The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Avigail Oren The recent work of historical anthropologist Katherine Hayes has focused on decolonizing the narratives interpreted at public heritage sites, including St. Paul’s Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote. The United States military constructed Fort Snelling in 1819-20 to protect the area’s fur trade, a role it served until Minnesota gained statehood in 1858 […]
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This piece by Marika Plater is the first entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to “write about a moment in urban history when the inflexible was asked to bend,” and in this essay Plater asks readers to stretch their interpretation of the fireworks that seemed ubiquitous […]
Read MoreLast night concluded the Urban History Association’s trio of virtual panels in response to the recent wave of Black-led urban uprisings against racist police brutality and renewed conversation about defunding and abolishing police. The Metropole’s Disciplining the City editors Matthew Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen moderated a discussion with historians Johanna Fernández, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, Marisol […]
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🔥🔥🔥🔥@UrbanHistoryA panel on Urban Uprisings and Racist Police Terror in Historical Context with @Prof_Suddler @AustinMcCoy3 @mfkantor and @hthompsn with @CharlotteERosen and @mguariglia moderating pic.twitter.com/UbY4A6pqTw — Marisol LeBrón (@marisollebron) July 8, 2020 In 1973, Detroit’s Stevie Wonder released Innervisions, a groove-filled album that was simultaneously joyous, sharp-eyed, and steely. In its third track “Living for the […]
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Last night The Metropole‘s Disciplining the City editors Matthew Guariglia and Charlotte Rosen (click those links to read their most recent work) moderated a panel on “Police Violence in the United States: How Did We Get Here?” It was the first in a series of three virtual discussions between experts of the carceral state convened […]
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Conversations on Race, Policing, and Abolition Although the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade triggered a recent wave of Black-led urban uprisings against racist police brutality, these uprisings, and the police repression that has been unleashed in response, are not unique to this moment. Drawing on a long legacy of abolitionist […]
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Colleagues, George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer was a horrifying illustration of the pattern of deadly police violence against Black people. In a widely circulated video, the world watched him plead for air, and witnessed the brutal indifference of the officer kneeling on his neck. Like the killing of Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor, […]
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By James Longhurst In 1979, a plainclothes police officer assaulted a uniformed parking agent in broad daylight on the steps of the courthouse in lower Manhattan. The New York Times summarized the fight between the policeman and the female parking enforcement agent, declaring that “the two were screaming at the top of their lungs. There […]
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By Sarah A. Seo Is a mobile home more like an automobile or a house? This was the key question that the justices of the US Supreme Court had to determine in California v. Carney, a 1985 case about the warrantless search of a mobile home parked in a lot in downtown San Diego. An […]
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Schrader, Stuart. Badges without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. By Charlotte Rosen As heavily-armed SWAT teams rained rubber bullets and tear gas on Ferguson protestors in August 2014, Palestinians on Twitter offered not only solidarity, but tactical advice. Given that the same tear gas […]
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