The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
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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By Timothy J. Gilfoyle The fear of increasing crime in nineteenth-century American cities generated an unprecedented expansion of penitentiary and carceral systems throughout the United States. The autobiography of George Appo (1856-1930) presents a rare window into this subaltern world of incarcerated men. Appo was arrested more than a dozen times and spent more than a decade […]
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This piece is the sole entrant into the Sixth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to “tell a story about any time, topic, person, or place in urban history that foregrounds sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch,” and this essay depicts the sensory experiences of a woman exercising her agency […]
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Editor’s note: Istanbul is the Metropolis of the Month for September. This is the sixth entry in the series. You can read additional entries, as they are published, linked at the conclusion of this post. By Yasemin Akçagüner As the ferry approaches the port of Karaköy on the European bank of the Bosphorus, the mast […]
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Editor’s note: Istanbul is the Metropolis of the Month for September. This is the fourth entry in the series. You can read additional entries, as they are published, linked at the conclusion of this post. By Kirsten Voris As our airport bus turned up the hill towards Taksim Square, I was describing it to my […]
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Pedro A. Regalado Assistant Professor of History Stanford University Please describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My book project, Nueva York: Making the Modern City, explores the history of New York City’s Latinx community during the twentieth century, from the “pioneers” who arrived after World War I to the panoply of […]
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Many of us at the UHA also participate in the activities of SACRPH and look forward to its biennial conference. Read on for more information about SACRPH’s October meeting in New York City, its first since 2019. After a three-year absence, The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) its thrilled to be […]
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Katie Uva Adjunct Lecturer CUNY Baruch @K80Uva Please describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I do a lot of teaching and freelancing these days, but my personal research is about New York’s two World’s Fairs (in 1939-1940 and 1964-1965, respectively), and how they shaped and reflected expectations about urbanism in the […]
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By Yalile Suriel In December 1978, the FBI’s Law Enforcement Bulletin shined a national spotlight on the incredibly rapid rise of University Police Departments. These departments emerged as one of several tools that institutions of higher education used to respond to student uprisings, national calls for law and order, and to catalyze their role in projects of urban […]
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The Metropole 