The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Mark Wild. Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Review by Bob Carey Renewal: Liberal Protestants and the American City after World War II is a well written study of how liberal Protestants (liberal, white male Protestants, it is important to note) tried to establish […]
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By Richard Harris Edward A. Wrigley. 1967. A simple model of London’s importance in changing English society and economy 1650-1750. Past and Present 37,1: 44-70. We all get bogged down in the weeds, figuring out who did what and when, and with what effect. Solidly grounded but wonderfully ambitious in scope, Tony Wrigley’s ‘simple model’ […]
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By Matt Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen Police and policing have been an integral theoretical component of liberal capitalist society since its inception—and a near constant in the everyday lives of citizen-subjects since at least the mid-nineteenth century. The Black Lives Matter movement—and the reactionary “Blue Lives Matter” response from U.S. law enforcement—have also recently brought […]
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By Kevin McGruder Lance Freeman, A Haven and a Hell: The Ghetto in Black America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). At the beginning of Langston Hughes’ Black Misery, a small volume featuring brief observations of black life accompanied by illustrations, a young black boy looks out at the reader with a melancholy gaze while […]
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By James Longhurst In 1979, a plainclothes police officer assaulted a uniformed parking agent in broad daylight on the steps of the courthouse in lower Manhattan. The New York Times summarized the fight between the policeman and the female parking enforcement agent, declaring that “the two were screaming at the top of their lungs. There […]
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By Richard Harris Richard Wade. 1964. Slavery in the Cities. The South, 1820-1860. New York: Oxford University Press. Lisa Tolbert. 2017. Henry, a slave, v. State of Tennessee. The public and private space of slaves in a small town. In Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, eds., Slavery in the City. Architecture and Landscapes of Urban […]
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By Genevieve Carpio When I hear the term “urban transit,” it conjures a flurry of images. My brain instantly turns to public forms of transportation. This includes your buses, metro lines, transit stops, maybe even bicycle share programs. If I sit on the term a bit longer, I start to think of abstract planners making […]
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By Sarah A. Seo Is a mobile home more like an automobile or a house? This was the key question that the justices of the US Supreme Court had to determine in California v. Carney, a 1985 case about the warrantless search of a mobile home parked in a lot in downtown San Diego. An […]
Read MoreLizabeth Cohen, Saving America’s Cities: Ed Logue and the Struggle to Renew Urban America in the Suburban Age (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2019) Reviewed by Bob Carey Lizabeth Cohen has given us a big, tasty book about urban renewal and the career—successes and failures—of urban planner Ed Logue. Logue had, for many, the […]
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By Jordan Patty Mass Transit After World War II In an era when labor expected generous wages and benefits, how could an urban bus company expect to operate at a profit, regularly raise pay, and pay franchise fees to municipalities when fewer people were riding the bus year after year? This was a question faced […]
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The Metropole 