The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
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 Rebecca Bratspies The Major Deegan Expressway is many people’s first experience of New York City. Travelers crossing the George Washington Bridge take the Major Deegan to the […]
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Ray Bromley Professor Emeritus Urban and Regional Planning/International Development Studies University at Albany, State University of New York Please describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I retired from teaching and administration in January 2020 so as to concentrate on research and writing. My initial retirement plans were to focus on international comparative […]
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Shanahan, Jarrod. Captives: How Rikers Island Took New York City Hostage. New York: Verso, 2022. Reviewed by David Helps Thirty years ago this September, some six thousand off-duty members of New York’s Finest descended on City Hall, ostensibly to oppose Mayor David Dinkins’s plan for a police civilian review board. The nearly all-white mob drank […]
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Sammartino, Annemarie H. Freedomland: Co-op City and the Story of New York. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. Reviewed by Katie Uva East of I-95 and west of the Hutchinson River Parkway, on 320 acres of marshy land that was once, briefly, home to a United States-themed (and United States-shaped) amusement park called Freedomland, stands […]
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Pedro A. Regalado Assistant Professor of History Stanford University Please describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My book project, Nueva York: Making the Modern City, explores the history of New York City’s Latinx community during the twentieth century, from the “pioneers” who arrived after World War I to the panoply of […]
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Katie Uva Adjunct Lecturer CUNY Baruch @K80Uva Please describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I do a lot of teaching and freelancing these days, but my personal research is about New York’s two World’s Fairs (in 1939-1940 and 1964-1965, respectively), and how they shaped and reflected expectations about urbanism in the […]
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McGruder, Kevin. Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Carla DuBose-Simons In his latest work, Philip Payton: The Father of Black Harlem, Kevin McGruder continues to explore the processes by which Harlem became the “Culture Capital” for African Americans. This book, which follows his first book, Race […]
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Clark, Shannan. The Making of the American Creative Class: New York’s Culture Workers and Twentieth-Century Consumer Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Stephen Petrus As the middle class increasingly shaped consumption habits and social practices in America in the 1950s, it became the subject of scathing critiques in scholarly and popular sociological […]
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Marcio Siwi Assistant Professor in Latin American History and Metropolitan Studies Towson University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? As an urban historian working at the intersection of race, class, and urban development, I am interested in exploring the city as a site of contestation where diverse populations with conflicting attachments […]
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Gale, Dennis. The Misunderstood History of Gentrification: People, Planning, Preservation, Urban Renewal, 1915-2020. Temple University Press, 2021. Reviewed by David J. Goodwin Gentrification entered the scholarly discourse on cities in 1964 with London: Aspects of Change, Ruth Glass’s study regarding the influx of middle-income residents moving into historically working-class London neighborhoods and the gradual transformation […]
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