The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
“He sits upon the landlord’s operating table, the needle of the nation sucking his soul.” —Henry Dumas Taylor, Keeanga-Yamahtta. Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2019. By Eric Michael Rhodes When Michael Bloomberg blamed the end of redlining for […]
Read MoreMike Amezcua Assistant Professor of History and Urban Studies New York University https://www.razalandscapes.com/ Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am in the process of completing my first book manuscript which centers on the making of Mexican Chicago and its distinct neighborhoods from postwar urban renewal to the era of gentrification. […]
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This piece by Lily Corral is the sixth and final entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. Corral takes on the life cycle of the media industry, and shows how the architecture built by newspapers reflects the industry’s birth, heyday, and now legacy. Daily news comes to us in all forms. […]
Read MoreCharlotte Rosen PhD Candidate in History Northwestern University @CharlotteERosen Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I just became ABD five seconds ago, and so I still feel kind of silly describing my current research since I know its bound to change, but: in the broadest sense, I am researching mass incarceration […]
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Our focus on the new edited volume, Shaped by the State: Toward a New Political History of the Twentieth Century continues as we discuss race and property tax assessments with University of Virginia historian, Andrew Kahrl who contributed the essay, “The Short Ends of Both Sticks: Property Assessments and Black Taxpayer Disadvantage in Urban America.” […]
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Growing up in and around Chicago in the 1980s and 1990s, one witnessed the city’s incomplete political transformation. Mayor Harold Washington’s 1983 victory propelled him to City Hall where during his brief but impactful tenure he began dismantling the Democratic machine built under Anton Cermak during the 1930s and consolidated by Richard J. Daley in […]
Read MoreLaDale Winling Associate Professor, Department of History Virginia Tech @lwinling Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently researching real estate and segregation in Chicago in the 1920s and 1930s. From this milieu, in the midst of the Great Migration and in wake of the 1919 race riot, emerged new […]
Read MoreRené Luís Alvarez, PhD Lecturer in History Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I have researched and written about the history of American urban education, focusing mainly on Chicago’s Mexican American community. While the teaching and administrative responsibilities of my current position at Arrupe […]
Read MoreBetsy Schlabach Associate Professor of History and African & African American Studies Earlham College @schlabetsy Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current book traces African-American women’s use of policy gambling to navigate racism, sexism, and capitalism in Black Chicago between 1890-1960. Policy structured economic and gender relations there, where participation […]
Read MoreElizabeth Todd-Breland Assistant Professor University of Illinois at Chicago @EToddBreland Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently finishing a book about transformations in Black politics, shifts in modes of education organizing, and the racial politics of education reform in Chicago from the 1960s to the present. I’ve always been […]
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