Wakeman, Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) 392 pp. $45 ISBN: 9780226346175 By Sam Wetherell Rosemary Wakeman’s exquisitely written Practicing Utopia charts the rise and fall of new towns—the “deus ex machina” of developmental welfare states—in the mid-twentieth century. The new towns appear almost […]
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By Walter Greason African-American history remains a marginal field within the global institution of professional history. Despite the powerful transformation of world society as a result of the American Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968) and the international struggle to end South African apartheid (1960-1994), most societies do not teach the stories about white supremacy, pan-Africanism, and the […]
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By Kate Uva On the (Queer) Waterfront, co-curated by Hugh Ryan and Avram Finkelstein, is a welcome accompaniment to Ryan’s new work When Brooklyn Was Queer: A History. The book is an engaging, wide-ranging, and scrupulously inclusive exploration of how Brooklyn supported queer communities and identity formation between the 1860s and the 1950s. The exhibition, […]
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The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. Genevieve Carpio. Collisions at the Crossroads: How How Place and Mobility Make Race. University of California Press, 2019. By Genevieve Carpio Collisions at the Crossroads seeks to bring […]
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[Editor’s note: As part of our Book Review Series, The Metropole provides authors a chance to respond to reviews by The Metropole of their work. This week, New York University Professor Kim Phillips-Fein responds to the review of her work Fear City: New York City’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. You can […]
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Susan Opotow and Zachary Baron Shemtob, editors, New York after 9/11. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. For anyone in New York that day, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 remain very much in the present. But memory and raw emotions fade. Young men and women joining the armed forces today were not even […]
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Ansley T. Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 390 pp. notes, index. ISBN 978 0 226 02525 4. Reviewed by Walter C. Stern For decades the relationship between the value of housing and the desirability of schools has been practically inescapable. Realtors hype or pooh-pooh […]
Read MoreAndrew Pope Lecturer in History & Literature Harvard University @popeand Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current project, Living in the Struggle: Black Power, Gay Liberation, and Women’s Liberation Movements in Atlanta, 1964-1996, explores how poor and working class residents of Atlanta came to identify mutual interests across traditional lines […]
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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 summer’s blogging contest theme is “Life Cycles.” We invite graduate students to submit essays about the birth, […]
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Call for Papers: 2020 Latrobe Chapter Symposium Race, Ethnicity, and Architecture in the Nation’s Capital In 2019, the Washington Post reported that the nation’s capital had the highest intensity of gentrification of any American city, with more than 20,000 African Americans displaced from low-income neighborhoods from 2000 to 2013. For architectural and urban historians, the […]
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