urban history 
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
4/14/2021
How White Fears of ‘Negro Domination’ Kept D.C. Disenfranchised for Decades
George Derek Musgrove and Chris Myers-Asch, authors of "Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation's Capital" have recently written a report for a nonprofit advocating DC statehood. They argue that Congressional efforts to disempower DC residents after 1871 have reflected White fears of Black political power.
-
SOURCE: The Baffler
4/8/2021
The Health Care Crucible (Review)
Gabriel Winant's "The Next Shift" examines the shift from industrial manufacturing toward care work as the economic base of the Rust Belt, where profit comes from treating the old, sick, and poor of one generation of the working class through the labor of the next generation.
-
SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
4/8/2021
How a Plan to Save Buildings Fell Apart
The imperatives of historic preservation are often at cross-purposes with the goals of community organizations. Does the failure of one preservation plan in Chicago offer lessons for the future?
-
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
4/5/2021
What Manhattan Beach’s Racist Land Grab Really Meant
by Alison Rose Jefferson
Debates over the redress of past racial injustice must acknowledge that some past actions have harmed communities in ways that can't be repaired, including the loss of space for communal leisure or equal access to everyday pleasures.
-
SOURCE: Wall Street Journal
4/2/2021
Does New York Still Want to Be the Capital of the World?
by Kenneth T. Jackson
Local development politics threaten a development in lower Manhattan, an example of the difficulty in building affordable housing that threatens the city's vitality.
-
SOURCE: The Metropole
3/30/2021
The Emergence Of Gangsta Rap — A Review Of To Live And Defy In LA
by Katherine Rye Jewell
A review by historian Katherine Rye Jewell of Felicia Angeja Viator's new book on the rise of "gangsta" rap music in the context of racism, poverty and policing in South Los Angeles in the 1980s.
-
SOURCE: The Nation
4/6/2021
The Age of Care (Review of Gabriel Winant's "The Next Shift")
by Nelson Lichtenstein
Labor historian Nelson Lichtenstein says Gabriel Winant's book on the rise of the care industry is the story of community change in the last 50 years, with union retiree health care dollars reabsorbed by capital through the treatment of diseases of despair provoked by deindustrialization (with care provided by a workforce of women and people of color).
-
SOURCE: The Metropole
4/5/2021
The Myth And The Truth About Interstate Highways
by Sarah Jo Peterson
A historian with experience in transportation planning takes a close look at the way that canonical texts in the highway planning field have erased the politics of road building and the way that the interstate highway system was always tied to urban land use planning and urban renewal.
-
SOURCE: The Atlantic
3/24/2021
Why America’s Great Crime Decline Is Over
Sociologist Patrick Sharkey examines the trajectory of crime in modern America and rejects single-cause explanations.
-
SOURCE: National Trust for Historic Preservation
3/12/2021
Settlement Houses: Sites of Service, Access, and Connection for Women
by Tamar Rabinowitz
"Progressive Era settlement houses fostered the activism and intellectual creativity, as well as the conflicts, that would profoundly shape American modernity in the 20th century."
-
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
3/17/2021
John Singleton Saw a Tenderness in Black L.A. that the World Refused to Look At
John Singleton's films showed the fullness of life in South Central Los Angeles during the tumultuous 1990s that the news media didn't always portray.
-
SOURCE: Washington Post
3/13/2021
A Push to Save Landmarks of the ‘Great Migration’ — and Better Understand Today’s Racial Inequities
A south Chicago house once owned by legendary blues singer Muddy Waters is being rehabilitated as a museum of the city's Black music and culture, just one of many battles to preserve the built environment and material history of the African American "Great Migration" to Chicago and other northern cities.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
3/12/2021
A Mansion Sale Built on the Myth of a Notorious Cow
The Chicago Fire of 1871 has been the wellspring of plenty of myths. A real estate listing for a southside mansion is just the latest. Historians Carl Smith and Ann Durkin Keating comment.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
3/11/2021
This Black Family Ran a Thriving Beach Resort 100 Years Ago. They Want Their Land Back.
The descendants of the Bruce family seek restitution for the taking of their family's beachfront land, which had been Southern California's first beach resort serving African Americans. Historian Alison Rose Jefferson says recreational access was an underappreciated facet of the struggle for justice.
-
SOURCE: YouTube
8/15/2020
Wuppertal Schwebebahn 1902 & 2015 Side By Side Video
A composite video of Berlin shows the same Berlin streets in 1902 and 2015.
-
SOURCE: Black Perspectives
3/9/2021
The Roots of Racial and Spatial Inequality
by Kimberley S. Johnson
As part of the AAIHS's roundtable on Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's "Race For Profit," urban studies scholar Kimberley Johnson looks at the ways that generations of housing policy enabled banks to write predatory loans to Black buyers, profiting first by high interest, then by foreclosure, while blaming outcomes on the individual irresponsibility of Black borrowers.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
2/28/2021
A New York Drugstore Nearly as Storied as the City Itself
"The store, on Sixth Avenue between West 8th and 9th Streets, is in the very center of Greenwich Village. And its landmark interior, which dates to 1902, is wonderfully preserved, with its original tiled floor and oak shelves."
-
SOURCE: Black Perspectives
3/3/2021
Online Roundtable: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s ‘Race for Profit’
Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, will sponsor a virtual roundtable on the award-winning "Race For Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership" with new essays being released beginning March 8.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
Should Black Northerners Move Back to the South?
by Tanisha C. Ford
Historian Tanisha C. Ford reviews Charles M. Blow's book, which advocates for a Reverse Great Migration to empower both Black Americans and progressive policies. She concludes it's an intriguing idea but oversimplifies the history of migration, disenfranchisement, and activism by Black southerners and their allies.
-
SOURCE: New York Times
2/25/2021
Searching for Our Urban Future in the Ruins of the Past
Annalee Newitz's book on lost cities debunks the idea of sudden, catastrophic collapse. But the death of cities does show that humanity is vulnerable to change that makes centuries-old ways of life untenable.
News
- The 'America First Caucus' Is Backtracking, But Its Mistaken Ideas About 'Anglo-Saxon' History Still Have Scholars Concerned
- ‘Prejudice’ Exposed? Jane Austen’s Links to Slavery ‘Interrogated’
- 2021 Wolfson Prize Shortlist Announced
- The Chauvin Verdict: ‘The Terrain Going Forward Will Not Be the Same’
- 'The Making Of Biblical Womanhood' Tackles Contradictions In Religious Practice