The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Farber, David. Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Kim Hewitt In Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, and the Decade of Greed, David Farber does dual duty—first recapping contemporary drug policies and then tracing the US history of cocaine use and cocaine business operations. The […]
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Sandoval-Strausz, A.K. Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City. New York: Basic Books, 2019. Reviewed by Maricio Castro In August of 2017 I moved to Durham, North Carolina. Because I could not go apartment hunting ahead of time and because I had a very large dog that many landlords would not take, I had […]
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Kotlowitz, Alex. An American Summer: Love and Death in Chicago. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2019. Reviewed by Sara Paretsky The demonstrations that swept America in the wake of George Floyd’s murder seemed to show that the country had reached a tipping point: centuries after the enslavement of Africans arrived in the New World, a majority of […]
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By Davarian L. Baldwin Balto, Simon. Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. By 2015, Chicago had become a symbol of the broken relationship between Black communities and the law enforcement apparatus. Outrage over the massive police cover-up of Laquan McDonald’s killing […]
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By Richard Harris Robert Lewis. 2008. Chicago Made. Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Many fine works are neglected because they treat a subject that is important but unfashionable. Chicago Made falls squarely into that category. Now not all of the overlap between urban and business historians has been neglected. […]
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“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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