The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
“We had a beautiful day; the eagles came, and we couldn’t have asked for a better day to do what we had to do,” Konrad Sioui, grand chief of the Huron-Wendat Nation, told a 2013 audience after laying to rest 1,760 of the tribe’s ancestors in their final resting place at the University of Toronto. Dug […]
Read More
By Olamide Udoma-Ejorh, Lagos Urban Development Initiative But I think this election was decided, dominated and directed by social media. The power of social media came out for this country. Social media played a central role as a watchdog in keeping the integrity of the process. Within minutes of votes being counted at a polling […]
Read More
In 2018, the website Ozy famously crowned Nigerian Americans as the most successful ethnic group in the United States. Nearly 30 percent of Nigerian Americans over the age of 25 held graduate degrees—almost three times the overall average within the general U.S. population. “Among Nigerian-American professionals, 45 percent work in education services … many are […]
Read More
By Susan A.C. Rosenfeld During the second half of the nineteenth century, Lagos became an increasingly diverse, urban node on the Atlantic circuit, where slavery and freedom defined individual identities and shaped the city itself. A series of political and economic transformations contributed to the social dynamics of Lagos. The nineteenth-century transition from the trans-Atlantic […]
Read More
By Lisa A. Lindsay A decade before the American Civil War, James Churchwill (“Church”) Vaughan set out to fulfill his formerly enslaved father’s dying wish: that he should leave his home in South Carolina for a new life in Africa. With help from the American Colonization Society, he went first to Liberia, though he did […]
Read More
As historians gather their kits together to embark on the quest that is #OAH19, The Metropole would like to provide some Philadelphia-centric reading material to those travelling the highways and byways of America to reach the City of Brotherly Love. We offer, first, a round up of our March coverage of the Philly for our […]
Read More
Editor’s note: In anticipation of this week’s #OAH2019/#OAH19 in Philadelphia, the March Metro of the Month was the City of Brotherly love (you can see here for all of our offerings; it begins with the post below but if you scroll down you’ll find all the others). We offer a final new post to whet […]
Read More
In its section on Nigeria, Lonely Planet’s 1995 edition of its Rough Guide to West Africa advised that getting the most out of one’s visit to the country depended on avoiding “Lagos and the sprawling congested cities of Ibadan, Port Hartcourt, Enugu, and Onitsha.” Several years later, a 30th anniversary edition offered a more nuanced […]
Read More
By Guian McKee Visitors to this year’s OAH conference in Philadelphia will likely spend much of their time amidst the revitalized restaurants, bars, arts venues, and office towers of Center City. All this is one part of post-industrial Philadelphia, but historians seeking to understand the actual core of the city’s new economy would do well […]
Read More
By James Wolfinger A Huffington Post reporter contacted me in early August, 2016. “What’s going on in Philadelphia?” he wanted to know. “How can you as a historian help me make sense of what I’m hearing?” Donald Trump had just received the Republican Party’s nomination a couple weeks earlier and the Huffington Post was canvassing […]
Read More
The Metropole 