Member of the Week: Alex Sayf Cummings

June 10, 2021.Reading time 10 minutes.

Alex Sayf Cummings is a professor of History at Georgia State University and the author of Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of Copyright in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2013) and Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy (Columbia, 2020). She is also a co-editor of East of East: The Making of Greater […]

Education Failed to be an Equalizer in Boston — A Review of “The Education Trap”

June 9, 2021.Reading time 8 minutes.

Groeger, Cristina Viviana. The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Erika M. Kitzmiller For centuries, social reformers and elected officials have insisted that education is central to reducing the inequities between the rich and poor, and in turn, to generating a more equitable […]

Anti-Black Punitive Traditions in Early American Policing

June 8, 2021.Reading time 32 minutes.

By DeAnza A. Cook Editors Note: This post, part of our Disciplining the City series, expounds upon the central thesis of “The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview” and examines the development of anti-black punitive traditions in American policing that first surfaced in the era of slavery and settler colonization. An English court […]

Demythologizing Newsboys — A Review of “Crying the News”

June 7, 2021.Reading time 13 minutes.

DiGirolamo, Vincent. Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Cristina Groeger In Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys, Vincent DiGirolamo gives newsboys the historical weight they are due. At nearly 600 pages, this tome offers a comprehensive history of a youth occupation spanning two […]

Topography and Poverty — A Review of “Urban Lowlands”

June 3, 2021.Reading time 7 minutes.

Moga, Steven T. Urban Lowlands: A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Reviewed by Henry C. Binford This fine book weaves together several strands of United States urban history over the period from Reconstruction to the New Deal. Urban Lowlands: A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning is an examination […]

Cold War Roots of Pittsburgh’s Renaissance — A Review of “Nuclear Suburbs”

June 2, 2021.Reading time 12 minutes.

Vitale, Patrick. Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Reviewed by Alex Sayf Cummings In the 1979 cult classic The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, a down-on-their-luck basketball team called the Pittsburgh Pythons is desperate for a change of fortune. They lose constantly, despite being led by the […]

Thorough and Damning — A Review of “In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower”

June 1, 2021.Reading time 10 minutes.

Editor’s note: It’s summer, and that means (hopefully!) more time to catch up on new work in urban history. For our Month of Books this June, we’re running eleven reviews of recently published monographs on everything from the immigrant Sunbelt to Rust Belt racism. Thanks to the reviewers who worked hard to make this happen! […]

The Metropole

Month: June 2021