The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
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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Hinton, Elizabeth. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. New York: Liverlight, 2021. Reviewed by Simon Balto Few historians are defter at helping us make sense of our present than Elizabeth Hinton. Her first book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (2016), recalibrated […]
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Viator, Felicia Angeja. To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Katherine Rye Jewell What does it mean to sell out? A generation of scholars have addressed this idea in hip hop and popular music, connecting it to questions of authenticity, artistic representation, and […]
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Harris, John. The Last Slave Ships: New York and The End Of The Middle Passage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Bob Cary There is something of a “close parenthesis” quality to John Harris’s engrossing discussion of the closing days of the Atlantic Slave trade. Harris focuses on the trade as it played […]
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Simpson, Andrew T. The Medical Metropolis: Health Care and Economic Transformation in Pittsburgh and Houston. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Reviewed by Kenneth Alyass The COVID-19 pandemic has made the geographies of health care systems visible in new ways, as cameras have focused on the harrowing scenes of filled-to-capacity ICUs, health care workers draped […]
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Talen, Emily. Neighborhood. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Reviewed by David J. Goodwin In his beloved 1949 essay “Here is New York,” E.B. White described the intricate network of businesses, shops, and encounters contained within an average New York City neighborhood. Residents could satisfy their daily needs by walking just a few blocks from […]
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Peterson, Mark. The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Kristian Price Challenging the popular depiction of Boston as a “city upon a hill,” Mark Peterson sees the city as less a beacon of promise or righteousness than as mired in contradictions […]
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