Timothy J. Gilfoyle, editor. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 2 volumes. ISBN 9780190853860 (set) By Richard Harris No question, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History stands as a major achievement testifying to the extraordinary quantity, quality, and diversity of contemporary research on American cities and suburbs. […]
Alejandro Velasco New York University @AleVelascoNYU Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? As a Venezuelan who studies the modern history of Venezuela I wake up every day asking the same question: why? Why is Venezuela undergoing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the region? Why are solutions so difficult to […]
By Eric Michael Rhodes Gone (thankfully) from our profession is Leopold von Ranke’s old fantasy of history as objective science. And yet, while we cannot test our hypotheses in laboratories, peer review has remained central to the process of the production of historical truth—our main objective. We all learn in graduate school that we should […]
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. Goodwin, David. Left Bank of the Hudson: Jersey City and the Artists of 111 1st Street. New York: Empire State Publishing, 2017. By David Goodwin Jersey City, New […]
Review: American Splendor (New York: HBO Films, 2003). Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini By Evan Ash In a middle-of-the-night lymphoma-induced delirium, Cleveland everyman Harvey Pekar (Paul Giamatti) asks his wife Joyce (Hope Davis): “Am I a guy who writes about himself in a comic book, or am I just a character in […]
Constanze Weise Department of Social Sciences Henderson State University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? Presently, I am working on two book manuscripts. I am currently finishing up the manuscript for my first book which is based on my doctoral dissertation. Tentatively titled Kingdoms of the Confluence: Ritual, Politics, and Sovereignty […]
“Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours Keyes. I killed Dietrichson, me, Walter Neff, insurance salesman, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars, until recently that is.” Fred MacMurray’s mortally wounded protagonist of Double Indemnity confesses to his supervisor Barton Keyes’ (Edward G. Robinson) dictaphone. A suburban insurance salesman seduced by a married seductress, […]
By Carlos Rojas Yuan Muzhi’s (袁牧之) 1937 film Street Angel (馬路天使) opens with a three-minute montage that begins with a rapid sequence of nighttime images of Shanghai’s neon signs, and which culminates with a series of shots panning up Shanghai’s buildings. The first shot following this montage opens with the camera angled directly up to […]
By Anton Rosenthal I first encountered the moveable archive of postcards by accident some 25 years ago during a research trip to Montevideo, Uruguay. I had been experiencing a sharp contrast between written accounts of the daily life of the city that I was reading in the national library and the national archives and the […]
Paige Glotzer Assistant Professor and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy University of Madison-Wisconsin Department of History @apaigeoutofhist Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I look at the long history of housing policy in the United States by tracing how […]
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