Soundscapes: The Music that Created New York

December 10, 2024.Reading time 25 minutes.

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 […]

Austerity Politics further Explained: Kim Phillips-Fein on The Metropole’s Review of Fear City

June 19, 2019.Reading time 6 minutes.

[Editor’s note: As part of our Book Review Series, The Metropole provides authors a chance to respond to reviews by The Metropole of their work. This week, New York University Professor Kim Phillips-Fein responds to the review of her work Fear City: New York City’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. You can […]

Fiscal Fright in NYC: A Review of Kim Phillips-Fein’s Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics

May 15, 2019.Reading time 10 minutes.

Kim Phillips-Fein. Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. 417pp. $9.98. (Paperback) Review by Michael R. Glass By 1965, a $255 million gap had opened in the New York City budget. To cover the city’s operating expenses, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. decided to “borrow now, […]

Strange Times in New York

November 16, 2017.Reading time 15 minutes.

Our first entry in The Metropole/Urban History Association Graduate Student Blogging Contest considers “A New Season,” the contest theme, through an examination of New York City Mayor John Lindsey’s creative attempts to reshape the public sector. The city, in the midst “of social, economic, and political distress” during the 1970s, presented an opportunity for a […]

Activism wrapped in capitalism: Josh Clark Davis on Activist Entrepreneurs in the 20th Century

August 21, 2017.Reading time 33 minutes.

“We now know that, during the Cold War, consumerism came to be increasingly tied to American citizenship in a particularly gendered form of privatization that occasionally surfaced into public politics,” noted Elaine Lewinnek in her review essay on architecture and consumerism in the July 2017 issue of the Journal of Urban History.[1] As evidenced by […]