The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Mayor. Directed by David Osit. Rosewater Pictures, LLC, 2020. Reviewed by Maytal Mark City branding is not the topic one expects to dwell on in a documentary about Palestinian civil engineer and Ramallah mayor Musa Hadid. But Mayor director David Osit’s camera returns repeatedly to the visual symbol of the city’s prominent “WeRamallah” sign, built […]
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By Dan Garodnick As New York City gets ready to choose its new mayor, one community is watching the results with particular interest. Having recently seen a decade of tumult across two mayoralties, the residents of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village understand that the occupant of Gracie Mansion matters to their safety and security. […]
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The editors of the Cambridge Elements in Global Urban History join Lila Caimari, author of a forthcoming Element in the series, to talk about the volume, its relevance in the contemporary news landscape, and how the Element fits into Caimari’s research more broadly. Your Element is about the history of journalism and the media. What […]
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Zubovich, Katherine. Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin’s Capital. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Zinaida Osipova While many people seek to understand why the Soviet Union fell apart, Katherine Zubovich focuses on one of its enduring successes—the seven skyscrapers designed under Joseph Stalin that still dominate Moscow’s landscape. […]
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By Richard Harris It is remarkable that few people take the trouble to show how cities matter. By ‘people’ I mean self-styled urbanists, those who write about cities, publish in ‘urban’ journals, and who for the most part, presumably, live in cities. And by ‘how cities matter’ I mean the ways in which the urban […]
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Hong, Liang. China in One Village: The Story of One Town and the Future of the World. Translated by Emily Goedde. New York: Verso Books, 2021. Reviewed by Lei Zhang Good scholarly accounts of life in rural China have been scant of late, because of a dearth of accounts written by people acquainted with small-town […]
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Pouillard, Véronique. Paris to New York: The Transatlantic Fashion Industry in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Lauren Laframboise If you’ve bought clothes in recent decades, chances are that they’re products of a dizzyingly complex supply chain, involving hundreds of different people’s labor across several distant towns and cities. Although […]
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Editors Note: This is the first post in our July series on global urban history, structured around the recently launched Elements in Global Urban History from Cambridge University Press. This post introduces the logic and aims behind the Elements, and forthcoming posts by Richard Harris and Alexia Yates will elaborate on the work they contributed […]
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Hackworth, Jason. Manufacturing Decline: How Racism and the Conservative Movement Crush the American Rust Belt. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Kenneth Alyass During the turbulent 2016 election campaign Donald Trump spoke at a rally in Akron, Ohio, about the crisis of American cities. In what was advertised as a “pitch to minority […]
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Horowitz, Andy. Katrina: A History, 1915-2015. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Reviewed by J. Mark Souther As Hurricane Katrina spun northward along the Pearl River into the piney woods of Mississippi on the morning of August 29, 2005, reporters spun the first news of how New Orleans fared. Reporting from the French Quarter, they […]
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The Metropole 