The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Editor’s note: The theme for February 2025, “Celluloid City,” explores the interplay between cities and film. This overview kicks off the month with subsequent pieces by contributors to follow. You can see all posts from the theme here. Nearly five years ago, The Metropole spent the month of April 2020 thinking about “The Visual City.” […]
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By William Gourlay If you present a map of Turkey to a traveler and ask them to pinpoint key cities, chances are they will immediately identify İstanbul, the great metropolis on the Bosphorus. Some would also be able to highlight Ankara, the capital, but beyond that choices may be limited. Few cities in Turkey’s Anatolian […]
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Randol Contreras. The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024. By Dianne Violeta Mausfeld East Los Angeles is an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County with a population that is over 95 percent Latino, overwhelmingly Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans. Mexican immigrants settled in this […]
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Launched in 2024, Soundscapes N.Y.C. is a podcast about how music created in New York has shaped the history of the city and how throughout its history the city itself has been an incubator for new music. It is a bi-monthly podcast series in which Sarah Lawrence College historian Ryan Purcell, talks with artists, music […]
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With 2024 just about in the rear view mirror, The Metropole’s editorial staff wanted to let our readers know that we have three theme months planned for the first half of 2025. Check out our calls below and drop us a line at themetropole@urbanhistory.org if you have a pitch for us! The City and Film […]
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Once again, we had a record number of entries in our graduate student blogging contest! Our 2024 theme, “Connection,” inspired submission by twelve students whose work intersects with urban history. Online publications such as The Metropole can provide an outlet for writing that allows for creativity and experimentation, both in content and how information is […]
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Editors note: This is our final entry in our theme month on The Latinx City. You can see all other entries for the theme month here. Additionally, readers interested in more on Miami can see other posts on the city published at The Metropole here. By Daniel Richter In 1987, Joan Didion published her book […]
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Editor’s note: This is the fourth post in our theme for November, The Latinx City. By Stephanie Rivera-Kumar Philadelphia, one of the oldest cities in the United States, has a vibrant history shaped by immigrant contributions that continue to affect its neighborhoods and economy. In recent years, Latinx immigrants from countries such as the Dominican […]
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David J. Goodwin. Midnight Rambles: H. P. Lovecraft in Gotham. New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. Reviewed by Peter C. Baldwin The horror fiction of Howard Phillips Lovecraft, which sends delightful chills down the spines of his many fans, draws its power from its monsters and creepy settings, not from human characters. Lovecraft’s florid prose […]
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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. Other entries in the series can be viewed here. By Romeo Guzmán I’m a historian who is weary of origin stories. In presenting Writing the Golden State: the New […]
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