Columbia and the Problem of Confederate Memorials

By Thomas J. Brown Columbia comes logically to its current position at the forefront of the national debate over Confederate memorials. The city has a good claim to be both the place of birth and the place of death for the Confederacy. The antebellum South Carolina College, now the University of South Carolina, was the […]

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Printing the Good Fight: The Importance of Black Newspapers in Columbia, S.C.

Editor’s note: Both as part of our continuing coverage of the January Metropolis of the Month  Columbia, S.C. and as a nod to the Martin Luther King holiday, University of Minnesota Professor of Journalism, Sid Bedingfield provides an account of how the Black press in Columbia and the state more broadly, proved integral to the burgeoning […]

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The Metropole Book Shelf: Adam Arenson’s Banking on Beauty

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. By Adam Arenson  Adam Arenson. 2018. Banking on Beauty: Millard Sheets and Midcentury Commercial Architecture in California. Austin: University of Texas Press, 368 pp. 157 color and 17 […]

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Congaree National Park: Gateway to a Historical Legacy

By Robert Greene II The history of Columbia, and of South Carolina more generally, would look markedly different if it were not for the existence of the Congaree Swamp. Being a home for Native Americans, a place of mystery for Europeans, and a refuge for escaped slaves, Congaree Swamp—now a National Park—is a unique part […]

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Taxing the land: Henry George, NYC, and the land value tax

By Daniel Wortel-London The land-value tax is coming back in vogue among municipal policy makers and scholars of urban studies. If real property consists of both structures and land, and if the value of land is determined by locational amenities produced by a community, then that community has a moral claim to this value– or […]

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Capital on the Congaree: A Bibliography for Columbia, S.C.

By John Sherrer Columbia, South Carolina was intentionally designed to be a very livable city from its inception. Founded in 1786 as the Palmetto State’s second capital, its location holds both geographic and symbolic meanings. The city’s original two-mile-by-two-mile footprint was set atop a plain overlooking the Congaree River at the state’s fall line, where […]

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From Redlining to Urban Renewal: University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab goes from “Mapping Inequality” to “Renewing Inequality”

When the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL; @UR_DSL) unveiled its ambitious Mapping Inequality project a few years ago, urban historians and others applauded. A collaboration of scholars at Virginia Tech, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Maryland and directed by Robert K. Nelson and Brent Cebul of the University of Richmond, Mapping Inequality […]

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The Vernacular Architecture Forum is on the March!

The Vernacular Architecture Forum invites urban historians — students, faculty of any rank, independent scholars, public historians — to apply for the third round of its Access Award. The award supports attendance at the group’s annual meeting — including two full days of tours and one day of paper sessions — no strings attached, for […]

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The Conference Debate

Earlier this month, longtime UHA member Jim Wunsch of Empire State College (SUNY) raised some great questions and points of debate regarding how we organize, conduct, and process conferences, including: accepting fewer papers for presentation; rethinking how historians present research (and the context in which they are presented); and posting papers earlier to encourage greater […]

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