The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Is there anything better than slinging out “Best Of” lists? How often do we have a platform from which to proselytize for one’s favorite films, books, movies and so forth? At The Metropole, we asked our editors if they wanted take the opportunity to hype those things that got them through this very difficult year. […]
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On behalf of the Urban History Association’s board of directors, we’re delighted to announce the winners of this year’s UHA award competitions. Kenneth Jackson Award for Best Book (North American), 2019 Co-Winner: Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, Racial Migrations: New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean (Princeton University Press, 2019). New York was not […]
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By Avigail Oren In This Tender Land (2019), William Kent Kreuger’s loose update of Huck Finn, the O’Banion brothers and their compatriots Emmy and Mose end up in St. Paul, Minnesota, after escaping from the Lincoln Indian Training School—and its despicable, abusive, headmaster Mrs. Brinkman—and sailing down the Minnesota River in a canoe. After passing […]
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For now, Cityscape is The Metropole’s listing of recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing. When movie theaters and museums re-open, we will again link to films and exhibits of interest to urban historians. Recent Books To Live and Defy in LA: How Gangsta Rap Changed America By Felicia Angeja Viator, Harvard University Press, 2020 An inquiry […]
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Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. Recent Books Newsboys, Crying the News: A History of America’s Boys By Vincent DiGirolamo, Oxford University Press, 2019 Reverberating through city streets and especially in the movies—“Extra, Extra Read all about it!”—DiGorolamo brings to life a world where kids […]
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Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. Recent Books Rotten Bodies: Class and Contagion in Eighteenth-Century Britain By Kevin Siena, Yale University Press, 2019 After the plague of 1666, it was the poor, allegedly weak and easily contaminated who were blamed for the epidemics that followed. […]
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By Richard Harris You know how Breitbart carries stories with captions like “The Democrats’ Five Steps to Socialism”? Or how the New York Times regularly updates its count of “The Whoppers that Trump Tells”? Well, herewith is my “Seven Neglected Gems in Urban History.” I’m hopeful it, too, will go viral. The inspiration, if such […]
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Timothy J. Gilfoyle, editor. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. 2 volumes. ISBN 9780190853860 (set) By Richard Harris No question, The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History stands as a major achievement testifying to the extraordinary quantity, quality, and diversity of contemporary research on American cities and suburbs. […]
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By Eric Michael Rhodes Gone (thankfully) from our profession is Leopold von Ranke’s old fantasy of history as objective science. And yet, while we cannot test our hypotheses in laboratories, peer review has remained central to the process of the production of historical truth—our main objective. We all learn in graduate school that we should […]
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Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food is Transforming the American City By Robert Lemon. University of Illinois Press, 2019. When the food truck pulls up it may stir conflict, but it can enliven and transform […]
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