The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Amanda I. Seligman Professor University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee @AmandaISeligman Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My central goal in teaching urban history is to help students to read the history of the American city in the landscapes they see. Editing the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee (EMKE) gave me the chance to extend that mission […]
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East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story, directed by Sarah Burns and David McMahon (Washington, DC: Florentine Films and WETA, 2002). Review by Courtney Rawlings Following their Peabody Award-winning documentary The Central Park Five (2012), co-directors Sarah Burns and David McMahon’s newest film examines another depressing tale of race in America. East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story (2020), focuses […]
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This piece by Marika Plater is the first entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to “write about a moment in urban history when the inflexible was asked to bend,” and in this essay Plater asks readers to stretch their interpretation of the fireworks that seemed ubiquitous […]
Read MoreLaShawn Harris Associate Professor of History Michigan State University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research project focuses on the policing of New York’s Black women during the 1980s, a period widely remembered for urban decay, economic instability, political conservativism, crime, racial violence, and new cultural music and art forms. […]
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This has been a difficult year. In addition to lives taken prematurely by COVID and police violence, lost jobs and wages, schools going intentionally or disingenuously online, and the mental health toll of myriad other small cuts, many historians are struggling to conduct research with archives and libraries closed. For graduate students at the beginning […]
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By Waseem-Ahmed Bin-Kasim Not long after the horrifying murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis in May 2020, protesters took to the streets in cities across the United States and the rest of the world demanding justice and a redress of decades of police brutality, systemic racism, and inequality. In London, Bristol, […]
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By Fallon Samuels Aidoo Countless community economic development initiatives took place in New Orleans within a decade of Hurricane Katrina making landfall in August of 2005. Many foundation and charity funded organizations restored storm-damaged storefronts in high-income neighborhoods on high ground, where tourists, investors, and even city planners expected streetcars, shotguns, and short-term rentals to […]
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Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Reviewed by Alex Sayf Cummings In his lovely new book on John Maynard Keynes, The Price of Peace, Zachary D. Carter paints a portrait of Bloomsbury, the economist’s artsy egghead neighborhood of […]
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Religion has often been a central force in urban America, particularly in the twentieth century. For example, by 1940 Los Angeles exhibited a “multiplicity and diversity of faiths…that probably cannot be duplicated in any other city on earth,” noted the authors of the WPA guide to Los Angeles. L.A.’s religious diversity included Buddhism, Catholicism, Judaism, […]
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Sandoval-Strausz, A.K. Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City. New York: Basic Books, 2019. Reviewed by Maricio Castro In August of 2017 I moved to Durham, North Carolina. Because I could not go apartment hunting ahead of time and because I had a very large dog that many landlords would not take, I had […]
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