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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By Charlotte Rosen and Matthew Guariglia The year 2020 saw one of the largest, if not the largest, protest movement in the history of the United States. Prompted by the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade–on top of too many others over the past decades–a Black-led movement against racial state and state-sanctioned […]
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It would be difficult to identify two words more in use this year than “coping” and “self-care.” Some UHA members travel the Norwegian route embracing hygge interior design to attain some level of “coziness,” though 2020 conventional wisdom says Danish Hygge is tired but Swedish Hygge is wired. Others, pound Ben and Jerry’s. In the […]
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Alison J. Bruey Professor of History University of North Florida Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My recent book Bread, Justice, and Liberty: Grassroots Activism and Human Rights in Pinochet’s Chile (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) is about social and political rights and activist organization against the Pinochet dictatorship in working-class neighborhoods of […]
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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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By Avigail Oren On November 16, Pittsburgh NPR affiliate WESA dropped a five-part podcast called Land and Power, about a fight for housing in the city’s historically Black neighborhood of East Liberty. In 2015, residents of the Penn Plaza apartment buildings found out they’d have to leave their homes to make way for new development. […]
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For decades, Hollywood viewed television and film actors the way the public thinks about the two houses of Congress. Like television, the House of Representatives, though important, lacks the august credibility of the Senate. In entertainment, the top talent and best quality flowed into film. Yet, since the alleged “Golden Era” of television — which […]
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Nicolas Kenny Department of History Simon Fraser University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? Right now, I’m working on a social and cultural history of railways in Montreal with my colleague Magda Fahrni (Université du Québec à Montréal). Railways are often examined in terms of nation building and economic transformation, but […]
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You know how newsletters in your email from prominent journalists (Clare Malone, Dave Weigel, Anne Helen Peterson, etc. etc.), while all the rage (as the kids in their mid-60s like to say), are really just a veiled return to the sort of chain emails that dominated the internets early years, but now in a more […]
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Is there anything better than slinging out “Best Of” lists? How often do we have a platform from which to proselytize for one’s favorite films, books, movies and so forth? At The Metropole, we asked our editors if they wanted take the opportunity to hype those things that got them through this very difficult year. […]
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