The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Peterson, Mark. The City-State of Boston: The Rise and Fall of an Atlantic Power, 1630-1865. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Kristian Price Challenging the popular depiction of Boston as a “city upon a hill,” Mark Peterson sees the city as less a beacon of promise or righteousness than as mired in contradictions […]
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By Michael J. Lansing Dakota people call it Owámniyomni. For centuries, they envisioned the Mississippi River’s largest waterfall as a sacred place. The fifty-foot drop harbors an intense spiritual energy. In the 1820s, the arrival of the United States government—in the guise of white soldiers—gave rise to a new understanding of the falls they called […]
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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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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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By Richard Harris Edward A. Wrigley. 1967. A simple model of London’s importance in changing English society and economy 1650-1750. Past and Present 37,1: 44-70. We all get bogged down in the weeds, figuring out who did what and when, and with what effect. Solidly grounded but wonderfully ambitious in scope, Tony Wrigley’s ‘simple model’ […]
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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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By Richard Harris, McMaster University I enjoyed Victoria Wolcott’s recent item in The Metropole. Engaging, and deeply-felt, it effectively made the point that the lives and struggles of black women are among the most neglected aspects of the American urban experience. But one phrase gave me pause. She suggested that lately we have been “neglecting […]
Read MoreJacob Bruggeman University of Cambridge Darwin College @jacob_bruggeman Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research is on the construction of narratives about economic inequality in the long 20th century. For my M.Phil. dissertation, I am examining how Margaret Thatcher’s descriptions of economic inequality drew upon Victorian narratives about poverty. […]
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In this, our third entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Vyta Baselice takes us through the life cycle of concrete. To understand how this construction material moves from birth to death, Baselice has us travel from Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century New York City, before boomeranging […]
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This piece by Katie Uva is the first entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to submit essays on “the birth, death, or aging of institutions, neighborhoods, cities, or suburbs,” and Uva hones in on the life cycle of the New York World’s Fair to argue that […]
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The Metropole 