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 […]
By Carl Abbott New Yorkers have gumption. They’ve got moxie. They don’t slow down and they don’t take crap from anyone. They’re also survivors who can sometimes figure out how to work together for the common good. That’s the shared message of two compelling and very different books by science fiction stars: N. K. Jemisin’s The […]
Holtzman, Benjamin. The Long Crisis: New York and the Path to Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Claire Dunning The notion of “crisis” may feel overplayed these days but remains pertinent when upheavals related to climate, democracy, health, and white supremacy continue to go unchecked. As governments respond too slowly or not […]
Hochschild, Adam. Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. Reviewed by Sara Paretsky Rebel Cinderella, Adam Hochschild’s study of Rose Pastor Stokes, draws the reader into the early decades of the twentieth century when reformers and radicals sought to shape public policies […]
When COVID-19 hit in late February/early March of last year, Cityscape continued its listing of current, forthcoming, and overlooked studies in urban history. But after suspending notices of museum shows and films, we initiated a series on the history of plagues in cities: yellow fever in Philadelphia, smallpox in Boston, polio in Brooklyn, cholera in […]
Fernandez, Johanna. The Young Lords: A Radical History. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Reviewed by Leo Valdes In 1969 activists convened at the first Chicano Youth Liberation Conference. Among them were New York Puerto Ricans excited to learn about a group of Chicago activists who wore purple berets and carried a […]
Dümpelmann, Sonja. Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Sara E. Levine Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York and Berlin by Sonja Dümpelmann is more than a history of street trees in two cities. It is about politics […]
Peeples, Scott. The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Katherine J. Kim That we still associate the name Edgar Allan Poe with torture, insanity, loneliness, perversity, drug abuse, and drunkenness is owing in part to one Rufus Griswold, rival and author of perhaps […]
In this, the third and final entry into the Fifth Annual Urban History Association/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Rachel Pitkin follows the story of activist Katy Van Deurs’s “Workshop of the Children” (1961-64) in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which some community members embraced and others protested, and examines how the experience led Van […]
Our second entrant into the Fifth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest is Rachel Klepper, who takes us back to New York City’s Yorkville neighborhood in the late 1940s to examine white, Black, and Latinx parents’ complicated embrace of an after-school program. At Public School 151, in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper East […]
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