African Americans at St. Elizabeth’s — A Review of Madness in the City of Magnificent Expectations

February 2, 2021.Reading time 10 minutes.

Summers, Martin. Madness in the City of Magnificent Expectations: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation’s Capital. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Debra Kram-Fernandez Madness in The City of Magnificent Expectations is concerned with the history of psychiatric care for Black, Brown, and White Americans suffering from serious and/or chronic […]

An Outsize Impact — A Review of Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community

January 25, 2021.Reading time 13 minutes.

Martin, Sean and John J. Grabowski, eds. Cleveland Jews and the Making of a Midwestern Community. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Avigail Oren Despite having lived in Pittsburgh for nearly a decade, I love Cleveland. This is anathema in my adopted home, though the source of animosity between the two cities […]

Early American Urban Protests — A Review of Boston’s Massacre

January 19, 2021.Reading time 13 minutes.

Hinderaker, Eric. Boston’s Massacre. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019. Review by Bob Carey In this engaging study, Eric Hinderaker offers a masterclass in how to peel back the layers of data, scholarship, and propaganda to understand what we call the Boston Massacre. Such an approach, inviting views of a fraught […]

Radical Movements in 1960s L.A. — A Review of Set the Night on Fire

January 11, 2021.Reading time 28 minutes.

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 […]

The Growth of Market-Oriented Urban Policy — A Review of Neoliberal Cities

December 10, 2020.Reading time 6 minutes.

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 […]

The Dynamics and Contradictions of Gentrification — A Review of The Battle of Lincoln Park

November 17, 2020.Reading time 8 minutes.

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 […]

Pandemic Graffiti — The Rebel Bear

November 10, 2020.Reading time 7 minutes.

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 […]

Seeing Race in Architectural History — A Review of Race and Modern Architecture

October 27, 2020.Reading time 9 minutes.

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 […]

Images of A Vast and Varied City — A Review of Aperture Magazine’s Mexico City Issue

October 21, 2020.Reading time 7 minutes.

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 […]

Urban Life in the Confederacy — A Review of Rebel Richmond

October 6, 2020.Reading time 8 minutes.

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 […]