The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Believing that blogging is an excellent way to teach beyond the classroom, market scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities, The Metropole established the Graduate Student Blogging Contest in 2017. This year, the theme of the contest was “The Senses,” which asked contributors to tell a story about any time, topic, person, or place […]
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By Amanda I. Seligman Henry Binford’s most legendary urban tours are ones that he led on Chicago’s elevated trains, but he knows his way around the city by car too. Once while driving with a small group during my time in graduate school, Henry found his planned route blocked. Undeterred, he drove over a block […]
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By David S. Rotenstein In 2009 I learned about one African American woman who briefly lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC, suburb. She worked for a white physician’s family. Lucille Walker’s story as a Black domestic worker survives in bits and pieces in the memory of the physician’s daughter, Ann Scandiffio. In 1939 […]
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By Timothy J. Gilfoyle The fear of increasing crime in nineteenth-century American cities generated an unprecedented expansion of penitentiary and carceral systems throughout the United States. The autobiography of George Appo (1856-1930) presents a rare window into this subaltern world of incarcerated men. Appo was arrested more than a dozen times and spent more than a decade […]
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This piece is the sole entrant into the Sixth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to “tell a story about any time, topic, person, or place in urban history that foregrounds sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch,” and this essay depicts the sensory experiences of a woman exercising her agency […]
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