The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By David S. Rotenstein In 2009 I learned about one African American woman who briefly lived in Silver Spring, Maryland, a Washington, DC, suburb. She worked for a white physician’s family. Lucille Walker’s story as a Black domestic worker survives in bits and pieces in the memory of the physician’s daughter, Ann Scandiffio. In 1939 […]
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In this, the fourth and final entry into the Fourth Annual Urban History Association/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Kenneth Alyass turns a skeptical lens towards the stretches one Detroit suburb made to justify a name change—and asks the reader to also stretch and see that the ‘burb’s supposedly colorblind arguments were anything but. In […]
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By Richard Harris Robert Lewis. 2008. Chicago Made. Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Many fine works are neglected because they treat a subject that is important but unfashionable. Chicago Made falls squarely into that category. Now not all of the overlap between urban and business historians has been neglected. […]
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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 […]
Read MorePaige Glotzer Assistant Professor and John W. and Jeanne M. Rowe Chair in the History of American Politics, Institutions, and Political Economy University of Madison-Wisconsin Department of History @apaigeoutofhist Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I look at the long history of housing policy in the United States by tracing how […]
Read MoreHarold Bérubé Full Professor of History Université de Sherbrooke (Canada). @HaroldBerube https://haroldberube.com Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I recently published a book on the history of Quebec’s main municipal association, created in 1919. In a way, it completes a research cycle on municipal governance that started with my research on […]
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Toronto’s suburbs have always been precisely the same as those of every other North American city: they have never conformed to stereotype. Now the stereotype – but do I really need to say this? – says that suburbs are low-density, white, middle-class residential environments. In varying combinations, however, Toronto’s suburbs have always included industry and […]
Read MoreOur fourth entrant into the Third Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Ian Toller-Clark, takes us back to the Midwest to examine the life cycle of the Wisconsin School for Boys. In the 1950s, the prison fell into aged disrepair at the same time that Milwaukee’s suburbs were in their infancy. Would it be […]
Read MoreToday our Member of the Week series returns, with a twist. This summer, we brought nine new assistant editors onto our team at The Metropole. Some of them you already know as past Members of the Week: Troy Hallsell, Dylan Gottlieb, and Kenneth Alyass. The rest will be introduced in the coming weeks, but we […]
Read MoreKenneth Alyass Senior, Wayne State University History Major @kenalyass Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I’ve been admitted to Northwestern and Harvard’s history PhD programs, and the project I proposed to both of those schools focus on Modern American urban history post-1970. More specifically, I want to study the intersection […]
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