The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Pouillard, Véronique. Paris to New York: The Transatlantic Fashion Industry in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Lauren Laframboise If you’ve bought clothes in recent decades, chances are that they’re products of a dizzyingly complex supply chain, involving hundreds of different people’s labor across several distant towns and cities. Although […]
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Editors Note: This is the first post in our July series on global urban history, structured around the recently launched Elements in Global Urban History from Cambridge University Press. This post introduces the logic and aims behind the Elements, and forthcoming posts by Richard Harris and Alexia Yates will elaborate on the work they contributed […]
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Hackworth, Jason. Manufacturing Decline: How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Kenneth Alyass During the turbulent 2016 election campaign Donald Trump spoke at a rally in Akron, Ohio, about the crisis of American cities. In what was advertised as a “pitch to minority […]
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Horowitz, Andy. Katrina: A History, 1915-2015. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Reviewed by J. Mark Souther As Hurricane Katrina spun northward along the Pearl River into the piney woods of Mississippi on the morning of August 29, 2005, reporters spun the first news of how New Orleans fared. Reporting from the French Quarter, they […]
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Mario Hernandez Assistant Professor, Social and Historical Department Mills College @mario22h Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My research focuses on relationship between race and gentrification. My current book project, Bushwick’s Bohemia: Art and Revitalization in Gentrifying Brooklyn, will be published by Routledge Press in the spring of 2022. The book […]
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Quraishi, Uzma. Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Reviewed by Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez In 1965, the United States passed the Immigration and Nationality Act against the backdrop of the Cold War. Extending preference to skilled migrants, allowing for family […]
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The Metropole/Urban History Association Graduate Student Blogging Contest exists to encourage and train graduate students to blog about history—as a way to teach beyond the classroom, market their scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities. This year’s theme is embrace. We’re looking for blog posts about a moment in urban history when individuals, groups, […]
Read MoreThompson, Heather Ann. Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Reviewed by Ian Toller-Clark Historians, social scientists, and public commentators have long wondered how and why America’s cities descended into an “urban crisis” in the final decades of the twentieth century. It has been twenty years […]
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Kwate, Naa Oyo A., ed. The Street: A Photographic Field Guide to American Inequality. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Howard Gillette In 1992 Time Magazine presented its readers with a scathing picture of Camden, New Jersey, under the telling headline, “Who Could Live Here?” Featuring images of desecrated landscapes as the background […]
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Cummings, Alex Sayf. Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Andrew Hedden A generation of labor historians famously asked: “Why was there no socialism in the United States?” Employing new forms of social history and foregrounding the country’s long history of class […]
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