The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
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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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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The Metropole 