urban history 
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SOURCE: The New Republic
3/8/2023
Why are the Dems Denying DC Self-Government?
Historian (and HNN Alum) Kyla Sommers connects the recent Senate rejection of DC's local crime legislation to the history of suspicion of Black political power in the District.
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SOURCE: NextCity
3/10/2023
Houston's Highway History Teaches Planners What Not to Do
by Kyle Shelton
Transportation planners have begun to collect the opinions of community residents affected by proposed highway projects, but they have yet to begin to meaningfully incorporate those concerns into planning. Doing so could prevent repeating the blighting effects of urban transporation projects.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
3/8/2023
In Chicago, the Political Vibes Echo 1983, but the Politics are Different
by Gordon Mantler
Harold Washington's victory in 1983 to become the city's first Black mayor promised a new multicultural coalition politics. Forty years later, that coalition is discouraged and demobilized, and seems unlikely to challenge the entrenched interests that Washington tried to dislodge from power.
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SOURCE: Gotham Center
3/1/2023
Marc Stein on "Sodomites and Gender Transgressors" in Old New York
The historian discusses a digital database he's been developing to make primary sources and their analysis more widely available for the study of queer communities in American history.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
2/26/2023
30 Years Later, "Falling Down" Still Shows the Shallowness of Suburbanites' Views of the City
by Carl Abbott
Set in a moment of economic upheaval, racial conflict, and media-driven fear of crime, Joel Schumacher's film reflected the degree of separation between America's suburbs and cities. Today, it's necessary to recognize that its portrayal of hostility and alienation isn't inevitable.
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SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
2/26/2023
How (Some) of the Hip Hop Generation Learned Black History
Historian Pero Dagbovie traces shifts in hip hop's political messages and says that, to some extent the glorification of materialism replaced a focus on Black history and politics as the genre developed.
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SOURCE: Baltimore Magazine
2/25/2023
Will Baltimore's Black Communities Ever See Justice for the "Highway to Nowhere"?
The Robert Moses-designed expressway displaced Black families and neighborhoods for a stub of a freeway that ultimately stretched for less than two miles and does not connect to the rest of the interstate system.
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SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
2/22/2023
Can the Long-Maligned Cuyahoga River Drive Revitalization in Cleveland?
The river was a central thread in the city's industrial development and growth, and a punchline for its decline. Can it become a place Clevelanders love?
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SOURCE: Religion News Service
2/10/2023
The Virgin of Guadalupe is a Constant on the Changing Streets of Los Angeles
The image of the Virgin Mary is both a protector of small businesses and a symbol of ethnic pride across Los Angeles; photographer Oscar Rodriguez Zapata has been documenting her appearances for a decade.
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SOURCE: Boston Globe
2/9/2023
An Unlikely Coalition Trying to Save a Nashville Black Landmark
A Nashville Elks lodge building was the 1960s home of a music club where superstars of Black music—and the yet-to-be famous Jimi Hendrix—played during the segregation era. Like many such landmarks, decades of highway building broke up the surrounding community and made the building endangered today.
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SOURCE: NextCity
2/9/2023
North Milwaukee Looks to Highway History to Reshape the Future
Clayborn Benson of the Wisconsin Black Historical Society and Museum is finding common cause with planning activists who want to take down the freeways that separated North Milwaukee from the rest of the city and contributed to its decline.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
2/7/2023
NYPL to Take Archives of East Village Eye, Newspaper of 1980s Downtown Scene
The complexity and difficulty of placing the relatively small archive of an underground arts paper with a repository that can preserve it highlights the challenges facing historic preservation.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
2/3/2023
Pride in the South is a Story of Resistance and Resilience
by La Shonda Mims
In the urban south, LGBTQ residents are drawing on a half century of claiming public space through pride celebrations in the face of efforts to label them a threat to society.
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SOURCE: The Nation
2/6/2023
Irony Alert: GOP Stages Anti-Socialist Show Vote while Preparing to Convene in the Most Socialist City in America
by John Nichols
"When the House denounced “the horrors of socialism,” those legislators made the case that socialism was—and is—a part of what makes Milwaukee great."
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SOURCE: The Baffler
1/25/2023
The Tradition of Overambitious Public Works in Mexico
Mexico's public works projects have often seen ambitious design outpace the will and capacity for maintaining them.
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SOURCE: WTTW
1/27/2023
Prof. Hasan Kwame Jeffries on Consulting for Hip Hop at 50 Documentary
The Ohio State professor served as a consultant for the four hour documentary produced by Public Enemy's Chuck D, which begins January 31.
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1/29/2023
Latino Activists Changed San Antonio in the 1960s
by Ricardo Romo
San Antonio in the 1960s faced many of the same challenges of cities throughout the South; its emerging Mexican American political leadership helped steer the city in a progressive direction.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
1/24/2023
Some Escaped Slavery Without Escaping the South
by Viola Franziska Müller
The majority of people escaping slavery before Emancipation never crossed the Mason-Dixon line, finding a measure of freedom in southern cities.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
1/25/2023
Atlanta's BeltLine Project a Case Study in Park-Driven "Green Gentrification"
by Dan Immergluck
Although the ambitious combination of multiuse trails and apartment complexes "was designed to connect Atlantans and improve their quality of life, it has driven up housing costs on nearby land and pushed low-income households out to suburbs with fewer services than downtown neighborhoods."
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/19/2023
The Romance of the Highway Obscures Harm to Communities of Color
by Ryan Reft
Secretary Pete Buttigieg's comments that interstate construction entrenched racial segregation were denounced as "woke" by critics. But history shows that highway planners knew that such consequences were likely to ensue, and proceeded anyway.
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