The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Begun initially as a blog in 2015, before expanding to include photographs, maps, and other historical artifacts, Building the Black Press explores the publishing plants, corporate offices, and production spaces used by Black periodicals and their contributors from the nineteenth century to the present day. It highlights why Black press buildings matter—as sites of historic […]
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Picturing Urban Renewal is a history of urban renewal from the bottom up. The urban renewal story typically is told from the perspective of politicians and urban planners. This website gives voice to displaced residents and business owners, community activists, reporters, gentrifiers, and construction workers, as well as to politicians and planners. The goal of […]
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By Amanda Page When I’m asked to offer an example of digital humanities, I point directly to the Scioto Historical website and app. It is a repository of much historical information about Portsmouth, Ohio, and Scioto County—of which the city is the seat. The county is home to approximately 73,000 people, and Portsmouth can claim […]
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The original The Valley of the Shadow website launched thirty years ago and is often cited as among the first digital humanities projects on the web. Two communities in the Great Valley, one in the North and one in the South, are documented in a database of public records, newspapers, correspondence, images, maps, and other […]
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“The history of Lviv Interactive itself is a fairly relevant case study for exploring the relatively early days of digital history projects in Ukraine and Eastern Europe,” notes Taras Nazaruk, head of Digital History projects at the Center for Urban History in Lviv, Ukraine. Entering its adolescence, Lviv Interactive turned fifteen this year. The project […]
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Though still undergoing construction, Bunker Hill Refrain, a digital humanities endeavor from the University of Southern California, provides a window into an innovative project that has at once taken shape but is also still taking full form. A synecdoche for the city’s larger history, “Bunker Hill is emblematic of the choices we made,” notes Meredith […]
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What is a “contested city” and how does one engage its historical layers? Few cities can be described as contested as Rijeka, a metropolis that has been under the Hapsburgs, Italy, Yugoslavia, and finally Croatia. Brigitte Le Normand, an associate professor at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and project director for Rijeka in Flux, has […]
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The residents of Boston have witnessed no small amount of debate and conflict in the city’s education and labor history. Schools have served as a flashpoint in this history, and a project that has taken form over the past five years, the creation of the Boston Teacher’s Union Collection (BTU Collection) strives to document and […]
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Begun in the fall of 2016 by California State University Fresno historians Sean Slusser and Romeo Guzman (now at the Claremont University), “Straight Outta Fresno” (SOF) provides a view into the burgeoning “popping” scene that emerged among multi-ethnic and multi-racial hip hop fans of 1980s and 1990s Fresno. As co-founder Slusser discusses below, though a […]
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Formally launched in 2014, the CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA) is as much a “digital history project” as it is archive, notes Roxanne Shirazi, CDHA project director and assistant professor at CUNY Graduate Center. From the outset, CHDA adopted an “activist approach to documenting CUNY history form the ground up,” digitizing the papers of students, […]
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The Metropole 