Forgotten Urban Currents: The Role of Subterranean Rivers in Shaping Modern Cities

Editor’s note: This is the second post in our theme for April 2025, The City Aquatic. For additional entries in the series, see here. By AN In cities across the world, rivers once central to daily life now flow unseen beneath layers of concrete and asphalt. These subterranean rivers–natural waterways that have been buried, diverted, […]

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The Metropole Bookshelf: Jacek Blaszkiewicz and “Fanfare for a City”

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. My new book, Fanfare for a City: Music and the Urban Imagination in Haussmann’s Paris, begins and ends with boulevard inaugurations. I don’t mean inaugurations taking place on […]

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Making Fashion and Design Capitals — A Review of “Paris to New York”

Pouillard, Véronique. Paris to New York: The Transatlantic Fashion Industry in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. Reviewed by Lauren Laframboise If you’ve bought clothes in recent decades, chances are that they’re products of a dizzyingly complex supply chain, involving hundreds of different people’s labor across several distant towns and cities. Although […]

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Writing about Street Life and Thinking about COVID

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 Brian Ladd My new book, The Streets of Europe, mostly ends a century ago, so it’s not about cars, but it would not have happened without their […]

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The Visual City: Photography, Film, and Postcards

“If the city is the raw material for production, for economic development, and for academic research, it has also been available to artists,” writes Helen Liggett in her 2003 work, Urban Encounters. “Photographs can function as sites of participatory reading that provoke urban encounters, first, in the relationship between the photographer and the city, and, […]

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Review: Iconic Paris and the Lens of History

Catherine E. Clark, Paris and the Cliché of History: The City and Photographs, 1860-1970. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. xii + 328 pp. $75.00 U.S. ISBN: 9780190681647. By Sun-Young Park Has ever a modern city been so iconic, so universally recognizable, as the Paris that boomed during the latter half of the […]

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Poisoners, Policemen, and a Scandal in the Court of King Louis XIV: Exploring the Origins of Parisian Policing with Holly Tucker

Although Professor Holly Tucker wrote her new book for a non-academic audience, City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris begins with a scene uniquely suited to evoke terror and handwringing from historians. The preface, which Tucker entitles “Burn Notice,” is set in the palace of Versailles in […]

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