The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Interviewed by Grace Gillies American world’s fairs at the turn of the twentieth century built visions of modernity and the future that were pointedly expressed through a language of the past. In Ancient Fantasies and Modern Power: Neo-Antique Architecture at American World’s Fairs 1893-1915, Elizabeth Macaulay unpacks the context and subtext of Greco-Roman and Egyptianizing […]
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Editor’s Note: This is the fourth post in our theme for February 2025, “Celluloid City,” which explores the role of and interplay between cities and film. You can see all posts from the theme here By Alyssa Lopez In March 1935, when sixteen-year-old Lino Rivera pocketed a knife while cutting through the S.H. Kress dime […]
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Richard E. Ocejo. Sixty Miles Upriver: Gentrification and Race in a Small American City. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2024. Reviewed by Mario Hernandez Focusing on small cities rather than the large metropolitan areas typically covered in gentrification literature, Richard Ocejo’s Sixty Miles Up River makes significant contributions to the study of gentrification. Beyond location, […]
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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. by Stephen Robertson I was not intending to write Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935 when my University of Sydney colleagues […]
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Picturing Urban Renewal is a history of urban renewal from the bottom up. The urban renewal story typically is told from the perspective of politicians and urban planners. This website gives voice to displaced residents and business owners, community activists, reporters, gentrifiers, and construction workers, as well as to politicians and planners. The goal of […]
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Editor’s note: This post part of our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Nuala Caomhánach The concerned look on their faces was enough to make me turn around and go home. Standing at the doorway of my shared […]
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By Timothy J. Gilfoyle The fear of increasing crime in nineteenth-century American cities generated an unprecedented expansion of penitentiary and carceral systems throughout the United States. The autobiography of George Appo (1856-1930) presents a rare window into this subaltern world of incarcerated men. Appo was arrested more than a dozen times and spent more than a decade […]
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Formally launched in 2014, the CUNY Digital History Archive (CDHA) is as much a “digital history project” as it is archive, notes Roxanne Shirazi, CDHA project director and assistant professor at CUNY Graduate Center. From the outset, CHDA adopted an “activist approach to documenting CUNY history form the ground up,” digitizing the papers of students, […]
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Stolzenberg, Nomi M. and Myers, David N. American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Bob Carey This is a big, readable study about how Satmer Hasidic Jews became an influential Republican voting bloc in Orange County, New York. You must work […]
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David Hochfelder, PhD Associate Professor History Department, University at Albany, SUNY Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? My current research is on the history of urban renewal, in particular, a public/digital history of urban renewal in New York State we’re calling Picturing Urban Renewal. I and my two colleagues, Ann Pfau and […]
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