Timothy J. Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). By Christopher Whann Since 1960, urban politics in America have been defined by massive changes like the civil rights movement, the related issue of “white flight” and suburbanization, deindustrialization, and economic transformation. Northeastern cities were certainly affected by these […]
Schrader, Stuart. Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. By Charlotte Rosen As heavily-armed SWAT teams rained rubber bullets and tear gas on Ferguson protestors in August 2014, Palestinians on Twitter offered not only solidarity, but tactical advice. Given that the same tear gas […]
Hurley, Amanda Kolson. Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City. Cleveland, OH: Belt Publishing, 2019. By Walter Greason For decades, urban historians have challenged the image of the suburb as a collection of, as Malvina Reynolds put it, “little boxes all the same.” The moment has arrived to introduce to the […]
By Bob Carey At the end of the First World War, influenza swept across the globe killing fifty million. But this, the deadliest pandemic in history, has never been given the prominence of say, the bubonic plague, cholera, or AIDS. The Mütter Museum of medical history has now launched a most welcome, and what promises […]
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. Brooks, Charlotte. American Exodus: Second Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901 – 1949. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2019. By Charlotte Brooks In 1936, a New York […]
By Charlotte Rosen There is no dearth of historical scholarship demonstrating the dangerous afterlife of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” or what would become commonly known as the “Moynihan Report.” An internal document written when Moynihan was the Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon Johnson, the report argued […]
via GIPHY If you are an urban scholar who put a book, article, or dissertation out into the world in 2019, we encourage you to check out the Jackson, Hirsch, and Katz awards and consider applying. The selection criteria for all awards is the same: significance, originality, quality of research, sophistication of methodology, clarity […]
Samuel Stein. Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2019. By Amanda Boston The process of exclusionary development we know as “gentrification”—and the working-class communities and cultures it displaces—has preoccupied urban residents and other stakeholders for decades. Scholars have explored transformation of the process from a scattered residential phenomenon into a […]
The UHA Board of Directors is delighted to announce the appointment of long-time UHA member Hope Shannon to the position of UHA Executive Director effective May 11, 2020. Hope will serve as interim director, replacing current Executive Director Peter Siskind, whose university administrative duties require him to step down in advance of his term’s end. […]
By Madison Heslop At the western edge of the North American continent, before mountains stretch out into the archipelago of what is now Southeast Alaska, the Fraser River empties into the Salish Sea. At the junction of these major regional waterways are the traditional, ancestral, and unceded homelands of the Musqueam, Sḵwxwú7mesh, and Tsleil-waututh First […]
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