The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Carlos Rojas Yuan Muzhi’s (袁牧之) 1937 film Street Angel (馬路天使) opens with a three-minute montage that begins with a rapid sequence of nighttime images of Shanghai’s neon signs, and which culminates with a series of shots panning up Shanghai’s buildings. The first shot following this montage opens with the camera angled directly up to […]
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By Anton Rosenthal I first encountered the moveable archive of postcards by accident some 25 years ago during a research trip to Montevideo, Uruguay. I had been experiencing a sharp contrast between written accounts of the daily life of the city that I was reading in the national library and the national archives and the […]
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By Peter Soppelsa This post focuses on a remarkable source for illustrating popular urbanism and urban imaginaries: European and American photomontage postcards from around 1900 to 1920 that visualize future cities. Cobbling together an online archive of over 400 future cities photomontages, I discovered an under-utilized body of evidence about popular urbanism. Visual and textual […]
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By Robert Bogdan Although picture postcards can provide an extensive resource of visual information about urban American they are seldom mined by serious researchers. Postcards’ reputation as repetitive, poor-quality, commercial images that only capture structures and landscapes that attract tourists work against their use. The reputation is not totally wrong, as most postcards fit that […]
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“If the city is the raw material for production, for economic development, and for academic research, it has also been available to artists,” writes Helen Liggett in her 2003 work, Urban Encounters. “Photographs can function as sites of participatory reading that provoke urban encounters, first, in the relationship between the photographer and the city, and, […]
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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. Austin, Paula. Coming of Age in Jim Crow D.C. Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life. New York: New York University Press, 2019. By Paula Austin Coming of Age […]
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By Daniel Clark For most of the twentieth century, autoworkers and their families were a large share of metro-Detroit’s population, and the decade and a half after World War II has been widely considered to be their heyday. Those familiar with the literature on Detroit history will immediately, and correctly, point out that Tom Sugrue’s […]
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By Richard Harris, McMaster University I enjoyed Victoria Wolcott’s recent item in The Metropole. Engaging, and deeply-felt, it effectively made the point that the lives and struggles of black women are among the most neglected aspects of the American urban experience. But one phrase gave me pause. She suggested that lately we have been “neglecting […]
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By Pete Saunders Detroit has had an outsized impact on American history. People around the world are familiar with its contributions to the auto industry in particular and manufacturing in general. And Detroit has had an impact on music—from Motown rhythm and blues to rock, jazz, gospel, and electronic dance music—that is unparalleled. Detroit has […]
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By James McQuaid On May 10, 1973, Gary Kapanowski walked into work and was greeted by orange and black fliers papered throughout the plant denouncing him as “a faggot,” asking workers at the plant, “Do you want a faggot to be your chairman of the shop committee?”[i] Kapanowski had worked at the Briggs Beautyware stamping […]
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