The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Cummings, Alex Sayf. Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Andrew Hedden A generation of labor historians famously asked: “Why was there no socialism in the United States?” Employing new forms of social history and foregrounding the country’s long history of class […]
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Schneider, Eric C. The Ecology of Homicide: Race, Place, and Space in Postwar Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Reviewed by Menika Dirkson In 2006 national news media bestowed the name “Killadelphia” on the “City of Brotherly Love” when police recorded 406 homicides, predominantly involving Black men, in Philadelphia’s low-income, African American neighborhoods. For […]
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Groeger, Cristina Viviana. The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Erika M. Kitzmiller For centuries, social reformers and elected officials have insisted that education is central to reducing the inequities between the rich and poor, and in turn, to generating a more equitable […]
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DiGirolamo, Vincent. Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Cristina Groeger In Crying the News: A History of America’s Newsboys, Vincent DiGirolamo gives newsboys the historical weight they are due. At nearly 600 pages, this tome offers a comprehensive history of a youth occupation spanning two […]
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Moga, Steven T. Urban Lowlands: A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Reviewed by Henry C. Binford This fine book weaves together several strands of United States urban history over the period from Reconstruction to the New Deal. Urban Lowlands: A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning is an examination […]
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Vitale, Patrick. Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Reviewed by Alex Sayf Cummings In the 1979 cult classic The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, a down-on-their-luck basketball team called the Pittsburgh Pythons is desperate for a change of fortune. They lose constantly, despite being led by the […]
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Editor’s note: It’s summer, and that means (hopefully!) more time to catch up on new work in urban history. For our Month of Books this June, we’re running eleven reviews of recently published monographs on everything from the immigrant Sunbelt to Rust Belt racism. Thanks to the reviewers who worked hard to make this happen! […]
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Makris, Mary Vollman and Mary Gatta. Gentrification Down the Shore. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020. Reviewed by David J. Goodwin During the virtual 2020 Democratic National Convention, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy stood in front of Asbury Park Convention Hall and pledged the state’s delegates to then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. Just an hour from […]
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Woolf, Greg. The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Kathryn Grossman On December 21, 2020, then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” Stipulating that “classical architecture shall be the preferred and default architecture for Federal public buildings” in Washington, […]
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Butler, Jon. God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Bob Carey If I were still teaching Introduction to Religion in American History, I would assign Jon Butler’s God in Gotham, with its excellent cameos of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Abraham […]
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The Metropole 