The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By David S. Rotenstein Introduction In the summer of 2021, crews began demolishing a historic building in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s Strip District. The building was a monumental, windowless, concrete block onto which a later owner—a fish wholesaler and retailer—had installed a large illuminated fish. The building and its fish were popular and well-loved visual landmarks in […]
Read More
Lisa Krissoff Boehm, PhD Dean, College of Graduate Studies, Professor of History and American Studies, Bridgewater State University @BoehmLisa Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? At this time I am working on three book projects. First, with co-author Steven H. Corey, I am working on a revised edition of our 2015 […]
Read More
This post is part of the Metropole’s Disciplining the Nation series, where we are spotlighting a primary source that is vital to the retelling of the history of racial state violence and criminalization in the United States. Learn more about the series here. By Charlotte Rosen “I am not under a court sentence of death. […]
Read More
By Matt Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen A Teaching Aid and Documentary History of Policing, Incarceration, Criminalization, and Activism in the United States For many years now, the Urban History Association and its conference has served as a type of home base for historians looking to explore and excavate the troubling histories of criminalization, policing, and […]
Read More
When COVID-19 hit in late February/early March of last year, Cityscape continued its listing of current, forthcoming, and overlooked studies in urban history. But after suspending notices of museum shows and films, we initiated a series on the history of plagues in cities: yellow fever in Philadelphia, smallpox in Boston, polio in Brooklyn, cholera in […]
Read More
Fernandez, Johanna. The Young Lords: A Radical History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Reviewed by Leo Valdes In 1969 activists convened at the first Chicano Youth Liberation Conference. Among them were New York Puerto Ricans excited to learn about a group of Chicago activists who wore purple berets and carried a […]
Read More
Diana J. Montaño Assistant Professor in History at Washington University in St. Louis @DJMontao1 Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently working on two projects, both of which interrogate the use of technology in Mexico. “Urban Palisades: Technology in the Making of Santa Fe, Mexico City” is a collaborative project […]
Read More
Dümpelmann, Sonja. Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Sara E. Levine Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin by Sonja Dümpelmann is more than a history of street trees in two cities. It is about politics […]
Read More
Leech, Brian James. The City that Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and its Expanding Berkeley Pit. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018. Reviewed by Troy A. Halsell Butte, Montana, is an interesting place. When I first visited the city in the spring of 2019, its turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture in the uptown central business district and its ubiquitous […]
Read More
By Ghida Ismail “Retrieving Beirut” was written on one of the walls in the Gemmayzeh neighborhood of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. Drawn below it was a taxi car. Beirut’s walls seemed to be calling attention to the indispensability of mobility, secured through the network of taxis and buses/vans, in retrieving the city from the grips of […]
Read More
The Metropole 