The Jewish Quarter of Saïda: Intertwined Displacements and Memories of Absence in a Southern Lebanese City

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth entry in our theme for the month of May: Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean by Molly Oringer “The rabbis prayed here, in Saïda’s synagogue,” recalled Basma, a Palestinian woman in her mid-thirties. It was early 2020, and we stood gathering in a courtyard typical of the medieval neighborhood, Ḥarat […]

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The Center at the Edge: The Beach in Mid-Century Alexandria

Editor’s note: This is the third entry in our theme for May, Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. by Alexandra Camille Schultz Introduction: From Edge to Center[1] In the early twentieth century, more people began to spend organized leisure time at the beach, including in Egypt. Indeed, by the end of World War II, the Mediterranean […]

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The Urban Tapestry of the Eastern Mediterranean—An Overview

Editor’s Note: This is the first in our theme for the month of May: Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean. by Zeead Yaghi The social, urban, and political fabric of cities across the Eastern Mediterranean have long shared material, cultural, and architectural commonalities, influenced by factors such as travel, commercial capitalism, and shared governance. Whether the […]

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Beyond the “Doom-Loop”—A Review of “Kids on The Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin”

Plaster, Joseph. Kids on the Street: Queer Kinship and Religion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2023. Reviewed by Alex Melody Burnett At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, national media outlets developed a powerful new narrative about San Francisco. After years of tech-induced prosperity, San Francisco had supposedly entered a dangerous […]

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Announcing The Eighth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest

Connection The Metropole/Urban History Association Graduate Student Blogging Contest exists to encourage and train graduate students to blog about history—as a way to teach beyond the classroom, market their scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities. This year’s theme is Connection. We are looking for blog posts that highlight connections that occur within, […]

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Demystified Tokyo Offers an Alternative Paradigm of Urban Planning—A Review of “Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City”

Almazán, Jorge and Studiolab. Emergent Tokyo: Designing the Spontaneous City. Novato, CA: ORO Editions, 2022. Reviewed by Eric Häusler Emergent Tokyo is the result of the collaborative effort of Studiolab, an architecture studio at Keio University that combines interdisciplinary research with socially conscious architectural practice. Emergent Tokyo’s authors argue that Tokyo is a vibrant and […]

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Suburban, Conservative, and Latino: A Transnational Story from Chicagolandia

Editor’s note: This month we are featuring work by historians that extend Beyond the Urban. This is our second post in the series. by Antonio Ramirez My community college students and I have been documenting the history of Latinx people in Chicago’s suburbs since 2015. We call these sprawling, Latino-dense communities on the outskirts of […]

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