The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
As many of our readers may already be aware, SACRPH 2019 commences this Thursday in Northern Virginia (NOVA). In anticipation of the conference, we’d like to provide attendees and non-attendees alike to chance to explore a bit of Northern Virginia’s history. “Capital within a Capital: Covert Action, the Vietnam War, and Creating a “Little Saigon” […]
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Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018). Reviewed by Barry Goldberg In 1965, the New York City Board of Estimate, an eight-member body that once had authority over the city’s budget and land-use matters, but has since […]
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By Avigail Oren (with help from Tom Sugrue and Ryan Reft) Despite having read, written for, and edited blogs for over a decade, administering the Graduate Student Blogging Contest over the past three years is what has taught me the best practices of writing history for the web. The combination of cutting-edge research, stylish graduate […]
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[Editor’s note, with time running out, if you want to submit a paper and looking for panel mates check out the #UHA2020 spreadsheet, you can access it directly here or if you want more info about the spreadsheet along with the link, see here. Also grad students, if you are presenting the UHA has funding […]
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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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