Policing the Public: Public Outcry and the Threat of Moral Intervention in San Francisco, 1857

December 11, 2017.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Carolyn Levy On April 4th, 1857, the San Francisco newspaper Daily Globe published a column concerning the existence of Chinese prostitutes in the city. Daily Globe was a short-lived newspaper, published only from 1856 to 1858. Although the newspaper did not last, the column published in the Daily Globe is indicative of the public […]

Policing the White City

November 30, 2017.Reading time 10 minutes.

Our third and final entry in The Metropole/Urban History Association Graduate Student Blogging Contest explores the intersection of law enforcement, imperialism, and American racial hierarchies through the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago intended to reflect the high point of U.S. and white Western civilization and, according to reports […]

Preserving Law and Order: The Fight for Los Angeles’ Parker Center

September 20, 2017.Reading time 34 minutes.

By Meredith Drake Reitan, MPL, PhD On February 7, 2017, the Los Angeles City Council ruled against colleagues on the Cultural Heritage Commission. After a lengthy and emotional public comment period, the Council decided not to designate Parker Center, the longtime headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department, a local historic monument. The following month, […]

Policing Chinatown: Chinese and Chinese American Adaptation in Progressive Era America

August 29, 2017.Reading time 8 minutes.

By Matthew J. Guariglia During the nineteenth century, until the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, it is estimated that Chinese immigrants made their way to the United States by the hundreds of thousands. In 1900, 18 years after the massive restrictions led to a major decline of the U.S. Chinese population, there were […]

Documenting Lynching and its Influence: The Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Clinic at Northeastern University is Doing Just That

June 26, 2017.Reading time 31 minutes.

In his 2003 work, The Contradiction of American Capital Punishment, University of California law professor Franklin E. Zimring suggested that a correlation existed between lynchings and capital punishment; states with more of the former participated at higher rates in the latter. Zimring’s statistics, Elaine Cassel argued, “should give pause to anyone who believes that the […]

The South Isn’t Exceptional, the People Are: New Orleans and Prisoner Rights Activism

June 21, 2017.Reading time 9 minutes.

New Orleans, and the state of Louisiana more generally, are often held up as the worst examples of policing and criminal justice. It’s where the Angola 3 were incarcerated, alongside Zulu Whitmore, as political prisoners. It’s where Amnesty International has focused much of its anti-carceral state activism. Angola often gets held up as “a modern […]

Poisoners, Policemen, and a Scandal in the Court of King Louis XIV: Exploring the Origins of Parisian Policing with Holly Tucker

June 12, 2017.Reading time 33 minutes.

Although Professor Holly Tucker wrote her new book for a non-academic audience, City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris begins with a scene uniquely suited to evoke terror and handwringing from historians. The preface, which Tucker entitles “Burn Notice,” is set in the palace of Versailles in […]

Disciplining the City: Policing and Incarceration in Urban Space

May 3, 2017.Reading time 6 minutes.

The Metropole is excited to debut a new series on urban policing, edited by Matthew Guariglia, a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Connecticut. “The basic mission for which police exist is to prevent crime and disorder as an alternative to the repression of crime and disorder by military force […]