The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
In Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress – And How to Bring It Back, Marc J. Dunkelman argues that well-intentioned efforts by progressives have contributed to “render[ing] government incompetent.” Once championing a technocratic elite to run government from the top down, the post-Robert Moses mid-century shift, which questioned this elitism and sought to undermine it […]
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Editor’s note: This is the fourth post for our November theme month, Metropolitan Consumption. You can see additional posts from the month here. See also David Bruno’s piece here from The Metropole’s 2024 Graduate Student Blogging Contest. By David Bruno Rising from the ashes of the Antebellum South, Birmingham, Alabama, went from undeveloped land in […]
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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 third post; you can see others from this month as they are published as well as past pieces on the city […]
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Editor’s Note: This is the fifth 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 Shruti Hussain We lock eyes with a stream of children, of women and men, peering straight at the camera […]
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By William Gourlay If you present a map of Turkey to a traveler and ask them to pinpoint key cities, chances are they will immediately identify İstanbul, the great metropolis on the Bosphorus. Some would also be able to highlight Ankara, the capital, but beyond that choices may be limited. Few cities in Turkey’s Anatolian […]
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Editor’s Note: This is the fourth entry in our theme for the month of May: Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean by Molly Oringer “The rabbis prayed here, in Saïda’s synagogue,” recalled Basma, a Palestinian woman in her mid-thirties. It was early 2020, and we stood gathering in a courtyard typical of the medieval neighborhood, Ḥarat […]
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By Davarian L. Baldwin Balto, Simon. Occupied Territory: Policing Black Chicago from Red Summer to Black Power. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. By 2015, Chicago had become a symbol of the broken relationship between Black communities and the law enforcement apparatus. Outrage over the massive police cover-up of Laquan McDonald’s killing […]
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Timothy J. Lombardo, Blue-Collar Conservatism: Frank Rizzo’s Philadelphia and Populist Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). By Christopher Whann Since 1960, urban politics in America have been defined by massive changes like the civil rights movement, the related issue of “white flight” and suburbanization, deindustrialization, and economic transformation. Northeastern cities were certainly affected by these […]
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Hurley, Amanda Kolson. Radical Suburbs: Experimental Living on the Fringes of the American City. Cleveland, OH: Belt Publishing, 2019. By Walter Greason For decades, urban historians have challenged the image of the suburb as a collection of, as Malvina Reynolds put it, “little boxes all the same.” The moment has arrived to introduce to the […]
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By Charlotte Rosen There is no dearth of historical scholarship demonstrating the dangerous afterlife of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” or what would become commonly known as the “Moynihan Report.” An internal document written when Moynihan was the Assistant Secretary of Labor under President Lyndon Johnson, the report argued […]
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