Member of the Week: Joseph Watson

Joseph Watson Ph.D. Candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture University of Pennsylvania School of Design Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?  I am currently wrapping up my dissertation. It’s a study of competing ideas about the future of metropolitan America during the 1930s. I focus primarily on two architectural projects, […]

Read More

Member of the Week: Kim Phillips-Fein

Kim Phillips-Fein Associate Professor Gallatin School of Individualized Study and History Department, College of Arts and Sciences New York University Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I’m actually between major research projects now, which is a nice though sometimes anxiety-provoking place to be!  I have been thinking about a lot of […]

Read More

Member of the Week: Mason Williams

Mason Williams Assistant Professor of Leadership Studies and Political Science Williams College @masonbwilliams Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?  I’m writing a book about how New York City rebuilt its public institutions in the wake of the 1975 Fiscal Crisis—looking especially at schools, policing, and public space. The era of New […]

Read More

Mickey Spillane’s Hell of a Town

By Brian Tochterman Across the banner of “The Metropole” as I write spans the George Washington Bridge, the majestic and modern steel link between the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan and the city of Fort Lee, New Jersey, although those that cross it typically seek points far beyond those two ends. The “GWB” serves as […]

Read More

Member of the Week: Valerie Paley

Valerie Paley, Ph.D. Vice President and Chief Historian, New-York Historical Society Director, Center for Women’s History Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest?  As a public historian working at New York City’s oldest museum, I find that my day job keeps me nimble where research is concerned. Just recently, I studied up […]

Read More

Member of the Week: Matt Lasner

Matthew G. Lasner Associate Professor, Urban Policy and Planning Hunter College, City University of New York   Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I am writing a new book tentatively entitled the rather cumbersome Bay Area Urbanism: Architecture, Real Estate, and Progressive Community Planning in the United States from the New […]

Read More

Taxing the land: Henry George, NYC, and the land value tax

By Daniel Wortel-London The land-value tax is coming back in vogue among municipal policy makers and scholars of urban studies. If real property consists of both structures and land, and if the value of land is determined by locational amenities produced by a community, then that community has a moral claim to this value– or […]

Read More

Holiday Histories and Well Wishes to All

We are taking a brief hiatus from our regular Tuesday Member of the Week feature. With the end-of-semester crunch and end-of-year celebrations in full swing, UHA members have their hands full with work and socializing–no need to burden anyone with more of it! In the spirit of the holidays, we instead bring you two pieces […]

Read More

The New York Times and the movement for integrated education in New York City

Our second entry in The Metropole/Urban History Association Graduate Student Blogging Contest explores the role of the New York Times in NYC school integration debates during the early 1960s through the lens the newspaper itself and the Pulitzer Prize winning work of Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff’s work, Race Beat: The Press, The Civil Rights Struggle, and […]

Read More

Strange Times in New York

Our first entry in The Metropole/Urban History Association Graduate Student Blogging Contest considers “A New Season,” the contest theme, through an examination of New York City Mayor John Lindsey’s creative attempts to reshape the public sector. The city, in the midst “of social, economic, and political distress” during the 1970s, presented an opportunity for a […]

Read More