The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
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
“Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours Keyes. I killed Dietrichson, me, Walter Neff, insurance salesman, 35 years old, unmarried, no visible scars, until recently that is.” Fred MacMurray’s mortally wounded protagonist of Double Indemnity confesses to his supervisor Barton Keyes’ (Edward G. Robinson) dictaphone. A suburban insurance salesman seduced by a married seductress, […]
Read More
“If the city is the raw material for production, for economic development, and for academic research, it has also been available to artists,” writes Helen Liggett in her 2003 work, Urban Encounters. “Photographs can function as sites of participatory reading that provoke urban encounters, first, in the relationship between the photographer and the city, and, […]
Read More
Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print The Taco Truck: How Mexican Street Food is Transforming the American City By Robert Lemon. University of Illinois Press, 2019. When the food truck pulls up it may stir conflict, but it can enliven and transform […]
Read More
Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print Love at Last Sight: Dating, Intimacy, and Risk in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin By Tyler Carrington. Oxford University Press, 2019 An inquiry into the sometimes risky ways of finding love in the big city. The 1914 murder of […]
Read More
Cityscape is The Metropole’s monthly shortcut to recent, forthcoming, or overlooked writing, exhibits and film. The City in Print The City in Arabic Literature: Classical and Modern Perspectives, edited by Nizar F. Hermes and Gretchen Head. Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Sixteen essays on Arabic poetry and prose which invite a literary exploration of Mosul, Cairo, […]
Read MoreStephanie Frank Assistant Professor of Urban Planning + Design University of Missouri-Kansas City @FranklyUrban Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently finishing up revisions to an article titled “Industrial Networks and Urban Development: Kansas City’s Film Row District and National Film Distribution” that will be published in the Spring […]
Read MoreWilla Granger PhD Candidate The University of Texas at Austin, School of Architecture Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am currently working on a dissertation that examines the material history of the American “old age home” during the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. Few architectural historians have studied the […]
Read More