The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Farber, David. Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Kim Hewitt In Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed, David Farber does dual duty—first recapping contemporary drug policies and then tracing the US history of cocaine use and cocaine business operations. The […]
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In this, the fourth and final entry into the Fourth Annual Urban History Association/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Kenneth Alyass turns a skeptical lens towards the stretches one Detroit suburb made to justify a name change—and asks the reader to also stretch and see that the ‘burb’s supposedly colorblind arguments were anything but. In […]
Read MoreDavid Morton Assistant Professor of African History University of British Columbia david.morton@ubc.ca Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I recently published a book, Age of Concrete, a history of home construction, informal settlement, and decolonization in Mozambique’s capital city, Maputo, from the 1940s through the 1990s. The chapter that I most enjoyed […]
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Rizzo, Mary. Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore beyond John Waters and the Wire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Daniel Cumming It was the “Prince of Puke”—also known as director John Waters—who pitched the idea to Baltimore’s Chamber of Commerce in the early 2000s. With aplomb only befitting such royalty, Waters urged civic […]
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In this, our third entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Menika Dirkson examines the stretches made by competing organizations—the Police Athletic League and the Black Panther Party—to effectively address the problem of juvenile crime and police-community violence in Philadelphia during the 1960s and ’70s. In 1976, Andre Martin was a […]
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Our second entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest is Willa Granger, who transports us to 1970s Texas to show how older Texans were stretching to their financial and economic limits to retain their mobility and independence. In the third week of September 1970, the Nixon Administration, in tandem with state […]
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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 Mary Rizzo The first time I heard someone talk about Baltimore as a tourist destination was in New Jersey in the mid-1990s. My college roommate excitedly described […]
Read MoreAmanda I. Seligman Professor University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee @AmandaISeligman Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My central goal in teaching urban history is to help students to read the history of the American city in the landscapes they see. Editing the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee (EMKE) gave me the chance to extend that mission […]
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East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story, directed by Sarah Burns and David McMahon (Washington, DC: Florentine Films and WETA, 2002). Review by Courtney Rawlings Following their Peabody Award-winning documentary The Central Park Five (2012), co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s newest film examines another depressing tale of race in America. East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story (2020), focuses […]
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This piece by Marika Plater is the first entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to “write about a moment in urban history when the inflexible was asked to bend,” and in this essay Plater asks readers to stretch their interpretation of the fireworks that seemed ubiquitous […]
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