The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. by Mike Amezcua Punk fliers are planning documents. Not the official kind produced by city planning departments, of course, nor the grassroots plans by neighborhood activists resisting investment […]
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Clark, Shannan. The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Stephen Petrus As the middle class increasingly shaped consumption habits and social practices in America in the 1950s, it became the subject of scathing critiques in scholarly and popular sociological […]
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by Josh Levy In 1968 the St. Louis Health Division determined that around 70 percent of the rat bites reported in the city came from the same corridor, a roughly two-mile strip of predominately Black neighborhoods stretching west from downtown, between Delmar Boulevard and Natural Bridge Road.[1] The same year Barry Commoner, founder of the […]
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Marcio Siwi Assistant Professor in Latin American History and Metropolitan Studies Towson University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? As an urban historian working at the intersection of race, class, and urban development, I am interested in exploring the city as a site of contestation where diverse populations with conflicting attachments […]
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Schley, David. Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Reviewed by Matthew A. Crenson The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has disappeared. It descended into bankruptcy toward the end of the nineteenth century, with ownership passing from Baltimore to investors in Chicago and New York. Now, […]
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Gale, Dennis. The Misunderstood History of Gentrification: People, Planning, Preservation, Urban Renewal, 1915-2020. Temple University Press, 2021. Reviewed by David J. Goodwin Gentrification entered the scholarly discourse on cities in 1964 with London: Aspects of Change, Ruth Glass’s study regarding the influx of middle-income residents moving into historically working-class London neighborhoods and the gradual transformation […]
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Michelle Nickerson Associate Professor of History Loyola University Chicago Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently finishing a book called Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial about a group of activists in the long 1960s who raided a draft board to disrupt the conscription […]
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To conclude our 2022 Month of Academic Odes, we solicited these appreciations from, and of, our community.
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By Julius L. Jones The history of African Americans on the Chicago Police Department (CPD) begins in 1871. The same year the Great Chicago Fire destroyed approximately three-and-a-half square miles of the city, leaving 100,000 people unhoused, James L. Shelton was appointed the first African American member of CPD. Since then, African Americans have served […]
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Andra Chastain, PhD Assistant Professor of History Washington State University, Vancouver Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I’m currently revising my book manuscript, which is a history of the metro system in Santiago, Chile. This project sparked my interest because its history crosses several key political divides in Chile’s history: it […]
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