The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Schley, David. Steam City: Railroads, Urban Space, and Corporate Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century Baltimore. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Reviewed by Matthew A. Crenson The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad has disappeared. It descended into bankruptcy toward the end of the nineteenth century, with ownership passing from Baltimore to investors in Chicago and New York. Now, […]
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Peeples, Scott. The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Katherine J. Kim That we still associate the name Edgar Allan Poe with torture, insanity, loneliness, perversity, drug abuse, and drunkenness is owing in part to one Rufus Griswold, rival and author of perhaps […]
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Editor’s note: This is the seventh in a series of articles during April that examine the construction of the Interstate Highway System over the past seven decades. The series, titled Justice and the Interstates, opens up new areas for historical inquiry, while also calling on policy makers and the transportation and urban planning professions to […]
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Rizzo, Mary. Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore beyond John Waters and the Wire. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Daniel Cumming It was the “Prince of Puke”—also known as director John Waters—who pitched the idea to Baltimore’s Chamber of Commerce in the early 2000s. With aplomb only befitting such royalty, Waters urged civic […]
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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 Mary Rizzo The first time I heard someone talk about Baltimore as a tourist destination was in New Jersey in the mid-1990s. My college roommate excitedly described […]
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Hemphill, Katie M. Bawdy City: Commercial Sex and Regulation in Baltimore, 1790-1915. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Jessica R. Pliley Over 20 years ago, Timothy Gilfoyle challenged historians of prostitution to explore the flow of capital between urban brothels and the formal and informal economies of the city. More recently, Amy Dru Stanley framed the […]
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The pervasive effects of the coronavirus have forced numerous public history institutions to rethink their mission and the means by which an organization might still work toward long held goals in a radically different environment. Celebrating its 60thanniversary this year, Baltimore Heritage serves as just one example of this phenomena, as the historic preservation non-profit nimbly […]
Read MorePaige Glotzer Assistant Professor and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy University of Madison-Wisconsin Department of History @apaigeoutofhist Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I look at the long history of housing policy in the United States by tracing how […]
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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. Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City. Eds. Nicole King, Kate Drabinski, and Joshua Davis. Rutgers University Press, 2019. By Kate Drabinski & Nicole King […]
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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 Matt Crenson Matt Crenson. Baltimore: A Political History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2017 The idea of writing Baltimore’s political history came to me by accident – an […]
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