The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
With sea levels rising, with flooding and storm surge becoming more intense and more frequent, our coastal cities are on the front line—literally—of the effects of climate change. But not only have we warmed those seas and powered those storms by our use of fossil fuels, we have also made our cities more vulnerable to these changes by building into and over tidewater.
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Editor’s note: This month we are featuring work by historians that extend Beyond the Urban. This is our third post in the series. by S.D. Hodell There are two main waterways in the Washington, DC, metro area: the Potomac and the Anacostia. The two rivers are a study in contrasts. The Potomac separates Maryland and […]
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Debjani Bhattacharyya, PhD Professor and Chair for the History of the Anthropocene Department of History, University of Zürich Twitter: @itihaashtag Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently working on a project tentatively titled “Climate Futures’ Past: Law and Weather Science in the Indian Ocean World.” Ranging from the eighteenth […]
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Editor’s note: This is the fifth post in our theme for January 2022, Urban Environmentalism. Additional entries can be seen at the end of this article. By Amanda K. Philips de Lucas Regulating Urban Runoff Presently, cities across the United States battle a microscopic foe. The particulate matter of urban existence, during wet weather events, […]
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Dümpelmann, Sonja. Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Sara E. Levine Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin by Sonja Dümpelmann is more than a history of street trees in two cities. It is about politics […]
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Leech, Brian James. The City that Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and its Expanding Berkeley Pit. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2018. Reviewed by Troy A. Halsell Butte, Montana, is an interesting place. When I first visited the city in the spring of 2019, its turn-of-the-twentieth-century architecture in the uptown central business district and its ubiquitous […]
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Matt Vitz Associate Professor of Latin American History UC San Diego Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently working on several projects. First, I am devising a second book project that will examine the historical relationship between indigenous knowledges and elite and scientific imaginaries about indigenous peoples from the […]
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By Troy A. Hallsell When I first moved to Great Falls, Montana, in the summer of 2018 two things leapt out at me. First, the city had a well-developed, though not particularly well-maintained, park system. This was not much of a surprise; most cities founded or already established by the early twentieth century developed a […]
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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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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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The Metropole 