The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
This is the eighth post in our themed series, Cities at Play. By Sameer Chandavarkar Every year, Mumbai changes its rhythm—deliberately. Roads that are usually choked with traffic slow down or shut entirely as temporary pandals (elaborate festival structures housing Ganesh idols) are set up across neighborhoods. Intersections turn into gathering points where residents participate […]
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Murphy, Ryan Patrick. Teamsters Metropolis . University of Michigan Press, 2025. Reviewed by Gracie Anderson Gender history and queer history have long been concerned with the city’s role in structuring norms and identity. Ryan Patrick Murphy’s Teamsters Metropolis applies the lenses of queer and gender history to an unexpected urban subject: the million-worker boom in […]
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This is the seventh post in our series, Cities at Play. By Sandra Coffey In Tarragona, a coastal city in Catalunya, Spain, the past sits so casually in the Plaça del Fòrum that many first-time visitors stop in disbelief. Here, 1st century Roman ruins, the surviving remnants of the Provincial Forum of Roman Tarraco, lie […]
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By Anna Rose The night before the explosion, the air in San Juanico felt heavy and hot, as though it was boiling. But that feeling was nothing new. The residents of San Juanico, a neighborhood on the northern outskirts of Mexico City, had long lived with hot, stagnant air and the pungent smell of gas. […]
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Moten, Crystal Marie. Continually Working: Black Women, Community Intellectualism, and Economic Justice in Postwar Milwaukee. Vanderbilt University Press, 2023. Reviewed by Hannah Bruno “Of course, this is/was/has always been hard work.” So said Black feminist historian Crystal Moten writing about intellectual work in the midst of the 2020 uprisings; so she demonstrates in her 2023 […]
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By Zehra Betül Atasoy One night in 1910, a woman named Şükrüye was accused of wandering through a burned neighborhood in Istanbul with unidentified men. Her alleged offense was not a clearly defined criminal act, but rather her presence in a fire-ravaged urban space at night, in the company of men whose identities remained unknown. […]
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The Metropole 