Departments

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urban history

  • 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. 

  • 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.

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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. 

  • 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."

  • 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.