The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Richard Harris Richard Wade. 1964. Slavery in the Cities. The South, 1820-1860. New York: Oxford University Press. Lisa Tolbert. 2017. Henry, a slave, v. State of Tennessee. The public and private space of slaves in a small town. In Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, eds., Slavery in the City. Architecture and Landscapes of Urban […]
Read MoreLizabeth Cohen, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2019) Reviewed by Bob Carey Lizabeth Cohen has given us a big, tasty book about urban renewal and the career—successes and failures—of urban planner Ed Logue. Logue had, for many, the […]
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By Richard Harris You know how Breitbart carries stories with captions like “The Democrats’ Five Steps to Socialism”? Or how the New York Times regularly updates its count of “The Whoppers that Trump Tells”? Well, herewith is my “Seven Neglected Gems in Urban History.” I’m hopeful it, too, will go viral. The inspiration, if such […]
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By Sara Patenaude Decade of Fire. Directed by Vivian Vázquez Irizarry and Gretchen Hildebran. Red Nut Films, 2018. Decade of Fire tells the story of the South Bronx in the 1970s, when 80% of the housing stock in the neighborhood was ravaged by fires and 250,000 residents lost their homes. Such wide-spread devastation could easily […]
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“He sits upon the landlord’s operating table, the needle of the nation sucking his soul.” —Henry Dumas Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019. By Eric Michael Rhodes When Michael Bloomberg blamed the end of redlining for […]
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By Steven Tischler Goldberger, Paul. Ballpark: Baseball in the American City. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019. Paul Goldberger deftly analyzes changing relationships between professional baseball and urban environments from the mid-19th century to the present day in Ballpark: Baseball in the American City. Goldberger uses ballparks as a lens through which to observe and […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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