The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
Guariglia, Matthew. Police and the Empire City: Race and the Origins of Modern Policing. Duke University Press, 2023. Editor’s note: In the interest of full disclosure, Matthew Guariglia formerly served as an assistant editor at The Metropole. Guariglia oversaw the Disciplining the City series from 2017 to 2023. By Sarah Frenking Matthew Guariglia’s Police and […]
Read More
By Ryan Reft It was late afternoon on August 29, 1970, when Rosalío Muñoz, chairman of the National Chicano Moratorium Committee (NCMC) stood before thousands of people under a hot southern California summer sun. He was briefly triumphant, having stewarded the nation’s largest ever Mexican American protest and the largest by a single ethnic group, […]
Read More
Editor’s note: In anticipation of what we all believe will be a stellar UHA conference this October 9-12 in Los Angeles, we featured Los Angeles as our theme in May. With the conference still in mind, we want to continue to highlight the city in the run up to the event; you can see other […]
Read More
Editor’s note: In anticipation of what we all believe will be a stellar UHA conference this October 9-12 in Los Angeles, we are featuring Los Angeles as our theme this month. This is our second post; you can see others from this month as they are published as well as past pieces on the city […]
Read More
This is the first post in our Metropolis of the Month for November 2023: Washington, DC, in the Twentieth Century. “If any city in the United States has borne the burden of serving as a symbol of American aspirations and has simultaneously been the place. . .where the issues of civilization have been focused, it […]
Read More
By Kenneth Alyass On April 1, 1966, during a rainy Friday evening, near downtown Detroit Habiba Kasgorgis made her way to her husband’s store at 7503 Brush Street. Jubrail Kasgorgis was a balding, middle-aged man, who immigrated to the United States from Iraq a decade earlier. Like many members of Detroit’s growing Chaldean community, a […]
Read More
Editor’s note: This is the second post in The Metropole’s theme month on Istanbul. You can see additional posts in the series at the bottom of the page. By Deniz Yonucu The Black Lives Matter Movement was not only successful in drawing large-scale attention to police violence enabled by deeply embedded racism both in the […]
Read More
Hinton, Elizabeth. America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. New York: Liverlight, 2021. Reviewed by Simon Balto Few historians are defter at helping us make sense of our present than Elizabeth Hinton. Her first book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime (2016), recalibrated […]
Read More
By Will Tchakirides Following three nights of unrest in the Twin Cities last May, Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman charged Minneapolis patrolman Derek Chauvin with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter of George Floyd. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison upgraded the charges to second-degree murder and charged the other three officers who watched Floyd’s killing with […]
Read More
By Seth Weitz On January 16, 1989, Miami police officer William Lozano shot Black motorcyclist Clement Lloyd, killing both Lloyd and his passenger, Allen Blanchard. The shooting sparked several days of riots and brought to an end a tumultuous, but transformative, decade in Miami’s relatively short history. Dubbed the 1989 Miami Riots, they marked the […]
Read More
The Metropole 