The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Amezcua, Mike. Making Mexican Chicago: From Postwar Settlement to the Age of Gentrification. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022. Reviewed by Emiliano Aguilar In December 2019 the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) received considerable backlash for painting over murals at the 18th Street Pink Line station. The murals—painted in 1998 by a partnership of artist Francisco […]
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McGruder, Kevin. Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Carla DuBose-Simons In his latest work, Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem, Kevin McGruder continues to explore the processes by which Harlem became the “Culture Capital” for African Americans. This book, which follows his first book, Race […]
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Fischer, Anne Gray. The Streets Belong to Us: Sex, Race, and Police Power from Segregation to Gentrification (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022). Reviewed by DeAnza A. Cook Making sense of systemic violence in modern American cities requires reckoning with sexual criminalization and its entangled carceral effects throughout this nation and beyond. Anne […]
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Martinko, Whitney. Historic Real Estate: Market Morality and the Politics of Preservation in the Early United States. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Reviewed by Stephanie Gray The practice of historic preservation is and always has been political. While “the politics of preservation” are time and place specific, in Whitney Martinko’s Real Estate: Market Morality […]
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Stolzenberg, Nomi M. and Myers, David N. American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Bob Carey This is a big, readable study about how Satmer Hasidic Jews became an influential Republican voting bloc in Orange County, New York. You must work […]
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Clark, Shannan. The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Stephen Petrus As the middle class increasingly shaped consumption habits and social practices in America in the 1950s, it became the subject of scathing critiques in scholarly and popular sociological […]
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Schley, David. Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Reviewed by Matthew A. Crenson The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has disappeared. It descended into bankruptcy toward the end of the nineteenth century, with ownership passing from Baltimore to investors in Chicago and New York. Now, […]
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Gale, Dennis. The Misunderstood History of Gentrification: People, Planning, Preservation, Urban Renewal, 1915-2020. Temple University Press, 2021. Reviewed by David J. Goodwin Gentrification entered the scholarly discourse on cities in 1964 with London: Aspects of Change, Ruth Glass’s study regarding the influx of middle-income residents moving into historically working-class London neighborhoods and the gradual transformation […]
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By Carl Abbott New Yorkers have gumption. They’ve got moxie. They don’t slow down and they don’t take crap from anyone. They’re also survivors who can sometimes figure out how to work together for the common good. That’s the shared message of two compelling and very different books by science fiction stars: N. K. Jemisin’s The […]
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Holtzman, Benjamin. The Long Crisis: New York and the Path to Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Claire Dunning The notion of “crisis” may feel overplayed these days but remains pertinent when upheavals related to climate, democracy, health, and white supremacy continue to go unchecked. As governments respond too slowly or not […]
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The Metropole 