The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Quraishi, Uzma. Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston During the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Reviewed by Iliana Yamileth Rodriguez In 1965, the United States passed the Immigration and Nationality Act against the backdrop of the Cold War. Extending preference to skilled migrants, allowing for family […]
Read MoreThompson, Heather Ann. Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. Reviewed by Ian Toller-Clark Historians, social scientists, and public commentators have long wondered how and why America’s cities descended into an “urban crisis” in the final decades of the twentieth century. It has been twenty years […]
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Kwate, Naa Oyo A., ed. The Street: A Photographic Field Guide to American Inequality. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Howard Gillette In 1992 Time Magazine presented its readers with a scathing picture of Camden, New Jersey, under the telling headline, “Who Could Live Here?” Featuring images of desecrated landscapes as the background […]
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Cummings, Alex Sayf. Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Andrew Hedden A generation of labor historians famously asked: “Why was there no socialism in the United States?” Employing new forms of social history and foregrounding the country’s long history of class […]
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Schneider, Eric C. The Ecology of Homicide: Race, Place, and Space in Postwar Philadelphia. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Reviewed by Menika Dirkson In 2006 national news media bestowed the name “Killadelphia” on the “City of Brotherly Love” when police recorded 406 homicides, predominantly involving Black men, in Philadelphia’s low-income, African American neighborhoods. For […]
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Groeger, Cristina Viviana. The Education Trap: Schools and the Remaking of Inequality in Boston. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Erika M. Kitzmiller For centuries, social reformers and elected officials have insisted that education is central to reducing the inequities between the rich and poor, and in turn, to generating a more equitable […]
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By DeAnza A. Cook Editors Note: This post, part of our Disciplining the City series, expounds upon the central thesis of “The Mass Criminalization of Black Americans: A Historical Overview” and examines the development of anti-black punitive traditions in American policing that first surfaced in the era of slavery and settler colonization. An English court […]
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Moga, Steven T. Urban Lowlands: A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Reviewed by Henry C. Binford This fine book weaves together several strands of United States urban history over the period from Reconstruction to the New Deal. Urban Lowlands: A History of Neighborhoods, Poverty, and Planning is an examination […]
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Vitale, Patrick. Nuclear Suburbs: Cold War Technoscience and the Pittsburgh Renaissance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Reviewed by Alex Sayf Cummings In the 1979 cult classic The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, a down-on-their-luck basketball team called the Pittsburgh Pythons is desperate for a change of fortune. They lose constantly, despite being led by the […]
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Editor’s note: It’s summer, and that means (hopefully!) more time to catch up on new work in urban history. For our Month of Books this June, we’re running eleven reviews of recently published monographs on everything from the immigrant Sunbelt to Rust Belt racism. Thanks to the reviewers who worked hard to make this happen! […]
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The Metropole 