Living in White Spaces: Suburbia’s Hidden Histories

October 10, 2022.Reading time 30 minutes.

By David S. Rotenstein In 2009 I learned about one African American woman who briefly lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC, suburb. She worked for a white physician’s family. Lucille Walker’s story as a Black domestic worker survives in bits and pieces in the memory of the physician’s daughter, Ann Scandiffio. In 1939 […]

Digital Summer School: The Boston Teacher’s Union Collection

July 19, 2022.Reading time 29 minutes.

The residents of Boston have witnessed no small amount of debate and conflict in the city’s education and labor history. Schools have served as a flashpoint in this history, and a project that has taken form over the past five years, the creation of the Boston Teacher’s Union Collection (BTU Collection) strives to document and […]

The Metropole Bookshelf: Andrew Simpson on The Medical Metropolis

June 11, 2020.Reading time 18 minutes.

The air over Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, seems different these days. The once smoky skies are brighter, and the signature view of the city is no longer the fiery and smoky mills that once lined its riverbanks. Instead, it is the gleaming downtown skyline of glass and steel office towers best seen from nearby Mt. Washington. Looking […]

Campaigning for Segregation: A Review of Threatening Property: Race, Class and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods

May 20, 2020.Reading time 7 minutes.

Herbin-Triant, Elizabeth A. Threatening Property: Race, Class, and Campaigns to Legislate Jim Crow Neighborhoods. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. By Paige Glotzer When such an enormous percentage of urban history grapples with the legacies of housing discrimination in the United States, it can be easy to overlook the efforts to segregate that did not […]

Detroit Autoworkers’ Elusive Postwar Boom

January 30, 2020.Reading time 25 minutes.

By Daniel Clark For most of the twentieth century, autoworkers and their families were a large share of metro-Detroit’s population, and the decade and a half after World War II has been widely considered to be their heyday. Those familiar with the literature on Detroit history will immediately, and correctly, point out that Tom Sugrue’s […]

The Kapanowski Challenge: The Intersection of Sexuality, Labor Activism, and Deindustrialization on the Shop Floor

January 15, 2020.Reading time 22 minutes.

By James McQuaid On May 10, 1973, Gary Kapanowski walked into work and was greeted by orange and black fliers papered throughout the plant denouncing him as “a faggot,” asking workers at the plant, “Do you want a faggot to be your chairman of the shop committee?”[i] Kapanowski had worked at the Briggs Beautyware stamping […]