The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Jon Wiener and Mike Davis. Set the Night on Fire: L. A. in the Sixties. New York: Verso Books, 2020. Reviewed by Ryan Reft Anyone who chooses to focus on Southern California history must consult the work of Mike Davis. Full stop. Keep in mind you don’t necessarily have to agree with Davis, but you […]
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Diamond, Andrew J. and Thomas J. Sugrue, eds. Neoliberal Cities: The Remaking of Postwar Urban America. New York: New York University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Tracy Neumann Compared to their urbanist counterparts in other disciplines, urban historians—or at least Americanists—have been slow to grapple with neoliberalism. Some avoid the terminology because very few historical actors […]
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Hertz, Daniel Kay. The Battle of Lincoln Park: Urban Renewal and Gentrification in Chicago. Cleveland: Belt Publishing, 2018. Reviewed by David J. Goodwin As COVID-19 swept across the United States, every news cycle seemed to carry stories of affluent residents fleeing big cities for rural hamlets. As many white-collar workers settled into working remotely, suburban […]
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Editors Note: When museums and movie theaters were shuttered in March, The Metropole suspended its reviews of shows and films relevant to urban history. As we make our tentative way back to museums, some just beginning to re-open, we may encounter a changed city. The anxiety, frustration, and sometimes sheer rage following months of pandemic […]
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Cheng, Irene, Charles L. Davis II, and Mabel O. Wilson, eds. Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Reviewed by Vita Baselice When I proposed to organize a symposium on the topic of race and architecture, I received some resistance. One colleague asked […]
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Aperture 236 (Fall 2019). Reviewed by Brian Harkin The Mexico City issue of Aperture—the glossy photography magazine that publishes a themed issue every quarter—opens with a feature on Graciela Iturbide, the celebrated Mexican documentarian of life in black and white. In one of her photographs from 1972, a car under a flower-print sheet is parked in […]
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Ash, Stephen V. Rebel Richmond: Life and Death in the Confederate Capital. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Reviewed by Griffin Jones Protests took hold of Richmond, Virginia, over this summer regarding the place of monuments and statues to Confederate leaders in the city. A storm of national debate around the place of […]
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Farber, David. Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Kim Hewitt In Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed, David Farber does dual duty—first recapping contemporary drug policies and then tracing the US history of cocaine use and cocaine business operations. The […]
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Rizzo, Mary. Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore beyond John Waters and the Wire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Daniel Cumming It was the “Prince of Puke”—also known as director John Waters—who pitched the idea to Baltimore’s Chamber of Commerce in the early 2000s. With aplomb only befitting such royalty, Waters urged civic […]
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East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story, directed by Sarah Burns and David McMahon (Washington, DC: Florentine Films and WETA, 2002). Review by Courtney Rawlings Following their Peabody Award-winning documentary The Central Park Five (2012), co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s newest film examines another depressing tale of race in America. East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story (2020), focuses […]
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