The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Marc Stein The following text is reprinted with permission from Bicentennial: A Revolutionary History of the 1970s by Marc Stein, published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2026 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. When the PBC [Philadelphia 1976 Bicentennial Corporation] board met on October 23 [1970] at the Penn Mutual […]
Read More
By Dan Holland The passage of Pittsburgh’s first fair housing law in 1958, the second in the nation, and Pennsylvania’s in 1961 (also among the first statewide fair housing laws in the nation), were rare civil rights victories at a time when record numbers of African Americans were being relocated under the federal urban renewal program. The […]
Read More
By Peter Blackmer Editor’s note: This is the third post in our annual Digital Summer School for 2025, where we highlight projects in the digital humanities. You can read other posts in the series here. In early 2013, Michigan governor Rick Snyder declared a financial emergency in Detroit, which gave him the power under a […]
Read More
This piece is an entry in our Eighth Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest, “Connections.” by Bridget Kelly What makes a site special? What must happen there for society to decide that a place, a building, a history is worth preserving? In 1991, the New York City Landmark Preservations Committee (LPC) considered these questions when determining […]
Read More
This piece is an entry in our Eighth Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest, “Connections.” by Jeremy Lee Wolin During the era of formal segregation, Black communities across the United States created thousands of schools to provide the education that white schools would not allow their students to receive. From the 1950s to the 1970s, the same […]
Read More
During the summer of 2016, architectural historians Anne E. Bruder, Susan Hellman, and Catherine W. Zipf came together over their shared interest in documenting the history of The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, more commonly referred to as simply “the Green Book.” As noted in their interview below, a series of conference engagements led to the […]
Read More
By J. Mark Souther Few things embody the freedom of American life more than mobility, and perhaps no other form of transportation, for better and worse, has defined mobility in the United States like cars. Yet in the era of Jim Crow, mobility for Black families could be dangerous, even deadly; hence the need for […]
Read More
Sharon D. Wright Austin, ed. Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2023. Reviewed by Sarena Martinez Political Black Girl Magic: The Elections and Governance of Black Female Mayors, edited by political scientist professor Sharon D. Wright Austin, is a trailblazing volume that draws together twenty-two […]
Read More
“Self-government died early in the District,” note historians Christopher Asch and G. Derek Musgrove. “Not even a generation after Americans went to war to protest ‘no taxation without representation,’ Congress stripped Washingtonians of democracy’s basic unit of currency, the right to vote.”[1] As they demonstrate in their 2017 work Chocolate City: A History of Race […]
Read More
Begun initially as a blog in 2015, before expanding to include photographs, maps, and other historical artifacts, Building the Black Press explores the publishing plants, corporate offices, and production spaces used by Black periodicals and their contributors from the nineteenth century to the present day. It highlights why Black press buildings matter—as sites of historic […]
Read More
The Metropole 