The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
In a recent fivethirtyeight podcast, political scientist Dan Chen noted that in China the population largely distrusts local authorities’ response to the COVID19 pandemic, while placing faith in the large central government. Host Galen Druke then noted that in the United States, at least over the past few months, the reverse is true: support for […]
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By Philip Mark Plotch New York City’s subway system, once the best in the world, is now frequently unreliable, uncomfortable, and overcrowded (at least when the city is not experiencing a pandemic). One of the reasons for its sorry state is a series of uninformed and self-serving elected officials who have fostered false expectations about […]
Read MoreGeorge Aumoithe Princeton University Department of History and Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research delves into the post-1970s history of federal, state, and local efforts to cut general in-patient beds in the United States, particularly in public facilities commonly referred to […]
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Samuel Stein. Capital City: Gentrification and the Real Estate State. Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2019. By Amanda Boston The process of exclusionary development we know as “gentrification”—and the working-class communities and cultures it displaces—has preoccupied urban residents and other stakeholders for decades. Scholars have explored transformation of the process from a scattered residential phenomenon into a […]
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By Natalie Behrends On Wednesday, November 4th, 1914, Henry Goldfogle was triumphant. It was the day after the election, and the seven-term Democratic Congressman from Manhattan’s Twelfth District had just received the results: a smashing victory of 4,944 votes to his Republican opponent’s 1,133. The three-month campaign season leading up to the election had been […]
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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. Kara M. Schlichting. New York Recentered: Building the Metropolis from the Shore. University of Chicago Press, 2019. By Kara M. Schlichting New York Recentered offers a new model […]
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Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani, Contested City: Art and Public History as Mediation at New York’s Seward Park Urban Renewal Area (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018). Reviewed by Barry Goldberg In 1965, the New York City Board of Estimate, an eight-member body that once had authority over the city’s budget and land-use matters, but has since […]
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In this, our third entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Vyta Baselice takes us through the life cycle of concrete. To understand how this construction material moves from birth to death, Baselice has us travel from Pennsylvania in the late nineteenth century to mid-twentieth century New York City, before boomeranging […]
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This piece by Katie Uva is the first entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to submit essays on “the birth, death, or aging of institutions, neighborhoods, cities, or suburbs,” and Uva hones in on the life cycle of the New York World’s Fair to argue that […]
Read MoreEric Häusler Ph.D. student, Department of History, University of Bern Researcher, Swiss National Science Foundation Sinergia-Project Doing House and Family. Material Culture, Social Space and Knowledge in Transition (1700-1850) @lurker85 Describe your dissertation research. What about it drew your interest? Thanks to the existence of thousands of bankruptcy records, a fascinating institutional arrangement, the […]
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