urban history

• 
• 5/9/2021
  

  Mudlarking: Searching for Lost Treasure – and History – on the Banks of the Thames

  by Jason Sandy and Nick Stevens

  The Thames River's silty bottom and tidal patterns make its banks a repository of historical artifacts. Today's "mudlarks" have turned the old tradition of scavenging the banks for subsistence into a public archaeology project. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  5/5/2021
  

  Thirty Years after Mount Pleasant Erupted, a Push for Better Treatment Persists

  by Mike Amezcua

  Central American refugees living in Washington's Mount Pleasant neighborhood had fled US-backed repression but found harsh treatment by immigration authorities and local police. In 1991 frustration erupted. Today, the unrest still raises questions about citizenship and belonging. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/1/2021
  

  What History Can Teach Banks About Making Change

  by Destin Jenkins

  "Celebrating Juneteenth and recruiting more Black bankers is one thing. It is quite another for financial firms to use their unique power to actively undermine the systems that perpetuate racial inequality."

• 
• 5/2/2021
  

  Remember The Essential Workers After COVID: They Deserve Better

  by Joshua B. Freeman

  All of us literally owe our lives to our essential workers.  Let’s not forget it.  Giving them a fair shake is not only a moral obligation, it will make a better city for all of us.

• 
• SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
  4/27/2021
  

  Pandemic Lessons From the Era of ‘Les Miserables’

  Medical historian Ed Cohen describes the 1832 cholera outbreak as "imperial blowback," as the disease arrived in Europe from their colonies. Nearly 2% of the city's population died, but the aftermath saw an increase in migration from the countryside and a flourishing of public health-oriented planning. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Metropole
  4/26/2021
  

  The Perils Of Participation

  by Amanda Phillips de Lucas

  The construction of US Highway 40 in West Baltimore blighted a Black community with far-reaching results. But it's important to understand that road planners used a selective idea of participatory planning to manufacture community consent for the project. 

• 
• SOURCE: Public Books
  4/23/2021
  

  Urban Democracy's Documentarian

  Frederick Wiseman's documentaries valorize not only the institutions but the labor that makes local government function against the odds. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Metropole
  4/19/2021
  

  Right In The Way: Generations Of Highway Impacts In Houston

  by Kyle Shelton

  Houston's characteristic sprawl is enabled by continually expanding highways, which historically and today run through Black and Latino communities. 

• 
• 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.