The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Margaret O’Mara The Code is the book I wish existed in March 2000, the month I moved to San Francisco from Philadelphia, a dissertating history graduate student amid a sea of IPO-chasing techies and newly minted MBAs. It was the height of the dot-com boom (quite literally: the tech-heavy NASDAQ index hit its highest […]
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Last night The Metropole‘s Disciplining the City editors Matthew Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen (click those links to read their most recent work) moderated a panel on “Police Violence in the United States: How Did We Get Here?” It was the first in a series of three virtual discussions between experts of the carceral state convened […]
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Conversations on Race, Policing, and Abolition Although the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade triggered a recent wave of Black-led urban uprisings against racist police brutality, these uprisings, and the police repression that has been unleashed in response, are not unique to this moment. Drawing on a long legacy of abolitionist […]
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By Davarian L. Baldwin Balto, Simon. Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. By 2015, Chicago had become a symbol of the broken relationship between Black communities and the law enforcement apparatus. Outrage over the massive police cover-up of Laquan McDonald’s killing […]
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By Richard Harris Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. New York: E.P.Dutton, 1974. Let me fess up: I’m cheating. Apart from the fact that this was written half a century ago, Soft City isn’t a neglected item of urban historical writing. It was one of the two books that made me into a student of cities. The other […]
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By Ziqi Wu Cherry, Haydon. Down and Out in Saigon: Stories of the Poor in a Colonial City. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, was once considered an exotic French colonial city, “The Pearl of the Far East.” From the 1860s to the mid-twentieth century, official records reflect the […]
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In Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, the narrator speaks ominously of a coming sickness: “In the whole face of things, as I say, was much altered: sorrow and sadness sat upon every face; and though some parts were not yet overwhelmed, yet all looked deeply concerned; and as we saw it apparently […]
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The air over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, seems different these days. The once smoky skies are brighter, and the signature view of the city is no longer the fiery and smoky mills that once lined its riverbanks. Instead, it is the gleaming downtown skyline of glass and steel office towers best seen from nearby Mt. Washington. Looking […]
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Colleagues, George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer was a horrifying illustration of the pattern of deadly police violence against Black people. In a widely circulated video, the world watched him plead for air, and witnessed the brutal indifference of the officer kneeling on his neck. Like the killing of Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, […]
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By Richard Harris Robert Lewis. 2008. Chicago Made. Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Many fine works are neglected because they treat a subject that is important but unfashionable. Chicago Made falls squarely into that category. Now not all of the overlap between urban and business historians has been neglected. […]
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The Metropole 