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