The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Julio Capó Jr. and Rebecca Friedman Miami is one of the most important cities in the United States and the Americas. Yet, its history, culture, politics, and overall meaning are still largely caricatured through myth, stigma, and hyperbole. These misrepresentations, often even fantasies, are all deeply rooted in the region’s layered past and relationship […]
Read More
Viator, Felicia Angeja. To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Katherine Rye Jewell What does it mean to sell out? A generation of scholars have addressed this idea in hip hop and popular music, connecting it to questions of authenticity, artistic representation, and […]
Read More
By Chanelle Rose On August 20, 2020, the Miami Herald featured an article titled “‘A History of Broken Promises: Miami Remains Separate and Unequal for Black Residents.” After providing a comprehensive look at the stark racial disparities in housing, income, education, employment, and government that continues to disproportionately impact African Americans, the newspaper reported: “one […]
Read More
By N. D. B. Connolly I sometimes recall a chance conversation from the early 2000s that feels increasingly unreal with every passing year. I can’t remember if it happened at a conference in Tempe, Arizona, or Portland, Maine. I do recollect that I was a graduate student on the very front end of a dissertation, […]
Read More
By Seth Weitz On January 16, 1989, Miami police officer William Lozano shot Black motorcyclist Clement Lloyd, killing both Lloyd and his passenger, Allen Blanchard. The shooting sparked several days of riots and brought to an end a tumultuous, but transformative, decade in Miami’s relatively short history. Dubbed the 1989 Miami Riots, they marked the […]
Read More
Harris, John. The Last Slave Ships: New York and The End Of The Middle Passage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Bob Cary There is something of a “close parenthesis” quality to John Harris’s engrossing discussion of the closing days of the Atlantic Slave trade. Harris focuses on the trade as it played […]
Read More
By Thomas Castillo Migration, wealth, racism, ethnic diversity, and tourism are the likely quick associations one would make about Miami’s history. Miami, of course, is a city proper, but it also is the label that includes the entire urban region of Miami-Dade County. I, for example, no longer try to distinguish my hometown, Hialeah, adjacent […]
Read More
A. K. Sandoval-Strausz Associate Professor of History Penn State University @SandovalStrausz Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I’ve been looking closely at the politics and economy of Latina/o repopulation in Pennsylvania’s smaller industrial cities. Places like Bethlehem, Allentown, Reading, Lancaster, York, and Hazleton are located in highly politically bellwether counties: Lehigh, […]
Read More
Editor’s note: March kicks off The Metropole’s coverage of its Metropolis of the Month: Miami. We begin with our usual overview/bibliography to be followed each week with at least one article on the city for the month. In Michael Mann’s 2006 film, Miami Vice, detectives Sonny Crocket and Ricardo Tubbs jump from pastel-hued 1980s television […]
Read More
By Richard Rodger The British Welfare State was “invented” in 1942 by the social reformer and Liberal politician William Beveridge. After a landslide post-war election win in 1945, however, it was the Labour Party that launched a “Welfare State” – a comprehensive legislative programme that included universal health, employment, and social benefits while also nationalizing […]
Read More
The Metropole 