The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Guariglia, Matthew. Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing. Duke University Press, 2023. Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure, Matthew Guariglia formerly served as an assistant editor at The Metropole. Guariglia oversaw the Disciplining the City series from 2017 to 2023. By Sarah Frenking Matthew Guariglia’s Police and […]
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This post is an entry in our ninth annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest. This year’s theme is “Light.” By Alexandra Miller BOOM! The sound of the explosion “Shook the houses broke Window panes and caused a great excitement among the respectable portion of the tenants” of the midtown Manhattan neighborhood around the corner of 56th […]
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Editor’s note: This is the first post in our annual Digital Summer School, where we highlight projects in the digital humanities. You can read other posts in the series here. 1. What led you to this project? Or in other words, what sparked your interest and what drove you to create it? As an MA […]
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Editor’s note: This is the second post in our theme for April 2025, The City Aquatic. For additional entries in the series, see here. By AN In cities across the world, rivers once central to daily life now flow unseen beneath layers of concrete and asphalt. These subterranean rivers–natural waterways that have been buried, diverted, […]
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Editor’s Note: This is the fourth 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 Alyssa Lopez In March 1935, when sixteen-year-old Lino Rivera pocketed a knife while cutting through the S.H. Kress dime […]
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Launched in 2024, Soundscapes N.Y.C. is a podcast about how music created in New York has shaped the history of the city and how throughout its history the city itself has been an incubator for new music. It is a bi-monthly podcast series in which Sarah Lawrence College historian Ryan Purcell, talks with artists, music […]
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This piece is an entry in our Eighth Annual Graduate Student Blogging Contest, “Connections.” by Bridget Kelly What makes a site special? What must happen there for society to decide that a place, a building, a history is worth preserving? In 1991, the New York City Landmark Preservations Committee (LPC) considered these questions when determining […]
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Vishaan Chakrabarti. The Architecture Of Urbanity: Designing For Nature, Culture And Joy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024. Reviewed by Dasha Kuletskaya Can architects and other design professionals help tackle the global challenges humanity faces today? Can design be a tool to address climate change, rising inequality, and the spread of right-wing populism? Can architecture […]
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Davida Siwisa James. Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries. New York: Fordham University Press, 2024. Reviewed by Kevin McGruder In Hamilton Heights and Sugar Hill: Alexander Hamilton’s Old Harlem Neighborhood Through the Centuries, author Davida Siwisa James uses several individual buildings and collections of buildings, the people who […]
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The theme for our 2023 Graduate Student Blogging Contest is “Stumble.” Our sixth entrant, Katelin Penner, discusses how leaders in real estate and finance forced New York City government to stumble into a relationship with them that has led the city to subsidize private development projects while reducing public services that support working-class residents. To […]
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The Metropole 