Local Logics and Urban Exorcisms for Better Neighborhoods—A Review of “Urban Specters: The Everyday Harm of Racial Capitalism”

Mayorga, Sarah. Urban Specters: The Everyday Harm of Racial Capitalism. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Reviewed by Minh Q. Nguyen Sarah Mayorga’s Urban Specters: The Everyday Harms of Racial Capitalism provides an in-depth analysis of material life within two neighborhoods in Cincinnati, a Midwestern Rust Belt city, from the perspective of […]

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The Travails of Urban Redevelopment in post-1968 Washington, DC

This is the second entry in our Metropolis of the Month for November 2023, Washington D.C. By Kyla Sommers In response to the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, African Americans took to the streets in more than one hundred American cities. The rebellions in Washington, DC, resulted in […]

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UHA 2023 Pittsburgh, the Past; UHA 2025 Los Angeles, the Future

Over the long weekend of October 26-29, urban historians gathered in Pittsburgh for the 10th biennial Urban History Association conference. The first UHA gathering since the pandemic, it was a resounding success, as evidenced by some of the tweets below. Special thanks to the planning arrangements committee, UHA President Joe Trotter, and UHA Executive Director […]

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Dream City Skepticism? A 20th-Century Bibliography of the Nation’s Capital

This is the first post in our Metropolis of the Month for November 2023: Washington, DC, in the Twentieth Century. “If any city in the United States has borne the burden of serving as a symbol of American aspirations and has simultaneously been the place. . .where the issues of civilization have been focused, it […]

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