The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
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 […]
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By Joshua Salzmann and Emiliano Aguilar In the fall of 2021, Northeastern Illinois University launched a web-based guide to help scholars conduct research using the city government records of Chicago. A product of the industrial age, Chicago is a lens through which scholars examine signal events of the past two centuries: industrialization; urbanization; class conflict; […]
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By N. D. B. Connolly I sometimes recall a chance conversation from the early 2000s that feels increasingly unreal with every passing year. I can’t remember if it happened at a conference in Tempe, Arizona, or Portland, Maine. I do recollect that I was a graduate student on the very front end of a dissertation, […]
Read MoreDavid Morton Assistant Professor of African History University of British Columbia david.morton@ubc.ca Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I recently published a book, Age of Concrete, a history of home construction, informal settlement, and decolonization in Mozambique’s capital city, Maputo, from the 1940s through the 1990s. The chapter that I most enjoyed […]
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This piece by Marika Plater is the first entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to “write about a moment in urban history when the inflexible was asked to bend,” and in this essay Plater asks readers to stretch their interpretation of the fireworks that seemed ubiquitous […]
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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 […]
Read MoreEmily Callaci Associate Professor of History University of Wisconsin, Madison @ecallaci Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I’ve been working for a few years now on a project on the history of reproductive technology in Africa in the 1960s through the present day. It’s not an urban history project in the […]
Read MoreKenvi Phillips, PhD Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? Among the topics I am currently interested in is the Colored Y Campaign lead by Rev. Jesse E. Moorland in the early 20th century. The efforts of the national and […]
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