The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Matt Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen This week, the United Nations released a human rights report that the massive protests rocking cities across the globe are — surprise — rooted in the massive and deeply-rooted inequalities that continue to divide societies and test the legitimacy of governments. With this current rising tide of global protests […]
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By Natalie Behrends On Wednesday, November 4th, 1914, Henry Goldfogle was triumphant. It was the day after the election, and the seven-term Democratic Congressman from Manhattan’s Twelfth District had just received the results: a smashing victory of 4,944 votes to his Republican opponent’s 1,133. The three-month campaign season leading up to the election had been […]
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By Victoria Okoye As a Nigerian-American, Accra’s connections to Nigeria stand out to me as insights into the deeply inter-regional character of the city. When I first came to Accra a decade ago, I identified the present, perhaps most obvious, traces of these connections: the Nigerians, like my uncle-in-law, moving through and living in the […]
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By Ethan Scott Barnett The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) would have achieved little without their Friends. In 1960, lunch counter sit-ins and freedom rides placed SNCC in the national spotlight. By 1963, regional offices in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Washington, DC represented the organization’s growth and maturity. College students returning from Freedom Summer—a national […]
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By Jennifer Hart The British colonial government moved their administration from Cape Coast to Accra in 1877 – a date which often marks the beginning of British consolidation of colonial rule in the Gold Coast. The motivations for the move were multiple. Protests over the imposition of new taxes and discontent over the abolition of […]
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By Sarah Balakrishnan In present-day Kaneshie, in the centre of the sprawling seaside city of Accra, lies a cemetery known as Awudome. It is a massive plot of land. Once it had been the private estate of the mantse (chief) of Otublohum, gifted by the wulomo (priest) of Korle for acts of bravery during the […]
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By Hermann W. von Hesse In the summer of 2017, I returned from Madison, Wisconsin to Accra – my hometown and Ghana’s capital since 1877 – to do my pre-dissertation research. Besides my main dissertation interests, I had since childhood been interested in the music and religion of Accra’s Afro-Brazilian descended community. Though not of […]
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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. Kara M. Schlichting. New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore. University of Chicago Press, 2019. By Kara M. Schlichting New York Recentered offers a new model […]
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Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print A Place to Call Home: Immigrant Exclusion and Urban Belonging in New York, Paris, and Barcelona By Ernesto Castañeda. Stanford University Press, 2018. A study conducted over 14 years comparing the assimilation experience of African and […]
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By Deborah Pellow In January 1982, I arrived in Accra for six months of research. Two weeks earlier, on December 31, Flight Lt Jerry Rawlings had led a successful coup. He was a junior officer in the Air Force. Two years earlier, he had led the June 4 coup; during his brief stint as head […]
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