Check out Mike Amezcua discuss Making Mexican Chicago, Monday at Noon!

June 23, 2023.Reading time 2 minutes.

“The Windy City,” “The City of Big Shoulders,” and even “Second City” have long been nicknames ascribed to one of the nation’s premier, but often overlooked, metropolises: Chicago. The capital of the Midwest has served as home for any number of immigrant groups over the course of the twentieth century – Poles, Czechs, and Irish […]

The Rise of Local Surveillance Culture—A Review of “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture 1975-2001”

June 22, 2023.Reading time 14 minutes.

Riismandel, Kyle. Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture 1975-2001. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Davy Knittle In July of 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh was kidnapped while his mother shopped at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida. Adam’s remains were found two weeks later in a canal just over 130 […]

The Watergate and Washington, DC, 1946-1975

June 14, 2023.Reading time 32 minutes.

Fifty years ago this September, gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson sat poolside at the Watergate with a young Pat Buchanan, who, according to Thompson, was “one of the few people in the Nixon administration with a sense of humor.” The two men drank beers while gossiping about Tex Colson and discussing the nature of political […]

Promise and Peril in Post-1968 Washington, DC — “When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellions and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation’s Capital”

May 9, 2023.Reading time 12 minutes.

While not completely ignored among urbanists, for a city of its size and significance, Washington, DC—or at least its post-1968 incarnation—remains an under-historicized metropolis. To be fair, historians like Scott Berg and J. D. Dickey have tackled its beginnings in the nineteenth century. James H. Whyte, Ronald Johnson, Carol Gelderman, Sharon Harley, and others have […]

Announcing the Seventh Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest

May 3, 2023.Reading time 4 minutes.

The Metropole/Urban History Association Graduate Student Blogging Contest exists to encourage and train graduate students to blog about history—as a way to teach beyond the classroom, market their scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities. This year’s theme is Stumble. We are looking for blog posts about: efforts in urbanism that have stumbled […]

Transcribing Labor: A New Transcription Campaign Focusing on the AFL Records at the Library of Congress.

April 26, 2023.Reading time 4 minutes.

When the American Federation of Labor (AFL) first took shape in the latter half of the nineteenth century, it did so as waves of immigrants from Europe, Asia, and Latin America washed over the United States’ shores, bringing increasing ethnic, racial, and religious diversity to the nation. However, immigration intersected with large scale industrialization, and […]

The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radical Planning—A Review of “Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning”

April 4, 2023.Reading time 14 minutes.

Sevilla-Buitrago, Álvaro. Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2022. Reviewed by Mohamed Gamal-Eldin and Marianne Dhenin Historian Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago delivers a provocative account of how planning has shaped our world in his debut single-author monograph, Against the Commons: A Radical History of Urban Planning, recently released from […]

Edo City-State & Fractal Design

March 30, 2023.Reading time 22 minutes.

Editorial note: This post is part of our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Likam Kyanzaire Benin City sits at the eastern end of Nigeria, not far from its commercial capital Lagos. The site is home to the […]

David Clem: Building Genetown

March 28, 2023.Reading time 35 minutes.

Editor’s note: This post is part of our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Robin Wolfe Scheffler On a warm, late-June evening in 1976, the Cambridge, Massachusetts, City Council gathered to contemplate the unprecedented act of banning a […]

A Bird’s-Eye View of the Colonial City: A.G. Vorderman’s “Bataviasche Vogels” (1882-1885)

March 21, 2023.Reading time 16 minutes.

Editorial note: This post is part of our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. Please also note that in this piece the ninenteenth-century Dutch spellings of the source material are used here for all species names—both Latin binomial and […]