The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Editor’s Note: This is the sixth and final post in our theme for February 2025, “Celluloid City,” which explores the role of and interplay between cities and film. You can see all posts from the theme here. By Victoria Timpanaro October 1, 1968 was the world premiere of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living […]
Read More
Editor’s Note: This is the third post in our theme for February 2025 “Celluloid City” which explores the role of and interplay between cities and film. You can see all posts from the theme here. By Jannat Suleman Since the introduction of the theoretical 15-minute city, there’s been significant nitpicking at the so-called socialist concept […]
Read More
With 2024 just about in the rear view mirror, The Metropole’s editorial staff wanted to let our readers know that we have three theme months planned for the first half of 2025. Check out our calls below and drop us a line at themetropole@urbanhistory.org if you have a pitch for us! The City and Film […]
Read More
Another year is coming to a close, and here at The Metropole, we editors are once again sharing some recommendations for things to read, listen to, view, or experience in your “off” time in the coming year. This installment: the movies and television shows that we think should go on a “must watch” list. Movies […]
Read More
For decades, Hollywood viewed television and film actors the way the public thinks about the two houses of Congress. Like television, the House of Representatives, though important, lacks the august credibility of the Senate. In entertainment, the top talent and best quality flowed into film. Yet, since the alleged “Golden Era” of television — which […]
Read More
By Stefanie Chambers & Betsy Kalin This post focuses on the Somali American experience in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota. We are currently in the process of making a documentary film about this important community. Interestingly, the film is the result of a collaboration between a professor (Chambers) who wrote a […]
Read More
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. […]
Read More
By Sara Patenaude Decade of Fire. Directed by Vivian Vázquez Irizarry and Gretchen Hildebran. Red Nut Films, 2018. Decade of Fire tells the story of the South Bronx in the 1970s, when 80% of the housing stock in the neighborhood was ravaged by fires and 250,000 residents lost their homes. Such wide-spread devastation could easily […]
Read More
By Charlotte Rosen There is no dearth of historical scholarship demonstrating the dangerous afterlife of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” or what would become commonly known as the “Moynihan Report.” An internal document written when Moynihan was the Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon Johnson, the report argued […]
Read More
Review: American Splendor (New York: HBO Films, 2003). Directed by Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini By Evan Ash In a middle-of-the-night lymphoma-induced delirium, Cleveland everyman Harvey Pekar (Paul Giamatti) asks his wife Joyce (Hope Davis): “Am I a guy who writes about himself in a comic book, or am I just a character in […]
Read More
The Metropole 