Postcards and United States Cities

February 10, 2020.Reading time 9 minutes.

By Robert Bogdan Although picture postcards can provide an extensive resource of visual information about urban American they are seldom mined by serious researchers. Postcards’ reputation as repetitive, poor-quality, commercial images that only capture structures and landscapes that attract tourists work against their use. The reputation is not totally wrong, as most postcards fit that […]

The Visual City: Photography, Film, and Postcards

February 6, 2020.Reading time 15 minutes.

“If the city is the raw material for production, for economic development, and for academic research, it has also been available to artists,” writes Helen Liggett in her 2003 work, Urban Encounters. “Photographs can function as sites of participatory reading that provoke urban encounters, first, in the relationship between the photographer and the city, and, […]

The Metropole Bookshelf: Boston University’s Paula Austin Discusses How African American Washingtonians Navigated the City in Her New Book, Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC

February 4, 2020.Reading time 7 minutes.

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. Austin, Paula. Coming of Age in Jim Crow D.C. Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press, 2019. By Paula Austin Coming of Age […]