David Clem: Building Genetown

March 28, 2023.Reading time 35 minutes.

Editor’s note: This post is part of our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Robin Wolfe Scheffler On a warm, late-June evening in 1976, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, City Council gathered to contemplate the unprecedented act of banning a […]

“They Cleaned Me Out Entirely”: An Enslaved Woman’s Experience with General Sherman’s Army

October 4, 2022.Reading time 22 minutes.

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 […]