The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
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 […]
Read MoreThe Washington, DC Latrobe Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians will be hosting a two-day symposium on the topic of Race, Ethnicity, and Architecture in the Nation’s Capital, April 18-19, 2020 at the Catholic University School of Architecture and Planning. The keynote lecture will be delivered by Dr. Amber Wiley of Rutgers University, a […]
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By Peter Soppelsa This post focuses on a remarkable source for illustrating popular urbanism and urban imaginaries: European and American photomontage postcards from around 1900 to 1920 that visualize future cities. Cobbling together an online archive of over 400 future cities photomontages, I discovered an under-utilized body of evidence about popular urbanism. Visual and textual […]
Read MoreHarold Bérubé Full Professor of History Université de Sherbrooke (Canada). @HaroldBerube https://haroldberube.com Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I recently published a book on the history of Quebec’s main municipal association, created in 1919. In a way, it completes a research cycle on municipal governance that started with my research on […]
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By Robert Bogdan Although picture postcards can provide an extensive resource of visual information about urban American they are seldom mined by serious researchers. Postcards’ reputation as repetitive, poor-quality, commercial images that only capture structures and landscapes that attract tourists work against their use. The reputation is not totally wrong, as most postcards fit that […]
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“If the city is the raw material for production, for economic development, and for academic research, it has also been available to artists,” writes Helen Liggett in her 2003 work, Urban Encounters. “Photographs can function as sites of participatory reading that provoke urban encounters, first, in the relationship between the photographer and the city, and, […]
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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. Austin, Paula. Coming of Age in Jim Crow D.C. Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press, 2019. By Paula Austin Coming of Age […]
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By Daniel Clark For most of the twentieth century, autoworkers and their families were a large share of metro-Detroit’s population, and the decade and a half after World War II has been widely considered to be their heyday. Those familiar with the literature on Detroit history will immediately, and correctly, point out that Tom Sugrue’s […]
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By Richard Harris, McMaster University I enjoyed Victoria Wolcott’s recent item in The Metropole. Engaging, and deeply-felt, it effectively made the point that the lives and struggles of black women are among the most neglected aspects of the American urban experience. But one phrase gave me pause. She suggested that lately we have been “neglecting […]
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We’ve been thinking long and hard here at The Metropole and the Urban History Association about how to sustain the blog in a way that honors and rewards all of the hard work that our editors and contributors currently do as volunteers. In 2019, we had over 50,000 visitors to the site (an increase of […]
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