The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Kara Murphy Schlichting Assistant Professor of History Queens College, City University of New York Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I thought I would be an environmental historian of the American West, particularly the Utah desert (really). But my first year in graduate school at Rutgers reinforced to me that environment was also everyday […]
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Klinenberg, Eric. Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life. (New York, New York: Crown, 2018). 336 pp. $28. ISBN 978-1-5247-6116-5 By Jacob Bruggeman Americans today consistently hear about the differences in wealth, geography, identity and politics that divide us, but they hear rather less […]
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Growing up in and around Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, one witnessed the city’s incomplete political transformation. Mayor Harold Washington’s 1983 victory propelled him to City Hall where during his brief but impactful tenure he began dismantling the Democratic machine built under Anton Cermak during the 1930s and consolidated by Richard J. Daley in […]
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Let the editors at The Metropole wish you a Happy New Year! Only a few hours into 2019 and with #AHA19 on the very near horizon, we wanted to ring in the decade’s final year with a reminder that for those of you attending #AHA19 (and by extension #MLA19), don’t miss the Urban History Meet […]
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When the Modern Language Association (MLA) and the American Historical Association (AHA) announced that they would both be hosting their 2019 conferences in the capital of the Midwest, Chicago, during always balmy January, it was not surprising. The two often overlap, particularly in the convention-friendly Windy City. However, what did create shouts of joy was […]
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“The best laid plans …” as the saying goes. As you hopefully remember, behind the leadership of Becky Nicolaides and Carol McKibben and in association with the UHA, this year’s AHA will feature an urban history “meet up” on Saturday, January 5, 2019. However as it so happens the initial event time coincided with a […]
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By Matt Guariglia This year the New York City Police Department announced that it would be integrating a new fleet of drones into its policing procedure for large events. In 2018, the NYPD also announced that it was experimenting with a lasso that would subdue citizens during mental health crises. Even as policing becomes more […]
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By Avigail Oren My best teacher this past year was the collective wisdom of the The Metropole’s many contributors. We will end 2018 with over 130 posts, totaling over 200,000 words—all of which I read, sometimes multiple times! While I learned a ton of history from our Metropolis of the Month posts, book reviews, Disciplining […]
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By Edward G. Goetz I want to thank Eric Michael Rhodes for his thoughtful read of my book, The One-Way Street of Integration. The great challenge of writing the book, which Mr. Rhodes seems to have sensed in his remarks at the end of his review, was in articulating a vision for how to use […]
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By Moritz Föllmer Architectural brutalism is anathema to British conservatives.[1] In 2016, a Tory government minister declared it “aesthetically worthless, simply because it is ugly.” Those who beg to differ, whether they merely fetishize brutalist architecture or recall its social agenda to provide affordable housing, situate themselves on the left. But this has not always been […]
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