The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print A Place to Call Home: Immigrant Exclusion and Urban Belonging in New York, Paris, and Barcelona By Ernesto Castañeda. Stanford University Press, 2018. A study conducted over 14 years comparing the assimilation experience of African and […]
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By Deborah Pellow In January 1982, I arrived in Accra for six months of research. Two weeks earlier, on December 31, Flight Lt Jerry Rawlings had led a successful coup. He was a junior officer in the Air Force. Two years earlier, he had led the June 4 coup; during his brief stint as head […]
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Editor’s note: In honor of Columbia historian Kenneth Jackson’s retirement, Columbia is holding a two-day conference called “An Urban World: The Changing Landscape of Suburbs and Cities.” Timothy Gilfoyle, interviewed here, will be among the numerous distinguished urban historians participating in the event. It is free and open to the public. See here for details. […]
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By Kuukuwa Manful It is commonly thought that Accra, like many other African cities, has an architectural “identity crisis”[1] because “if you look at the city, there’s nothing that tells you where we were, where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.”[2] This view, echoed in both academic and popular discourse, is held […]
Read MoreCarl Nightingale Professor of Urban History Department of Transnational Studies University at Buffalo Coordinator, Global Urban History Project Board Secretary, People United for Sustainable Housing, PUSH Buffalo. Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? While writing my book on segregation, I got interested the relationship between urban history and other forms of […]
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Movement, both unfettered and brutally curtailed, has long been central to Accra’s urban culture. From its days as a slave entrepot, through its decades as a colonial possession, well into its car-driven post-independence boom years, Accra has always been defined by movement–of the enslaved, by colonial administrators, of goods, and of postcolonial citizens. Take for […]
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Editor’s note: Michael Brickey’s post below is, of course, a reminder to check out the CFP for #UHA2020 in Detroit. If you’re reading this, consider submitting! You can check out the CFP here. By Michael Brickey Last week, Kate Carpenter posted this to Twitter: Still feeling inspired by #WHA2019 and seeing chatter about #WHA2020 panels, […]
Read MoreJacob Bruggeman University of Cambridge Darwin College @jacob_bruggeman Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research is on the construction of narratives about economic inequality in the long 20th century. For my M.Phil. dissertation, I am examining how Margaret Thatcher’s descriptions of economic inequality drew upon Victorian narratives about poverty. […]
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Editor’s Note: Socialists in cities have imagined, formulated, and attempted to create a conception of urban space that revolved around their ideological principals and ideas. Urban socialist experiments took on many forms and have had a varying rate of success and failure. Each case demonstrates how crucial alternative conceptions to the political economy of capitalist […]
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As many of our readers may already be aware, SACRPH 2019 commences this Thursday in Northern Virginia (NOVA). In anticipation of the conference, we’d like to provide attendees and non-attendees alike to chance to explore a bit of Northern Virginia’s history. “Capital within a Capital: Covert Action, the Vietnam War, and Creating a “Little Saigon” […]
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