“The Ladies . . . Want Action”: The Greater Little Rock Women’s Chamber of Commerce and the Crusade for Urban Renewal

In our fifth installment of the 2019 UHA/The Metropole Grad Student Blog contest,  University of Mississippi PhD candidate Monica N. Campbell explores the role of white women in pushing through urban renewal and slum clearance, advancing the “life cycle” of their cities. Through her essay, Campbell suggests that historical tropes about urban renewal, often seen as […]

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The Indigenous City: Indigeneity and Toronto’s Past and Present

“We had a beautiful day; the eagles came, and we couldn’t have asked for a better day to do what we had to do,” Konrad Sioui, grand chief of the Huron-Wendat Nation, told a 2013 audience after laying to rest 1,760 of the tribe’s ancestors in their final resting place at the University of Toronto. Dug […]

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Prisons, Rehabilitation, and Suburbanization: Building the Local Carceral State in Metropolitan Milwaukee, 1950-1958

Our fourth entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Ian Toller-Clark, takes us back to the Midwest to examine the life cycle of the Wisconsin School for Boys. In the 1950s, the prison fell into aged disrepair at the same time that Milwaukee’s suburbs were in their infancy. Would it be […]

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Review – The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution

Slezkine, Yuri.  The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) XVIII, 1104 pp. $39.95. By John W. Steinberg  Yuri Slezkine has written an extraordinary book. Building his epic around the lives of Soviet luminaries, he combines a host of topics ranging from intellectual to architectural history to reveal […]

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The Way Concrete Goes

In this, our third entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Vyta Baselice takes us through the life cycle of concrete. To understand how this construction material moves from birth to death, Baselice has us travel from Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century New York City, before boomeranging […]

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Cody High School: From Promise to Punishment

Our second entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest is Matt Kautz, who takes us to a very particular high school in Detroit. The life cycle of this one institution, Kautz shows, offers a peek at the birth of the school-to-prison pipeline. Detroit’s desegregation case, Milliken v. Bradley, is largely remembered […]

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Funding the World of Tomorrow: Public-Private Partnerships and the 1939 World’s Fair

This piece by Katie Uva is the first entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to submit essays on “the birth, death, or aging of institutions, neighborhoods, cities, or suburbs,” and Uva hones in on the life cycle of the New York World’s Fair to argue that […]

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Digital Summer School: Accra Wala, Transit Spanning Continents

It’s the final installment of Digital Summer School 2019! Wayne State’s Jennifer Hart drops us into the transit grid of Accra, Ghana as she and others working on the Accra Wala project engage the city’s public transportation system and the broader concept of automobility. For all other DSS 2019 courses scroll down to the bottom for links. Accra Wala […]

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CFP: Urban Affairs Association 2020 to be held in Washington D.C.

The Urban History Association would like to draw your attention to the Call for Papers from the Urban Affairs Association for its 2020 conference: Shaping the Future of Urban Research. You can go to their CFP directly, however the call is also provided below. April 2-4, 2020 | Washington, DC USA | Renaissance Hotel Shaping the Future of Urban Research […]

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Metropole Bookshelf: Revisiting Baltimore

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. Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City. Eds. Nicole King, Kate Drabinski, and Joshua Davis. Rutgers University Press, 2019.  By Kate Drabinski & Nicole King […]

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