The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Call for Student Applications University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OhioThursday, October 15, 2026 Applications due: March 1, 2026 The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) announces the opening of student applications for the inaugural Alison Isenberg Dissertation Colloquium, to be held on the afternoon of Thursday, October 15, 2026, in conjunction with its biennial National […]
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This is the third post in Urban and Environmental Dialogues, our January collaboration with the Network in Canadian History and Environment (NiCHE). For other entries in the series, see here. By Sam Grinsell On the 18th of April, 1849, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (husband of Queen Victoria) laid the foundation stone of the Royal Docks, Grimsby. The […]
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Sidewalks mark the aesthetic line between nature and civilization. They are the city’s environmental hinge, mediating between natural forces and social ideals of a civilized order. Through Chicago’s history, specifically during the City Beautiful movement and the civic interventions that followed, sidewalks have revealed how urban reformers sought to “harden” the city against what they perceived as disorder.
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With sea levels rising, with flooding and storm surge becoming more intense and more frequent, our coastal cities are on the front line—literally—of the effects of climate change. But not only have we warmed those seas and powered those storms by our use of fossil fuels, we have also made our cities more vulnerable to these changes by building into and over tidewater.
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“We, we got ourselvesGonna sing it, gonna love it, gonnawork it out to any lengthDon’t worry, no worry, aboutwhat the people sayWe got ourselves, we gonna make it anywayYou! You can’t hurt meWhy? I’m banned in DC” Bad Brains, “Banned in D.C.” 1982 By Ryan Reft A few years ago, I was attending a history […]
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[Editor’s note: To read our other selections for Best of 2025, see here] Media comes at us so fast nowadays, and along with the fragmentation of culture that has accompanied the increasing pace of society, it become much too easy to miss great works, be they film, television, or books. Our senior editors offer a […]
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[Editor’s note: To read our other selections for Best of 2025, see here] Beyond the obvious – Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, and a handful of others – there are fewer big stars, groups or bands around to set any kind of dominant sound these days. Music journalism, like much of the rest of the industry, has […]
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Guariglia, Matthew. Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing. Duke University Press, 2023. Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure, Matthew Guariglia formerly served as an assistant editor at The Metropole. Guariglia oversaw the Disciplining the City series from 2017 to 2023. By Sarah Frenking Matthew Guariglia’s Police and […]
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[Editor’s note: To see our other selections for Best of 2025, see here] How many times have you bought a book at a conference or at a bookstore, with the full intention of reading it posthaste, only to stumble upon it again twelve months later when you finely dig in? Unlike an album or a […]
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[Editor’s note: To see our other selections for Best of 2025, see here] One could argue that unlike film and music, television’s aperture has only grown in recent years. The movement of stars and directors from film to TV (which historically had been seen as inferior to the movie industry), bolder attempts at storytelling, and […]
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The Metropole 