Ansley T. Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 390 pp. notes, index. ISBN 978 0 226 02525 4. Reviewed by Walter C. Stern For decades the relationship between the value of housing and the desirability of schools has been practically inescapable. Realtors hype or pooh-pooh […]

­ By Taoyu Yang Isabella Jackson. Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 274 pp. $99.99 (cloth). No Chinese city has attracted as much attention from academics and the public as Shanghai. The most cosmopolitan of Chinese cities, Shanghai for generations has been central both to China’s development and […]

By Thai Jones Wallace, Mike. Greater Gotham: A History of New York City From 1898 to 1919 (New York: Oxford University Press,2018). 1182pp. $45.ISBN 978-0-19-511635-9  Greater Gotham opens on New Year’s Eve, 1897, with thousands massing in Union Square before stepping off to join a parade celebrating consolidation of the five boroughs—including what were at […]

Kelly Lytle Hernández. City of Inmates: Conquest, Rebellion, and the Rise of Human Caging in Los Angeles, 1771-1965. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. We are living in an era of human caging on a massive scale. Each night, 2.2 million people fall asleep locked inside one of more than 6,000 prisons, jails, […]

By Robert B. Carey, Ph.D. Germ City: Microbes and the Metropolis. Museum of the City of New York until April 28th https://www.mcny.org/exhibition/germ-city Review of Germ City and Related Podcasts Radio Station WYNC https://www.wnyc.org/story/germ-city/ We live in a time of New York Triumphalism—it is hard to avoid the celebratory tone and the accompanying music that rehearses […]