The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Clark, Shannan. The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Stephen Petrus As the middle class increasingly shaped consumption habits and social practices in America in the 1950s, it became the subject of scathing critiques in scholarly and popular sociological […]
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by Josh Levy In 1968 the St. Louis Health Division determined that around 70 percent of the rat bites reported in the city came from the same corridor, a roughly two-mile strip of predominately Black neighborhoods stretching west from downtown, between Delmar Boulevard and Natural Bridge Road.[1] The same year Barry Commoner, founder of the […]
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Schley, David. Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Reviewed by Matthew A. Crenson The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has disappeared. It descended into bankruptcy toward the end of the nineteenth century, with ownership passing from Baltimore to investors in Chicago and New York. Now, […]
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Michelle Nickerson Associate Professor of History Loyola University Chicago Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently finishing a book called Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial about a group of activists in the long 1960s who raided a draft board to disrupt the conscription […]
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By Julius L. Jones The history of African Americans on the Chicago Police Department (CPD) begins in 1871. The same year the Great Chicago Fire destroyed approximately three-and-a-half square miles of the city, leaving 100,000 people unhoused, James L. Shelton was appointed the first African American member of CPD. Since then, African Americans have served […]
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Andra Chastain, PhD Assistant Professor of History Washington State University, Vancouver Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I’m currently revising my book manuscript, which is a history of the metro system in Santiago, Chile. This project sparked my interest because its history crosses several key political divides in Chile’s history: it […]
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By Inbal Ofer As a social historian I have always found public services to be a fascinating domain of research. They are a meeting point between theories of progress and the practicality of everyday life, and between the aspirations of professionals, the dictates of national, regional and local bureaucracies, and the needs of different users. […]
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Debjani Bhattacharyya, PhD Professor and Chair for the History of the Anthropocene Department of History, University of Zürich Twitter: @itihaashtag Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently working on a project tentatively titled “Climate Futures’ Past: Law and Weather Science in the Indian Ocean World.” Ranging from the eighteenth […]
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David Hochfelder, PhD Associate Professor History Department, University at Albany, SUNY Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research is on the history of urban renewal, in particular, a public/digital history of urban renewal in New York State we’re calling Picturing Urban Renewal. I and my two colleagues, Ann Pfau and […]
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By Rob Gioielli If you are an urbanist that studies or teaches transportation history, you’ve probably heard some version of the following at a party or from a student after class: “You know, General Motors destroyed the streetcar,” the person will tell you, often in a hushed, conspiratorial tone. “Bought all of them up and […]
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The Metropole 