urban history

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/26/nyregion/nyc-vo
  

  Inside Decades of Nepotism and Bungling at the N.Y.C. Elections Board

  “I expect the B.O.E. to pull this off — there’s no other option. It’s the most important election of our lifetime,” said Scott Stringer, the city comptroller. “But we shouldn’t have to hold our breath because of their gross incompetence.”

• 
• SOURCE: Reuters
  10/19/2020
  

  'Slavery and the City' Tour Sheds Light on London's Dark Past

  An organization advocating for the teaching of Black history in British schools has organized walking tours demonstrating the degree to which the city's financial and political institutions were tied to slavery. 

• 
• SOURCE: Dumbarton Oaks Library
  10/19/2020
  

  Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City (Virtual Lecture, 11/12/2020)

  Urban historian A. K. Sandoval-Strausz discusses the impact of Latino immigrants on revived urban centers in the late 20th century, sponsored by the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library. 

• 
• SOURCE: Mother Jones
  10/13/2020
  

  A Scholar of American Doom Doesn’t See How Capitalism Can Fix This Crisis

  "There are probably a billion and a half people, maybe more, maybe 2 billion, in the informal working class who have simply been triaged already in advance. So the fate of a very large minority of humanity has been determined now."

• 
• SOURCE: The Metropole (Urban History Association)
  10/15/2020
  

  UHA Announces Award Winners

  The Urban History Association announces its annual awards for best book, best journal article, and best dissertation.

• 
• SOURCE: Orange County Register
  10/9/2020
  

  CSUF Professor is Digitally Mapping the History of Gay Spaces in America

  A new digital project by Eric Gonzaba and Amanda Regan maps out places listed in gay travel guides from the 1960s to the present, giving new insight into how gay people outside of tolerant cities created social spaces. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Metropole (Urban History Association)
  10/13/2020
  

  “Where The Waters Reflect The Clouds”: Examining Minnesota’s Indigenous History

  by Katrina Phillips

  "Recent events have forced Minneapolitans and Minnesotans to reckon with the state’s treatment of historically excluded populations. For the original inhabitants of what’s now Minneapolis, though, resistance and activism are nothing new."

• 
• 10/11/2020
  

  Paris, City of Dreams: Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann and the Creation of Paris

  by Jeff Roquen

  Nothing can compare to a visit to Paris, but until international travel resumes, readers can learn how the modern city was built through Mary McAulliffe's book. 

• 
• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  10/7/2020
  

  Accuracy and Authenticity in a Digital City

  by Anne Sarah Rubin

  The technological capacity to render the city of the past in minute detail doesn't replace the work of interpreting and understanding how people lived in its spaces.

• 
• SOURCE: Gothamist
  10/5/2020
  

  Are Trump And Biden Fighting About Abolishing The Suburbs, Or Desegregating Them?

  Beneath the rhetoric rests a genuine policy debate over the extent to which the federal government needs to push municipalities to undo segregation. This debate has been going on since 1968, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act.

• 
• SOURCE: The Metropole (Urban History Association)
  10/5/2020
  

  “Entrepreneurial Greed” — A Review Of Crack: Rock Cocaine, Street Capitalism, And The Decade Of Greed

  David Farber's book examines the entrepreneurial culture of crack cocaine and how the drug trade meshed with Reagan-era changes in urban political economy.

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/1/2020
  

  D.C. Statehood Is Good for the Democrats, Good for Democracy

  by George Derek Musgrove and Chris Myers Asch

  DC statehood will secure the citizenship rights of the city's residents and begin to repair the crisis of legitimacy caused by the gross imbalance of political representation in the U.S. Senate. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/1/2020
  

  With Evictions Looming, Cities Revisit a Housing Experiment From the ’70s (video)

  by Retro Report

  The looming evictions crisis is prompting housing policy experts to reconsider government programs that would enable the tenants of a building to secure loans to purchase their buildings cooperatively. A video from Retro Report explores how the battle to save the International Hotel in San Francisco for its low-income tenants prefigured today's policy debates.

• 
• SOURCE: Black Perspectives
  9/18/2020
  

  Police Power and the Election of Newark’s First Black Mayor

  by Andrew Grim

  Newark’s experience cautions today’s activists to be wary of channeling the urgency, the radicalism, the moral authority of this current moment into electoral politics.

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/24/2020
  

  The Origins of Policing in America

  Historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad and Media Studies scholar Chenjerai Kumanyika explain how American policing grew out of efforts to control the labor of poor and enslaved people.

• 
• SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
  9/21/2020
  

  A Neighborhood’s Race Affects Home Values More Now Than in 1980

  by Brentin Mock

  The real estate industry has adopted appraisal standards in response to fair housing laws that are, on the surface, race-neutral. But they don't account for the ways that racism has lowered the sale value in diverse neighborhoods, and still penalize Black and Latino homeowners. 

• 
• SOURCE: Decaturish
  9/16/2020
  

  ‘The Right Kind of Neighbors’ – Race and the Origins of Avondale Estates

  by Kathryn Wilson

  An Atlanta suburb's history connects to the history of American race relations, beginning as a planned all-white community with a segregated Black enclave and ties to the KKK. 

• 
• SOURCE: Belt
  9/1/2020
  

  Cleveland and Chicago: Cities of Segregation

  "Berlin had a wall, but they took to it with hammers and pickaxes and tore it down. Cleveland and Chicago have walls too, but not the kind you can tear down with a pickaxe. They’ve been erected in places that are harder to reach than a river or a street: bitter, entrenched hearts and minds, both black and white, going back for generations, on either side of town."

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/16/2020
  

  The Man Who Made Us Feel for the Animals (review)

  A new book uses the life story of ASPCA founder Henry Bergh to illustrate the interdependence of humans and non-human animals in urban society. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Metropole (Urban History Association)
  9/10/2020
  

  A Neoliberal Love Story, From Public Housing To Golf: A Review Of East Lake Meadows: A Public Housing Story

  by Courtney Rawlings

  Courtney Rawlings argues that a recent documentary on public housing has a blind spot for the politics that make decent housing precarious or even unavailable to millions.