In this, our third entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Menika Dirkson examines the stretches made by competing organizations—the Police Athletic League and the Black Panther Party—to effectively address the problem of juvenile crime and police-community violence in Philadelphia during the 1960s and ’70s. In 1976, Andre Martin was a […]
Our second entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest is Willa Granger, who transports us to 1970s Texas to show how older Texans were stretching to their financial and economic limits to retain their mobility and independence. In the third week of September 1970, the Nixon Administration, in tandem with state […]
The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. By Mary Rizzo The first time I heard someone talk about Baltimore as a tourist destination was in New Jersey in the mid-1990s. My college roommate excitedly described […]
East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story, directed by Sarah Burns and David McMahon (Washington, DC: Florentine Films and WETA, 2002). Review by Courtney Rawlings Following their Peabody Award-winning documentary The Central Park Five (2012), co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s newest film examines another depressing tale of race in America. East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story (2020), focuses […]
This piece by Marika Plater is the first entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to “write about a moment in urban history when the inflexible was asked to bend,” and in this essay Plater asks readers to stretch their interpretation of the fireworks that seemed ubiquitous […]
LaShawn Harris Associate Professor of History Michigan State University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research project focuses on the policing of New York’s Black women during the 1980s, a period widely remembered for urban decay, economic instability, political conservativism, crime, racial violence, and new cultural music and art forms. […]
This has been a difficult year. In addition to lives taken prematurely by COVID and police violence, lost jobs and wages, schools going intentionally or disingenuously online, and the mental health toll of myriad other small cuts, many historians are struggling to conduct research with archives and libraries closed. For graduate students at the beginning […]
By Fallon Samuels Aidoo Countless community economic development initiatives took place in New Orleans within a decade of Hurricane Katrina making landfall in August of 2005. Many foundation and charity funded organizations restored storm-damaged storefronts in high-income neighborhoods on high ground, where tourists, investors, and even city planners expected streetcars, shotguns, and short-term rentals to […]
Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Reviewed by Alex Sayf Cummings In his lovely new book on John Maynard Keynes, The Price of Peace, Zachary D. Carter paints a portrait of Bloomsbury, the economist’s artsy egghead neighborhood of […]
Religion has often been a central force in urban America, particularly in the twentieth century. For example, by 1940 Los Angeles exhibited a “multiplicity and diversity of faiths…that probably cannot be duplicated in any other city on earth,” noted the authors of the WPA guide to Los Angeles. L.A.’s religious diversity included Buddhism, Catholicism, Judaism, […]
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