The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Even though The Metropole traffics heavily in the written word—we value books more than anyone—it can be hard to fit all the year’s titles in annually. When putting books on my wish lists, I almost always end up using “Best ofs” from two to three years ago. With that in mind, our editors have a […]
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Ray Bromley Professor Emeritus Urban and Regional Planning/International Development Studies University at Albany, State University of New York Please describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I retired from teaching and administration in January 2020 so as to concentrate on research and writing. My initial retirement plans were to focus on international comparative […]
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It’s that time of year again folks. While we realize you might not lean on The Metropole for its pop culture sensibilities, if the explosion in streaming has made one thing clear, choice is great, but sometimes choice feels overwhelming. A tip here, a tip there, can uncover a hidden gem lost among the digital […]
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Shanahan, Jarrod. Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage. New York: Verso, 2022. Reviewed by David Helps Thirty years ago this September, some six thousand off-duty members of New York’s Finest descended on City Hall, ostensibly to oppose Mayor David Dinkins’s plan for a police civilian review board. The nearly all-white mob drank […]
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By Kenneth Alyass On April 1, 1966, during a rainy Friday evening, near downtown Detroit Habiba Kasgorgis made her way to her husband’s store at 7503 Brush Street. Jubrail Kasgorgis was a balding, middle-aged man, who immigrated to the United States from Iraq a decade earlier. Like many members of Detroit’s growing Chaldean community, a […]
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Sammartino, Annemarie H. Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. Reviewed by Katie Uva East of I-95 and west of the Hutchinson River Parkway, on 320 acres of marshy land that was once, briefly, home to a United States-themed (and United States-shaped) amusement park called Freedomland, stands […]
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By Robert Gioielli Teaching the history of racism in America can be a difficult thing. Not because students deny it, but because it is something that is so ubiquitous, so all encompassing, that many (particularly white) students let the idea roll over and past them. They know racism existed in the past and people did […]
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Believing that blogging is an excellent way to teach beyond the classroom, market scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities, The Metropole established the Graduate Student Blogging Contest in 2017. This year, the theme of the contest was “The Senses,” which asked contributors to tell a story about any time, topic, person, or place […]
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By Amanda I. Seligman Henry Binford’s most legendary urban tours are ones that he led on Chicago’s elevated trains, but he knows his way around the city by car too. Once while driving with a small group during my time in graduate school, Henry found his planned route blocked. Undeterred, he drove over a block […]
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By David S. Rotenstein In 2009 I learned about one African American woman who briefly lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC, suburb. She worked for a white physician’s family. Lucille Walker’s story as a Black domestic worker survives in bits and pieces in the memory of the physician’s daughter, Ann Scandiffio. In 1939 […]
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