Last night concluded the Urban History Association’s trio of virtual panels in response to the recent wave of Black-led urban uprisings against racist police brutality and renewed conversation about defunding and abolishing police. The Metropole’s Disciplining the City editors Matthew Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen moderated a discussion with historians Johanna Fernández, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Marisol […]
Walton, Nicholas. Singapore, Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency. London: Hurst & Company, 2018. By Taoyu Yang If territorial size were the critical factor in determining a country’s success, then Singapore, at 280 square miles (less than half the size of Houston), would seem little more than a curious throwback to antiquity: a city-state, somehow still […]
🔥🔥🔥🔥@UrbanHistoryA panel on Urban Uprisings and Racist Police Terror in Historical Context with @Prof_Suddler @AustinMcCoy3 @mfkantor and @hthompsn with @CharlotteERosen and @mguariglia moderating pic.twitter.com/UbY4A6pqTw — Marisol LeBrón (@marisollebron) July 8, 2020 In 1973, Detroit’s Stevie Wonder released Innervisions, a groove-filled album that was simultaneously joyous, sharp-eyed, and steely. In its third track “Living for the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
