The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Elaine Lewinnek Once, my colleague’s parents were visiting from their rural hometown on a day when my department was holding an event. I don’t remember now if it was someone’s book party or retirement party or research colloquium, but I do remember that my colleague invited her parents to come along. “Oh, I don’t […]
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“The city of Angels is unique, not simply in the frequency of its fictional destruction, but in the pleasure that such apocalypses provide to readers and movie audiences,” Mike Davis wrote in Ecology of Fear. “The entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angeles to slide into the Pacific or to be swallowed up […]
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By Jill Found In December, the University of South Carolina dedicated two new historic plaques on the Horseshoe, the school’s original campus. Each marker described the school’s ownership of enslaved people and use of enslaved labor from its founding until the Civil War. One included the names of sixteen individuals owned by the college or […]
Read MoreRené Luís Alvarez, PhD Lecturer in History Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I have researched and written about the history of American urban education, focusing mainly on Chicago’s Mexican American community. While the teaching and administrative responsibilities of my current position at Arrupe […]
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By Jim Wunsch Happy 2018, if the statute of limitations has not yet run out on such greetings. What will the new year bring? When it comes to prognosticating, historians are probably no better than any others. As to the past, however, we would be remiss to overlook that it has been a half-century since the year 1968–arguably the annus mirabilis of […]
Read MoreBy Avigail Oren We’re approaching the end of our Metropolis of the Month coverage of Columbia, SC, and I confess that I’m feeling sad about it. I have thoroughly enjoyed working with our many contributors and the response from you all, dear readers, has been so enthusiastic. My consolation is that we have one more […]
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Image above: 1919 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Ward 1, the African American neighborhood the university acquired and demolished through Urban Renewal. LBC&W’s Carolina Coliseum was built on the block just south of Greene Street, facing east onto Assembly Street. Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of South Carolina Collection, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina. By […]
Read MoreMatthew G. Lasner Associate Professor, Urban Policy and Planning Hunter College, City University of New York Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am writing a new book tentatively entitled the rather cumbersome Bay Area Urbanism: Architecture, Real Estate, and Progressive Community Planning in the United States from the New […]
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By Thomas J. Brown Columbia comes logically to its current position at the forefront of the national debate over Confederate memorials. The city has a good claim to be both the place of birth and the place of death for the Confederacy. The antebellum South Carolina College, now the University of South Carolina, was the […]
Read MoreDakota Irvin Doctoral Candidate in History University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill @ddirvin1 Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I’m currently writing my dissertation on the history of the city of Ekaterinburg, Russia, during the Russian Revolution, Civil War, and first years of Soviet power (1917-1922). My research traces the […]
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The Metropole 