The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By David S. Rotenstein In 2009 I learned about one African American woman who briefly lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC, suburb. She worked for a white physician’s family. Lucille Walker’s story as a Black domestic worker survives in bits and pieces in the memory of the physician’s daughter, Ann Scandiffio. In 1939 […]
Read More
This piece is the sole entrant into the Sixth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to “tell a story about any time, topic, person, or place in urban history that foregrounds sight, sound, smell, taste, or touch,” and this essay depicts the sensory experiences of a woman exercising her agency […]
Read More
McGruder, Kevin. Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Carla DuBose-Simons In his latest work, Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem, Kevin McGruder continues to explore the processes by which Harlem became the “Culture Capital” for African Americans. This book, which follows his first book, Race […]
Read More
By Matt Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen The purpose of the Disciplining the Nation project is to make the history of policing, incarceration, and criminalization in the United States more accessible and teachable by highlighting the documents which shaped it. In addition to looking at specific documents, we also want to highlight specific public history projects […]
Read More
By Julius L. Jones The history of African Americans on the Chicago Police Department (CPD) begins in 1871. The same year the Great Chicago Fire destroyed approximately three-and-a-half square miles of the city, leaving 100,000 people unhoused, James L. Shelton was appointed the first African American member of CPD. Since then, African Americans have served […]
Read More
The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. By Briana A. Thomas Writing my debut history book, Black Broadway in Washington, D.C., felt like traveling through time. Navigating through the past three centuries of rich, vibrant, […]
Read More
Fernandez, Johanna. The Young Lords: A Radical History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Reviewed by Leo Valdes In 1969 activists convened at the first Chicano Youth Liberation Conference. Among them were New York Puerto Ricans excited to learn about a group of Chicago activists who wore purple berets and carried a […]
Read More
Editor’s note: This is the third post in a three part series by Kirin Makker exploring Black community building in rural towns during the Jim Crow era. Click here to see Part I. Part II can be found here. By Kirin Makker Though a story about a scattered community, the history of the Farmers Improvement […]
Read More
Editor’s note: This is the second post in a three part series by Kirin Makker exploring Black community building in rural towns during the Jim Crow era. Click here to see Part I. Part III can be found here. By Kirin Makker Robert L. Smith was a black politician and social entrepreneur during the rise […]
Read More
By Charles Lester With his most recent book, Charles Blow offers an intriguing proposition for Black empowerment–a mass migration of African Americans to the South. He argues that the project of northern and western migration of previous generations has given way to racial prejudice, de facto segregation, failing schools, chronic underemployment, few economic opportunities or […]
Read More
The Metropole 