Protest and Publication: Los Angeles and the Chicano Movement in the Raul Ruiz Papers

May 14, 2025.Reading time 17 minutes.

Editor’s note: In anticipation of what we all believe will be a stellar UHA conference this October 9-12 in Los Angeles, we are featuring Los Angeles as our theme this month. This is our third post; you can see others from this month as they are published as well as past pieces on the city […]

Digital Summer School 2023: Building the Black Press

July 26, 2023.Reading time 17 minutes.

Begun initially as a blog in 2015, before expanding to include photographs, maps, and other historical artifacts, Building the Black Press explores the publishing plants, corporate offices, and production spaces used by Black periodicals and their contributors from the nineteenth century to the present day. It highlights why Black press buildings matter—as sites of historic […]

Member of the Week: Felix Cowan

March 29, 2022.Reading time 8 minutes.

Felix Cowan PhD Candidate Department of History University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research is on the Russian penny press in the early twentieth century: small, accessible, hugely popular newspapers that sold for a single kopeck per issue and targeted the Russian Empire’s growing […]

Friends of SNCC and The Birth of The Movement

December 10, 2019.Reading time 17 minutes.

By Ethan Scott Barnett The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) would have achieved little without their Friends. In 1960, lunch counter sit-ins and freedom rides placed SNCC in the national spotlight. By 1963, regional offices in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and Washington, DC represented the organization’s growth and maturity. College students returning from Freedom Summer—a national […]

Beacons of Truth: Newspaper Buildings in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

September 12, 2019.Reading time 20 minutes.

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. […]

A Black Monument in a White Suburb: The T. Thomas Fortune Cultural Center

June 25, 2019.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Walter Greason African-American history remains a marginal field within the global institution of professional history. Despite the powerful transformation of world society as a result of the American Civil Rights Movement (1954-1968) and the international struggle to end South African apartheid (1960-1994), most societies do not teach the stories about white supremacy, pan-Africanism, and the […]