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Aerial view of the suburbs.

How Racist Policies Destroyed Public Housing and Created the American Suburbs

The systematic post-war displacement of communities of color.
by Tracy Rosenthal, Leonardo Vilchis via Literary Hub on September 25, 2024

Read Another Book

The Power Broker leaves us ill-equipped to understand or confront the struggles that face the city today.
by Henry Grabar via Slate on September 16, 2024
The Gateway Arch in St. Louis.
partner

Walt Disney Presents Manifest Destiny

On the St. Louis theme park that never made it past the drawing board.
by Devin Thomas O’Shea via HNN on April 30, 2024
Map of Southeast DC showing the Anacostia River

The Anacostia and Residential Displacement in Postwar Southeast DC

The long-polluted Anacostia bisects the District’s Potomac waterfront, segregating the majority-Black Southeast from the rest of the capital city.
by S. D. Hodell via The Metropole on April 17, 2024
Grid Lock in New York City.
Exhibit

Traffic Jam

Car culture is so pervasive that many people take it for granted. This exhibit shows how history can serve as our “blind spot detection,” enabling us to see new possibilities for the future.
partner

NIMBYs and YIMBYs Have More in Common Than It Might Seem

NIMBYs were citizen activists who set a model for participatory democracy that YIMBYs should follow.
by Brian Balogh via Made By History on February 6, 2024
A modern paper map of Boston, marked with Sharpie lines.

Boston's Map, Explained

Boston has more "made" land than any other American city.
by Daniel Steiner via YouTube on October 26, 2023
1906 plan of proposed street widening in San Francisco.

Putting Chinatown on the Map: Resisting Displacement through Infrastructural Advocacy

How San Francisco's Chinatown community used infrastructure as a conduit for identity, empowerment, and resilience.
by Deland Chen via Norman B. Leventhal Map & Education Center on September 15, 2023
A photograph of Dennis Lehane next to the cover of his book, Small Mercies.

The Other South

Coming to terms with Boston’s racist legacy in “Small Mercies."
by Steve Nathans-Kelly, Dennis Lehane via Chicago Review of Books on May 11, 2023
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas leading Washington Post editors on a hike along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, as part of his campaign to prevent the construction of a highway along its route, Maryland, 1954.

The Frontier Justice

William O. Douglas was a strong advocate of conservation, but as a Supreme Court justice his involvement in such issues was often ethically questionable.
by Jed S. Rakoff via New York Review of Books on May 4, 2023

Anatomy of an ‘American Transit Disaster’

In his new book, historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom chronicles the collapse of public transportation in US cities — and explains who really deserves the blame.
by David Zipper, Nicholas Dagen Bloom via CityLab on April 27, 2023
original

Redlining is Only Part of the Story

An annotated collection of resources from the Bunk archive that help explain the long history of housing discrimination.
by Julian Maxwell Hayter on October 5, 2022
Dancing crowds and a DJ at the 2022 Capitol Hill Block Party in Seattle, Washington

How the Block Party Became an Urban Phenomenon

“That spirit of community, which we all talk about as the roots of hip-hop, really originates in that block party concept.”
by Briana A. Thomas via Smithsonian on August 10, 2022
A statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which was previously on display at the U.S. Capitol, now resides at the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in Richmond.

Richmond Tore Down its Statues — and Revealed a New Angle on History

After the 2020 removal of Confederate memorials, museums provide a place to confront the ugly past and find a way forward.
by Philip Kennicott via Washington Post on July 19, 2022
Albert Turner and Bob Mants are walking directly behind Williams and Lewis across Edmund Pettus Bridge
partner

Biden’s Push for an Infrastructure Presidency Risks Sacrificing Black Communities

Infrastructure has a long history of cloaking racism and preventing justice.
by N. D. B. Connolly via Made By History on March 15, 2022
Map and photo of Seneca Village

Let’s Talk About the Taking of Black Land

From Seneca Village to “urban renewal,” the government has claimed Black property—rarely with the “just compensation” promised by the Fifth Amendment.
by Elie Mystal via The Nation on February 19, 2022
Fast food with the seal of the president on the containers.

How the State Created Fast Food

Because of consistent government intervention in the industry, we might call fast food the quintessential cuisine of global capitalism.
by Alex Park via Current Affairs on January 25, 2022
Screen capture of a Black man standing in an urban residential neighborhood, speaking in the documentary "Who Killed the Fourth Ward?"

How “Who Killed Fourth Ward?” Challenged the Nature of Documentary Filmmaking

James Blue’s film investigated the destruction of a Black neighborhood in Houston, but it is also a powerful self-interrogation.
by Richard Brody via The New Yorker on January 21, 2022
Photograph of Robert Moses on a background collage of a blueprint and a photo of passengers waiting in Penn Station.

Robert Moses Helped Ruin Penn Station. He'd Have Made it Easier to Fix, Too.

Preservationists like Jane Jacobs are urbanist heroes. But their rules can stifle.
by Samuel Goldman via The Week on December 10, 2021
A crowd gathered around a railroad track at the ceremony marking the completion of the first transcontinental railroad.

Breaking the Myth About America’s ‘Great’ Railroad Expansion

Historian Richard White on the greed, ineptitude and economic cost behind the transcontinental railroads, and the implications for infrastructure policy today.
by Richard White, Jake Blumgart via Governing on November 18, 2021
FDR with eyes crossed out with red line

Is It Time to Cancel FDR?

Today’s progressives are children of the old Republican Party, not the New Deal Democrats. Roosevelt and his followers stood for nearly everything they oppose.
by Michael Lind via Tablet on April 11, 2021
Photograph of a former slave interviewed by the Federal Writers' Projects

Stories of Slavery, From Those Who Survived It

The Federal Writers’ Project narratives provide an all-too-rare link to our past.
by Clint Smith via The Atlantic on February 9, 2021

Walt Disney's Empty Promise

For so many of the millions of tourists who come to Orlando, this—Disney, Universal Studios, I-Drive, all of it—stands in for America itself.
by Kent Russell via The Paris Review on July 10, 2020
Woman in the doorway of a kitchen.

Abolish Oil

The New Deal's legacies of infrastructure and economic development, and entrenching structural racism, reveal the potential and mistakes to avoid for the Green New Deal.
by Reinhold Martin via Places Journal on June 16, 2020
An row of small suburban houses, with an SUV parked in a driveway and an American flag in the foreground.

Trump Doesn’t Understand Today’s Suburbs—And Neither Do You

Suburbs are getting more diverse, but that doesn't mean they’re woke.
by Thomas J. Sugrue, Zack Stanton via Politico Magazine on June 8, 2020

American Bottom

Designed as a bucolic working-class suburb of St. Louis, the nearly all-black town of Centreville now floods with raw sewage every time it rains.
by Walter Johnson via Boston Review on January 23, 2020

The History of Cities Is About How We Get to Work

From ancient Rome to modern Atlanta, the technologies that allow people to commute in about 30 minutes have defined the shape of cities.
by Jonathan English via CityLab on August 29, 2019
partner

Freedom's Fortress

Exploring Virginia’s Fort Monroe – the place where slavery began in British North America, and where, during the Civil War, it began to unravel.
via Future Of America's Past on August 8, 2019

The Lincoln Memorial as a Pyramid? That Wasn’t the Craziest Idea Pitched a Century Ago

Congress had the final say on the design for the slain president’s monument. The competition was intense.
by Ronald G. Shafer via Retropolis on May 29, 2019
Firefighters cutting a trench as a blaze approaches.

The Case for Letting Malibu Burn

Many of California’s native ecosystems evolved to burn. But modern fire suppression creates fuel for catastrophic fires. Is it time for a change?
by Mike Davis via Longreads on December 4, 2018
853 map of San Francisco by the U. S. Coast Survey

Demolishing the California Dream: How San Francisco Planned Its Own Housing Crisis

Today's housing crisis in San Francisco originates from zoning laws that segregated racial groups and income levels.
by Hunter Oatman-Stanford via Collectors Weekly on September 21, 2018
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