The Metropole Bookshelf: Becky Nicolaides and “The New Suburbia”

January 9, 2024.Reading time 21 minutes.

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 Becky Nicolaides The seed for my book The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2024) was planted years […]

Annexation Politics & Manufacturing Blight in a Black St. Louis Suburb

September 12, 2023.Reading time 26 minutes.

The seventh entry in this year’s Graduate Student Blogging Contest is by Bridget Laramie Kelly, who won last year’s blogging contest. In this year’s entry, she writes about how a historic Black suburb was perceived by wealthier white residents as a “stumbling block” in the way of protecting and increasing property values. To see all […]

The Rise of Local Surveillance Culture—A Review of “Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture 1975-2001”

June 22, 2023.Reading time 14 minutes.

Riismandel, Kyle. Neighborhood of Fear: The Suburban Crisis in American Culture 1975-2001. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Davy Knittle In July of 1981, six-year-old Adam Walsh was kidnapped while his mother shopped at the Hollywood Mall in Hollywood, Florida. Adam’s remains were found two weeks later in a canal just over 130 […]

Creating Research Triangle Park– A Review of “Brain Magnet”

June 16, 2021.Reading time 10 minutes.

Cummings, Alex Sayf. Brain Magnet: Research Triangle Park and the Idea of the Idea Economy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Reviewed by Andrew Hedden A generation of labor historians famously asked: “Why was there no socialism in the United States?” Employing new forms of social history and foregrounding the country’s long history of class […]