The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Kate Uva On the (Queer) Waterfront, co-curated by Hugh Ryan and Avram Finkelstein, is a welcome accompaniment to Ryan’s new work When Brooklyn Was Queer: A History. The book is an engaging, wide-ranging, and scrupulously inclusive exploration of how Brooklyn supported queer communities and identity formation between the 1860s and the 1950s. The exhibition, […]
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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. Genevieve Carpio. Collisions at the Crossroads: How How Place and Mobility Make Race. University of California Press, 2019. By Genevieve Carpio Collisions at the Crossroads seeks to bring […]
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[Editor’s note: As part of our Book Review Series, The Metropole provides authors a chance to respond to reviews by The Metropole of their work. This week, New York University Professor Kim Phillips-Fein responds to the review of her work Fear City: New York City’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. You can […]
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Susan Opotow and Zachary Baron Shemtob, editors, New York after 9/11. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. For anyone in New York that day, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 remain very much in the present. But memory and raw emotions fade. Young men and women joining the armed forces today were not even […]
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Ansley T. Erickson, Making the Unequal Metropolis: School Desegregation and Its Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). 390 pp. notes, index. ISBN 978 0 226 02525 4. Reviewed by Walter C. Stern For decades the relationship between the value of housing and the desirability of schools has been practically inescapable. Realtors hype or pooh-pooh […]
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Call for Papers: 2020 Latrobe Chapter Symposium Race, Ethnicity, and Architecture in the Nation’s Capital In 2019, the Washington Post reported that the nation’s capital had the highest intensity of gentrification of any American city, with more than 20,000 African Americans displaced from low-income neighborhoods from 2000 to 2013. For architectural and urban historians, the […]
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We close out the Metropole’s coverage of the new edited volume, Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century with a discussion of neoliberalism and its importance in thinking about urban history. Working backwards, Maryland historian David M.P. Freund explores economic policy notably the government’s role as “monetary sovereign,” in our third […]
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Our focus on the new edited volume, Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century continues as University of Maryland historian David M.P. Freund explores economic policy notably the government’s role as “monetary sovereign.” Freund recently discussed his research and the value of applying heterodox economic analysis to the study of […]
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Kim Phillips-Fein. Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. 417pp. $9.98. (Paperback) Review by Michael R. Glass By 1965, a $255 million gap had opened in the New York City budget. To cover the city’s operating expenses, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. decided to “borrow now, […]
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By Taoyu Yang Isabella Jackson. Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 274 pp. $99.99 (cloth). No Chinese city has attracted as much attention from academics and the public as Shanghai. The most cosmopolitan of Chinese cities, Shanghai for generations has been central both to China’s development and […]
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