Confronting the Void: New York after 9/11

Susan Opotow and Zachary Baron Shemtob, editors, New York after 9/11. New York: Fordham University Press, 2018. For anyone in New York that day, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 remain very much in the present. But memory and raw emotions fade. Young men and women joining the armed forces today were not even […]

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Fiscal Fright in NYC: A Review of Kim Phillips-Fein’s Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics

Kim Phillips-Fein. Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2017. 417pp. $9.98. (Paperback)  Review by Michael R. Glass By 1965, a $255 million gap had opened in the New York City budget. To cover the city’s operating expenses, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. decided to “borrow now, […]

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Book Review: John Strausbaugh’s Victory City

Strausbaugh, John. Victory City: A History of New York and New Yorkers during World War II. (New York: Twelve, 2018). 497pp. $30. ISBN 1455567485 Reviewed by Michael L. Levine Victory City tells what it was like to live in New York during the Great Depression and World War II. The book may not break new […]

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Member of the Week: Michael Glass

Michael Glass Ph.D. Candidate, Princeton University @m_r_glass Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?  As a former New York City high school teacher, I’ve long been interested in educational inequality. For my M.A. thesis, I studied the 1950s school desegregation movement in Harlem, portions of which were recently published in the JUH. […]

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Member of the Week: Kara Murphy Schlichting

Kara Murphy Schlichting Assistant Professor of History Queens College, City University of New York Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?  I thought I would be an environmental historian of the American West, particularly the Utah desert (really).  But my first year in graduate school at Rutgers reinforced to me that environment was also everyday […]

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Member of the Week: Matthew Guariglia

Matthew Guariglia Ph.D. Candidate in History University of Connecticut @mguariglia Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?  My current research explores how policing changed as U.S. cities became more racially and ethnically diverse between the 1860s and the 1920s. A few years ago I became very interested in how the state learns […]

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Busting Out in WWII-Era Brooklyn

This piece by Emily Brooks is the first entrant into the Second Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to submit essays on theme of “Striking Gold,” whether lucre or archival treasures. Brooks’ interpretation of the theme hews to the latter, and she uses a memo discovered on a reel of […]

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Digital Summer School: Harlem Education History Project

All good things must come to an end, and this is especially true of summer school. Whether talking about the 1980s Mark Harmon feature or the classroom, digital and analog, it’s come time to shutter our doors for a couple weeks as The Metropole takes some time off. We’ll re-open after Labor Day with a […]

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Digital Summer School: Gotham

Digital Summer School began with Tropics of Meta where co-editors Romeo Guzman and Alex Sayf Cummings talked about the old and new initiatives at the academic/cultural website. We then moved the classroom to the Midwestern metropolis of Milwaukee as Amanda Seligman discussed the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee. Today, we travel to New York City and The Gotham […]

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