The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Recently, UHA member, historian and social media personality extraordinaire Kevin Kruse tweeted out a thread of advice on writing in which the Princeton professor noted that historians, young and old alike, would do well to read outside of the field. Though the thread covered a great deal of territory, Kruse emphasized the need for historians […]
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By Kelsey Rice In 1806, the city of Baku was a sleepy port town of about 3,000-5,000 Turkic and Persian Muslims, governed by a local Khan who swore fealty to the Qajar state. Compared to the cities of Shamakha to the north and Shusha to the west, it was a relative cultural and political backwater, […]
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By Carlo Rotella The best spot for ectoplasmic people-watching in South Shore is the raised wooden platform of the Bryn Mawr Metra station at 71st and Jeffery. This is the old Illinois Central station that formed the principal bud from which this neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago grew in the late nineteenth century, […]
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By Carl Abbott The picture window in the modest suburban house in Belle Reve, New Jersey is marred by a long crack from top to bottom. Built for World War II veterans, its foundation is cracking after a dozen years and there’s no money to fix the fifteen-foot window that supposedly signaled upward mobility. Forward […]
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By Kristin Stapleton Over the past thirty years, Chinese cities have boomed – more than 100 Chinese cities have populations of over a million, and the world’s newest skyscrapers are continuously reshaping their skylines. Fiction that can be characterized as “urban” is less common in China than in many other parts of the world, however. […]
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By Brian Tochterman Across the banner of “The Metropole” as I write spans the George Washington Bridge, the majestic and modern steel link between the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan and the city of Fort Lee, New Jersey, although those that cross it typically seek points far beyond those two ends. The “GWB” serves as […]
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“The city of Angels is unique, not simply in the frequency of its fictional destruction, but in the pleasure that such apocalypses provide to readers and movie audiences,” Mike Davis wrote in Ecology of Fear. “The entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angeles to slide into the Pacific or to be swallowed up […]
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By Jill Found In December, the University of South Carolina dedicated two new historic plaques on the Horseshoe, the school’s original campus. Each marker described the school’s ownership of enslaved people and use of enslaved labor from its founding until the Civil War. One included the names of sixteen individuals owned by the college or […]
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By Jim Wunsch Happy 2018, if the statute of limitations has not yet run out on such greetings. What will the new year bring? When it comes to prognosticating, historians are probably no better than any others. As to the past, however, we would be remiss to overlook that it has been a half-century since the year 1968–arguably the annus mirabilis of […]
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Image above: 1919 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Ward 1, the African American neighborhood the university acquired and demolished through Urban Renewal. LBC&W’s Carolina Coliseum was built on the block just south of Greene Street, facing east onto Assembly Street. Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of South Carolina Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina. By […]
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The Metropole 