Social Movements, Communities, and Campaigns in Pittsburgh

January 25, 2023.Reading time 19 minutes.

Editor’s note: In anticipation of the Urban History Association’s 2023 conference being held in Pittsburgh from October 26 – October 29, The Metropole is making the Steel City its Metropolis of the Month for January 2023. The CFP remains open until February 20, 2023. See here for details. By Suzanne Staggenborg Social movements, such as […]

On Russell Maroon Shoatz’s “Death By Regulation,” 1997, with Robert Saleem Holbrook, Executive Director of the Abolitionist Law Center

December 15, 2021.Reading time 28 minutes.

This post is part of the Metropole’s Disciplining the Nation series, where we are spotlighting a primary source that is vital to the retelling of the history of racial state violence and criminalization in the United States. Learn more about the series here. By Charlotte Rosen “I am not under a court sentence of death. […]

WomensActivism.NYC: Building an Archive of 20,000 Women’s Stories by 2020

August 17, 2020.Reading time 10 minutes.

By Avigail Oren Urban historians have long visited New York City’s Municipal Archives to examine the records of mayoral administrations and city agencies—records more often created by and featuring men than women, though women likely typed up or filed them. Certainly women’s stories have popped up (sometimes thrillingly, like when Emily Brooks stumbled upon the […]

“History Is The Most Compelling Evidence Police Cannot Be Reformed”: Third UHA Panel Imagines an Abolitionist Future

July 16, 2020.Reading time 7 minutes.

Last night concluded the Urban History Association’s trio of virtual panels in response to the recent wave of Black-led urban uprisings against racist police brutality and renewed conversation about defunding and abolishing police. The Metropole’s Disciplining the City editors Matthew Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen moderated a discussion with historians Johanna Fernández, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Marisol […]

50 YEARS SINCE THE TORCH WAS PASSED: THE SIERRA CLUB AND THE FOUNDING OF CONGAREE NATIONAL PARK

October 16, 2019.Reading time 19 minutes.

By Neal D. Polhemus October 18, 1976, the date President Ford signed Public Law No. 94-545, is generally considered the birthday of Congaree National Park. But the campaign to save the rapidly disappearing old-growth forests across America, specifically those in the Congaree River floodplain, began much earlier.[1] A more fitting birthday would be October 25-26, […]

The Brotherhood of Liberty and Baltimore’s Place in the Black Freedom Struggle

November 12, 2018.Reading time 22 minutes.

By Dennis Patrick Halpin On June 2, 1885, Reverend Harvey Johnson called five of his fellow clergymen and close confidants —Ananias Brown, William Moncure Alexander, Patrick Henry Alexander, John Calvin Allen, and W. Charles Lawson—to his Baltimore home. During the previous year, Johnson had orchestrated challenges to public transportation segregation and Maryland’s prohibition on black […]

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 […]