The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Ryan Reft It was late afternoon on August 29, 1970, when Rosalío Muñoz, chairman of the National Chicano Moratorium Committee (NCMC) stood before thousands of people under a hot southern California summer sun. He was briefly triumphant, having stewarded the nation’s largest ever Mexican American protest and the largest by a single ethnic group, […]
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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 first piece, you can see others from this month as they are published as well as past pieces on the city […]
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Randol Contreras. The Marvelous Ones: Drugs, Gang Violence, and Resistance in East Los Angeles. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024. By Dianne Violeta Mausfeld East Los Angeles is an unincorporated part of Los Angeles County with a population that is over 95 percent Latino, overwhelmingly Mexican immigrants and Mexican Americans. Mexican immigrants settled in this […]
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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 […]
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Editor’s note: This is the third post in our theme for November, The Latinx City. By David Helps Jorge Cruz Cortes was still a teenager when the Los Angeles Police Department arrested him for selling household goods without a license in 1989. The eighteen-year-old from Oaxaca, Mexico had been in L.A. long enough to know […]
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This piece is an entry in our Eighth Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest, “Connections.” by David Bruno During the mid to late twentieth century, shopping centers in America served as community cornerstones, providing communal spaces and establishing national social and cultural connections based on mutual shopping experiences and product consumption. Weakening regional differences and contributing […]
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If you’ve been to Los Angeles recently and had the opportunity to visit the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), perhaps you were able to drop in on its new exhibit, “Ed Ruscha/Now Then“. Ruscha has long been an observer of the city, especially with regard to its vernacular and commercial architecture. While the […]
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The Metropole Bookshelf is an opportunity for authors of forthcoming or recently published books to let the UHA community know about their new work in the field. By Becky Nicolaides The seed for my book The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2024) was planted years […]
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Over the long weekend of October 26-29, urban historians gathered in Pittsburgh for the 10th biennial Urban History Association conference. The first UHA gathering since the pandemic, it was a resounding success, as evidenced by some of the tweets below. Special thanks to the planning arrangements committee, UHA President Joe Trotter, and UHA Executive Director […]
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The third entry in our 2023 Graduate Student Blogging Contest is by Julie Haltom. She writes about the myriad of stumbling blocks faced by mid-twentieth-century homesteaders in Southern California’s deserts, and the short- and long-term ramifications of the Bureau of Land Management’s Small Tract Lease program. To see all entries from this year’s contest check […]
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