The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Will Tchakirides Following three nights of unrest in the Twin Cities last May, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman charged Minneapolis patrolman Derek Chauvin with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter of George Floyd. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison upgraded the charges to second-degree murder and charged the other three officers who watched Floyd’s killing with […]
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By Julio Capó Jr. and Rebecca Friedman Miami is one of the most important cities in the United States and the Americas. Yet, its history, culture, politics, and overall meaning are still largely caricatured through myth, stigma, and hyperbole. These misrepresentations, often even fantasies, are all deeply rooted in the region’s layered past and relationship […]
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Viator, Felicia Angeja. To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Katherine Rye Jewell What does it mean to sell out? A generation of scholars have addressed this idea in hip hop and popular music, connecting it to questions of authenticity, artistic representation, and […]
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By Chanelle Rose On August 20, 2020, the Miami Herald featured an article titled “‘A History of Broken Promises: Miami Remains Separate and Unequal for Black Residents.” After providing a comprehensive look at the stark racial disparities in housing, income, education, employment, and government that continues to disproportionately impact African Americans, the newspaper reported: “one […]
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By N. D. B. Connolly I sometimes recall a chance conversation from the early 2000s that feels increasingly unreal with every passing year. I can’t remember if it happened at a conference in Tempe, Arizona, or Portland, Maine. I do recollect that I was a graduate student on the very front end of a dissertation, […]
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Harris, John. The Last Slave Ships: New York and The End Of The Middle Passage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Bob Cary There is something of a “close parenthesis” quality to John Harris’s engrossing discussion of the closing days of the Atlantic Slave trade. Harris focuses on the trade as it played […]
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A. K. Sandoval-Strausz Associate Professor of History Penn State University @SandovalStrausz Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I’ve been looking closely at the politics and economy of Latina/o repopulation in Pennsylvania’s smaller industrial cities. Places like Bethlehem, Allentown, Reading, Lancaster, York, and Hazleton are located in highly politically bellwether counties: Lehigh, […]
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By Richard Rodger The British Welfare State was “invented” in 1942 by the social reformer and Liberal politician William Beveridge. After a landslide post-war election win in 1945, however, it was the Labour Party that launched a “Welfare State” – a comprehensive legislative programme that included universal health, employment, and social benefits while also nationalizing […]
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To conclude our Month of Academic Odes, we solicited these beautiful shout-outs from urban historians and urbanists. They speak to the collegiality of our field and the role of relationships in the construction of knowledge. Thankfully, only one is written in rhyme. So without further ado… Amanda Seligman’s Ode to Ann Durkin Keating, Jim Grossman, […]
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Simpson, Andrew T. The Medical Metropolis: Health Care and Economic Transformation in Pittsburgh and Houston. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Reviewed by Kenneth Alyass The COVID-19 pandemic has made the geographies of health care systems visible in new ways, as cameras have focused on the harrowing scenes of filled-to-capacity ICUs, health care workers draped […]
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The Metropole 