A River Runs Through It: The Anacostia and Residential Displacement in Postwar Southeast DC

April 17, 2024.Reading time 16 minutes.

Editor’s note: This month we are featuring work by historians that extend Beyond the Urban. This is our third post in the series. by S.D. Hodell There are two main waterways in the Washington, DC, metro area: the Potomac and the Anacostia. The two rivers are a study in contrasts. The Potomac separates Maryland and […]

Fifty Years of Home Rule in Washington, DC

December 20, 2023.Reading time 34 minutes.

“Self-government died early in the District,” note historians Christopher Asch and G. Derek Musgrove. “Not even a generation after Americans went to war to protest ‘no taxation without representation,’ Congress stripped Washingtonians of democracy’s basic unit of currency, the right to vote.”[1] As they demonstrate in their 2017 work Chocolate City: A History of Race […]

The History of Disability Rights in Washington, DC

October 17, 2023.Reading time 32 minutes.

This is the third installment of our theme for October 2023, Urban Disability, an exploration of the role cities and their residents have played in the expansion of disability rights. By Patricia Chadwick Disability history is woven throughout the history of civil rights, institutions, medicine, eugenics, technology, war, and pandemics. The study of the history […]

Fighting for Rights: An Overview of Urban Disability

October 3, 2023.Reading time 48 minutes.

This is the first post in our theme for October 2023, Urban Disability focusing on the role of cities in fostering disability rights. In her 2020 memoir Being Huemann, pioneering disability rights activist Judith Heumann recounted her adolescent experiences in New York City’s public schools. She was part of the Health Conservation 21, a program […]

Promise and Peril in Post-1968 Washington, DC — “When the Smoke Cleared: The 1968 Rebellions and the Unfinished Battle for Civil Rights in the Nation’s Capital”

May 9, 2023.Reading time 12 minutes.

While not completely ignored among urbanists, for a city of its size and significance, Washington, DC—or at least its post-1968 incarnation—remains an under-historicized metropolis. To be fair, historians like Scott Berg and J. D. Dickey have tackled its beginnings in the nineteenth century. James H. Whyte, Ronald Johnson, Carol Gelderman, Sharon Harley, and others have […]

Astronomy on the Flats: How the Moons of Mars and the Death of a President Altered the Late Nineteenth-Century Washington, DC, Landscape

March 8, 2023.Reading time 40 minutes.

Editor’s note: This post is part of our theme for March 2023, Science City, an exploration of the ways cities and science have interacted over time and around the world. By Vincent Femia Simon Newcomb often arose from his bed in the middle of the night to walk two miles to the Naval Observatory grounds. […]

Living in White Spaces: Suburbia’s Hidden Histories

October 10, 2022.Reading time 30 minutes.

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 […]

Shifting a Timeline—A Review of “The Misunderstood History of Gentrification”

March 7, 2022.Reading time 7 minutes.

Gale, Dennis. The Misunderstood History of Gentrification: People, Planning, Preservation, Urban Renewal, 1915-2020. Temple University Press, 2021. Reviewed by David J. Goodwin Gentrification entered the scholarly discourse on cities in 1964 with London: Aspects of Change, Ruth Glass’s study regarding the influx of middle-income residents moving into historically working-class London neighborhoods and the gradual transformation […]

Black Broadway in Washington, D.C.

December 21, 2021.Reading time 8 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 Briana A. Thomas Writing my debut history book, Black Broadway in Washington, D.C., felt like traveling through time. Navigating through the past three centuries of rich, vibrant, […]

African Americans at St. Elizabeth’s — A Review of Madness in the City of Magnificent Expectations

February 2, 2021.Reading time 10 minutes.

Summers, Martin. Madness in the City of Magnificent Expectations: A History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation’s Capital. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Reviewed by Debra Kram-Fernandez Madness in The City of Magnificent Expectations is concerned with the history of psychiatric care for Black, Brown, and White Americans suffering from serious and/or chronic […]