The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
When COVID-19 hit in late February/early March of last year, Cityscape continued its listing of current, forthcoming, and overlooked studies in urban history. But after suspending notices of museum shows and films, we initiated a series on the history of plagues in cities: yellow fever in Philadelphia, smallpox in Boston, polio in Brooklyn, cholera in […]
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Fernandez, Johanna. The Young Lords: A Radical History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Reviewed by Leo Valdes In 1969 activists convened at the first Chicano Youth Liberation Conference. Among them were New York Puerto Ricans excited to learn about a group of Chicago activists who wore purple berets and carried a […]
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Diana J. Montaño Assistant Professor in History at Washington University in St. Louis @DJMontao1 Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently working on two projects, both of which interrogate the use of technology in Mexico. “Urban Palisades: Technology in the Making of Santa Fe, Mexico City” is a collaborative project […]
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Dümpelmann, Sonja. Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Sara E. Levine Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin by Sonja Dümpelmann is more than a history of street trees in two cities. It is about politics […]
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Leech, Brian James. The City that Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and its Expanding Berkeley Pit. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018. Reviewed by Troy A. Halsell Butte, Montana, is an interesting place. When I first visited the city in the spring of 2019, its turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture in the uptown central business district and its ubiquitous […]
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By Ghida Ismail “Retrieving Beirut” was written on one of the walls in the Gemmayzeh neighborhood of Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. Drawn below it was a taxi car. Beirut’s walls seemed to be calling attention to the indispensability of mobility, secured through the network of taxis and buses/vans, in retrieving the city from the grips of […]
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This blog post is the fourth in a series of posts supporting the UHA’s inaugural Membership Drive. These posts will introduce you to some of the many amazing scholars, activists, teachers, and others in the UHA’s membership community, as well as highlight the role played by the UHA in the lives and careers of its […]
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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 “Embrace,” in what turned out to be an overly optimistic nod to the “end” of the […]
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Peeples, Scott. The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Katherine J. Kim That we still associate the name Edgar Allan Poe with torture, insanity, loneliness, perversity, drug abuse, and drunkenness is owing in part to one Rufus Griswold, rival and author of perhaps […]
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In this, the third and final entry into the Fifth Annual Urban History Association/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Rachel Pitkin follows the story of activist Katy Van Deurs’s “Workshop of the Children” (1961-64) in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which some community members embraced and others protested, and examines how the experience led Van […]
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