urban history 
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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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SOURCE: New York Times
1/16/2023
An Oral History of Riker's Island
An oral history of New York's notorious jail is chaotic and difficult, but could an account of the place be any different and be true?
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
1/3/2022
NY Mayor's Proposal to Lock Up Mentally Ill Has Long History
by Elliott Young
The impulse to heal the mentally ill has long battled the impulse to lock them up as a threat to the society. Eric Adams is trying to do the latter while claiming to do the former.
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SOURCE: NextCity
12/13/2022
New Docuseries Traces the Importance of America's Vanishing Lesbian Bars
In 1987, there were an estimated 206 lesbian bars across the U.S. Phoenix's Boycott Bar is one of fewer than two dozen that remain today.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
11/23/2022
Taking a Longer View, the Crime Spike Isn't a Mystery, but Solutions aren't Easy Enough for Politicians
by Patrick Sharkey
Crime is a whole-society problem that is experienced locally; solutions require deep reforms and can't be subjected to the shifting attention of politicians in an election year.
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SOURCE: Black Perspectives
11/18/2022
Black Family History Opens New Archives
by Paula C. Austin, Catherine Nelson and Donna Payne Wilson
Paula Austin's history of Black Washington depended on the knowledge and memorial work of generations of Black families, who have preserved history that is not kept in traditional archives.
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SOURCE: N + 1
11/11/2022
Mike Davis Forced Readers to Embrace Specificity
by Gabriel Winant
The recently deceased radical scholar never allowed the particularity of historical moments to disappear under theoretical abstraction, which made his work powerful and compelling.
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SOURCE: The Metropole
11/17/2022
Immigrant Merchants and Law-and-Order Politics in Detroit
by Kenneth Alyass
The Chaldean community of Detroit became a significant middleman-minority through the operation of small stores in working-class and majority-Black neighborhoods. As white flight and disinvestment created increasingly dire conditions, they also became a constituency for aggressive policing.
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SOURCE: The Metropole
11/3/2022
The Tyranny of the Maps: Rethinking Redlining
by Robert Gioielli
The four-color mortgage security maps created by New Deal-era bureaucrats and bankers have become a widely-known symbol of housing discrimination and the racial wealth gap. But does the public familiarity with the maps obscure the history of housing discrimination? And what can historians do about that?
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
11/1/2022
Black-Brown Solidarity has been Elusive in Los Angeles
by Erin Aubry Kaplan
For decades, the increasing Latino presence in previously Black neighborhoods in South Los Angeles has raised concerns about political representation and hopes for a cross-racial movement for a more just city. Recent leaked city councl tapes show things are far from settled.
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SOURCE: Los Angeles Review of Books
10/26/2022
California Historians and Writers Remember Mike Davis
Matt Garcia, William Deverell and others share personal reflections on their personal and professional intersections with the mold-breaking historian and activist.
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SOURCE: The Nation
10/25/2022
Mike Davis, 1946-2022
by Jon Wiener
"Mike hated being called “a prophet of doom.” Yes, LA did explode two years after City of Quartz; the fires and floods did get more intense after Ecology of Fear, and of course a global pandemic did follow The Monster at Our Door."
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SOURCE: The New Republic
10/19/2022
LA Council Racism Shows Ethnic Politics Covers for War by Landlords on Renters
The recorded remarks in a council meeting show that while Angelenos have been encouraged to vote along ethnic lines, their representatives have been more intersted in catering to politically powerful landlords and developers.
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SOURCE: ScienceNews
10/13/2022
Drone Photos Give New Insight into Mesopotamian City Structure
Evidence of separate clusters of urbanization on islands separated by marshland suggests that ancient Lagash did not grow out from one administrative and ceremonial center but was a polycentric urban zone.
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SOURCE: Boston Globe
10/5/2022
The Limits of Nonprofit Urban Development in Boston
by Claire Dunning
In Boston, nonprofit agencies became the principal vehicle for redevelopment. While they could empower residents of poor communities to compete for grants and negotiate with city authorities, they couldn't make a deep impact on inequality in the city and let city agencies off the hook for discriminatory policies.
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SOURCE: New York Times
10/4/2022
Greg Melville Tells America's History Through its Cemeteries
"What does the act of memorializing, who is remembered and who is left out, tell us about how people lived, what they valued, and the way we live now?"
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SOURCE: NPR
9/27/2022
Recovering the Story of the Black Men who were the Nation's First Paramedics
In Pittsburgh's Hill District in the 1960s, a group of Black men from a neighborhood where many were considered unemployable revolutionized emergency medical response. But the story of Freedom House has been suppressed.
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