Masking New Orleans’s Tragic Pasts

New Orleans has just roared through its season of celebration and excess that ends on Mardi Gras – or Fat Tuesday. A big part of the annual carnival is the donning of masks. Celebrants tossing beads from floats hide their true identities; members of marching crews disguise their faces; and one of the trademark gifts […]

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A Big Easy Bibliography

“It has been said that, in any New Orleans bar, the three subjects most likely to be discussed are the status of the seafood in season at the time, politics and sports – all with equal fervor,” notes the introduction to the 1983 reissue of The W.P.A. Guide to New Orleans. In the original guide, […]

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Member of the Week: Koji Hirata

Koji Hirata PhD Candidate Department of History, Stanford University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? Drawing on archival sources in Chinese, Japanese, and Russian, my dissertation, “Steel Metropolis: Industrial Manchuria and the Making of Chinese Socialism, 1909–1964,” tells the story of the rise and fall of the largest steel enterprise in […]

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A New Destination

Welcome to The Metropole, the new blog of the Urban History Association. We envision this digital space as the hub of the Association’s scholarly network, bringing together UHA members who live scattered throughout the United States and across the globe. Furthermore, our aim is for The Metropole to serve as a central public square where […]

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