“Where the Waters Reflect the Clouds”: Examining Minnesota’s Indigenous History

October 13, 2020.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Katrina Phillips Minnesota has always been a Native place. The state takes its name from a Dakota phrase, Mni Sota Makoce, which translates to “land where the waters reflect the clouds.” While the state’s capital is the other Twin City (St. Paul), Minneapolis is the largest city in the state. Its English name also […]

Where the Waters Meet the People: A Bibliography of the Twin cities

October 7, 2020.Reading time 41 minutes.

By Avigail Oren In This Tender Land (2019), William Kent Kreuger’s loose update of Huck Finn, the O’Banion brothers and their compatriots Emmy and Mose end up in St. Paul, Minnesota, after escaping from the Lincoln Indian Training School—and its despicable, abusive, headmaster Mrs. Brinkman—and sailing down the Minnesota River in a canoe. After passing […]

Urban Life in the Confederacy — A Review of Rebel Richmond

October 6, 2020.Reading time 8 minutes.

Ash, Stephen V. Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Reviewed by Griffin Jones Protests took hold of Richmond, Virginia, over this summer regarding the place of monuments and statues to Confederate leaders in the city. A storm of national debate around the place of […]

“Entrepreneurial Greed” — A Review of Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed

October 5, 2020.Reading time 9 minutes.

Farber, David. Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Kim Hewitt In Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed, David Farber does dual duty—first recapping contemporary drug policies and then tracing the US history of cocaine use and cocaine business operations. The […]

Blight by Association: Why a White Working-Class Suburb Changed Its Name

October 1, 2020.Reading time 28 minutes.

In this, the fourth and final entry into the Fourth Annual Urban History Association/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Kenneth Alyass turns a skeptical lens towards the stretches one Detroit suburb made to justify a name change—and asks the reader to also stretch and see that the ‘burb’s supposedly colorblind arguments were anything but. In […]