The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Manshel, Andrew W. Learning From Bryant Park: Revitalizing Cities, Towns, and Public Spaces. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Katie Uva On an August night in 1993, I was five years old and sitting in Bryant Park on a blanket on a lush bed of grass with my parents, their friends, and […]
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Dyja, Thomas. New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021. Reviewed by Bob Carey To get at what Thomas Dyja is after in his new book, begin with the epilogue. Having drawn us into a lengthy but spirited chronicle which begins in the seventies […]
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By Dan Garodnick As New York City gets ready to choose its new mayor, one community is watching the results with particular interest. Having recently seen a decade of tumult across two mayoralties, the residents of Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village understand that the occupant of Gracie Mansion matters to their safety and security. […]
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Mario Hernandez Assistant Professor, Social and Historical Department Mills College @mario22h Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My research focuses on relationship between race and gentrification. My current book project, Bushwick’s Bohemia: Art and Revitalization in Gentrifying Brooklyn, will be published by Routledge Press in the spring of 2022. The book […]
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Butler, Jon. God in Gotham: The Miracle of Religion in Modern Manhattan. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Bob Carey If I were still teaching Introduction to Religion in American History, I would assign Jon Butler’s God in Gotham, with its excellent cameos of Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Abraham […]
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Harris, John. The Last Slave Ships: New York and The End Of The Middle Passage. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Bob Cary There is something of a “close parenthesis” quality to John Harris’s engrossing discussion of the closing days of the Atlantic Slave trade. Harris focuses on the trade as it played […]
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By Katie Uva In an essay first published in The New York Times in 2001, Colson Whitehead wrote, “You start building your private New York the first time you lay eyes on it.” I started building my private New York at the top of a hill, one of the several that gave my neighborhood, Forest […]
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This piece by Marika Plater is the first entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to “write about a moment in urban history when the inflexible was asked to bend,” and in this essay Plater asks readers to stretch their interpretation of the fireworks that seemed ubiquitous […]
Read MoreLaShawn Harris Associate Professor of History Michigan State University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research project focuses on the policing of New York’s Black women during the 1980s, a period widely remembered for urban decay, economic instability, political conservativism, crime, racial violence, and new cultural music and art forms. […]
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By Thai Jones Merwood-Salisbury, Joanna. Design for the Crowd: Patriotism and Protest in Union Square. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019. Union Square today displays an extraordinary mania for subdivision. Its ten acres have been hardscaped by fencing and concrete into a multitude of distinct levels and impermeable zones. On the surface, these choices appear […]
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