The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Charlotte Rosen There is no dearth of historical scholarship demonstrating the dangerous afterlife of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” or what would become commonly known as the “Moynihan Report.” An internal document written when Moynihan was the Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon Johnson, the report argued […]
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Samuel Stein. Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2019. By Amanda Boston The process of exclusionary development we know as “gentrification”—and the working-class communities and cultures it displaces—has preoccupied urban residents and other stakeholders for decades. Scholars have explored transformation of the process from a scattered residential phenomenon into a […]
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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. […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018). Reviewed by Barry Goldberg In 1965, the New York City Board of Estimate, an eight-member body that once had authority over the city’s budget and land-use matters, but has since […]
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Catherine E. Clark, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City and Photographs, 1860-1970. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xii + 328 pp. $75.00 U.S. ISBN: 9780190681647. By Sun-Young Park Has ever a modern city been so iconic, so universally recognizable, as the Paris that boomed during the latter half of the […]
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Benjamin Heber Johnson, Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017) 311 pp. $40, ISBN: 9780300115505 By Alan Lessoff Urban historians should take particular note of Benjamin Heber Johnson’s Escaping the Dark, Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation, which returns the city to the center […]
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Slezkine, Yuri. The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) XVIII, 1104 pp. $39.95. By John W. Steinberg Yuri Slezkine has written an extraordinary book. Building his epic around the lives of Soviet luminaries, he combines a host of topics ranging from intellectual to architectural history to reveal […]
Read MoreRosemary Wakeman, Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) 392 pp. $45 ISBN: 9780226346175 By Sam Wetherell Rosemary Wakeman’s exquisitely written Practicing Utopia charts the rise and fall of new towns—the “deus ex machina” of developmental welfare states—in the mid-twentieth century. The new towns appear almost […]
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