Crime in the City and the Curious Case of Philadelphia: Part II of the 2012 UHA

"Is their such a thing as Philadelphia exceptionalism?" asked one observer at this year's UHA.  Undoubtedly, over the past two UHA's (2010, 2012), Philadelphia has enjoyed the attentions of more than a few historians. With this in mind, ToM correspondents provide a glimpse at some of the work being done on the City of Brotherly Love.  Crime and policing emerged as another area of increased interest at this year's conference.  San Francisco's Chinatown, New York's Washington Heights, and yes, West Philadelphia provide case studies focusing on crime's influence on political mobilization, urban renewal, race relations and community activism. For part I of ToM's 2012 UHA coverage click …

Dog Days Classics: Lanny Budd, Upton Sinclair’s Ideal Idler

"It was profoundly true that movements of the spirit came first, and that events of history were consequences thereof." -Upton Sinclair, Wide is the Gate Several years ago I was directed toward Upton Sinclair’s socialist-minded quasi-spy novels about a young man named Lanning Prescott Budd. The 11 books span the breadth of time from the onset of The Great War to the rise of the Cold War, but as I have been able to acquire only the first half of the series, my investigation has followed Lanny only so far as the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. A New York Times reflection on the books gives a decent introduction to the protagonist: Born in 1900, he was the illegitimate child of an …

The Food Truck Conundrum: Urban Politics and Mobile Eats

When local DC cultural website DCist tweeted a celebratory announcement of the arrival of Chic-fil-A’s new roaming food truck in the nation’s capital, one might have thought the tweet rather ho-hum. At most, cries of corporate infringement on a burgeoning subculture might have been expected to ring out. However, within minutes several prominent DC restaurant proprietors responded with harsh admonishments, but not about aesthetics or subcultures. Perhaps most notably, Dean Gold owner of Cleveland Park’s popular Dino restaurant, rebuked DCist for publicizing the food truck of a company known to support anti-gay causes and legislation tweeting: ChickFilA_Fuckers hate gays and we need to …

Is the Beltline Bad for Atlanta?

Class has always been the shadow cast by New Urbanism.  The idea of curbing sprawl and promoting greater urban density runs up against material realities time and time again.  Consider Oregon’s much-lauded urban growth boundary system, which set a limit for growth around the state’s cities beginning in the 1970s.  The policy was put in place by a liberal Republican governor, Tom McCall, who hoped to prevent “grasping wastrels” from gobbling up Oregon’s farms and scenic countryside.  It has since promoted infill – intensive reuse of existing urban space, in lieu of expansion – and contributed to the famously walkable and bike-friendly urban culture of cities such as …

L.A. Confidential: California History and the 2012 Whitsett Seminar

If you've ever been to Los Angeles, you know beneath the sprawl lay one of the nation's most fascinating cities.  From Echo Park to Boyle Heights to Silver Lake to Malibu, Los Angeles collects vistas, peoples, highways, and film noir like few others. Beyond LA, California provides scholars with ample subjects from which to explore history both locally and nationally.  The network of public universities in Los Angeles and the state's other cities only furthers this process. The annual Whitsett Grad Student Seminar enables future academics to present their California research to professors and  graduate students working in similar fields. Cal State Northridge's Whitsett Professor of …

Why Rick Santorum Won In Iowa: A Historical Perspective

For several months prior to the Iowa Caucuses of January 3rd, 2012, Rick Santorum, the former US Senator from Pennsylvania, and his presidential campaign languished somewhere between obscurity and irrelevance. While nearly every candidate, starting with Michelle Bachman and followed in rapid-fire succession by Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Newt Gingrich, and Ron Paul, had risen to the top of the field as the possible challenger to frontrunner Mitt Romney, Santorum’s poll numbers remained frozen in the single digits. Despite having visited all of Iowa’s 99 counties—many more than once—and his invocations that he was the only “true conservative” in the field, on both social and economic …

Dog Days Classics: Revisiting the Long Twentieth Century

Today we begin to look at more recent works that influenced us -- at least "recent" in historians' terms, which in this case means 1994.  Last week we looked at classics like The American Political Tradition (1948) and Orientalism (1978).  Today we go all the way back to Renaissance Genoa to find the origins of the current capitalist death-spiral (or, as the Germans say, the pharfignewton) in Giovanni Arrighi's The Long Twentieth Century. Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times, 1994 Historians have a habit of expanding and contracting time to suit their schema – there is the “short twentieth century,” the “long …

Learning from Tiny Tower: Mobile Gaming and the Post-Industrial Society

Ever since Wii came along and swept everyone from me to my seventy year old retired Teamster uncle into the world of gaming, I’ve had a sneaking suspicion that video games have become a tool by which our future robot overlords are retraining us to perform various tasks after the big takeover.* Big Brain Academy, in particular, reminded me of those later scenes in 1984, when the Party had smashed every bone in Winston’s hands and he had to learn to write again using a big pencil, like a kindergartener. 4423… 3244. Do-re-mi…mi-re-do. Memorize the faces and match the frog to the dog. When a game tells me to take an order on the phone and then tell it back to the game – “calzone, …

Visions of the “Long Emergency”: How Will We Live After Peak Oil?

Stories about the end of the world are as old as culture itself. While many traditional belief systems posit history as an endless cycle of renewal, humans have often imagined time as having a beginning and an end, an origin story and an apocalypse or day of judgment. In modern society, these stories have often taken the form of dystopian literature; Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World depict a kind of “end of history,” where the despotism of politics and technology have extinguished humanity’s potential for progress, either by grinding people down with pain or numbing them with pleasure. More recently, we have seen tales of nuclear disaster (Cloud Atlas), environmental …

Stalking the Tax Man: The Pervasive Influence of the Property Tax Revolt

"Assessment Excess" To the Editor, In January of this year my retirement annuity was increased 1.3 percent due to the increase in the cost of living. In April of this year the city of Norfolk reassessed my property, raising it 6.87 percent. This is more than five times the cost of living percentage and will unfairly and excessively increase my property taxes. I understand some city officials in the area may consider the hike in tax revenues by this means as tax "windfalls" or "bonanzas." We all know better. Every penny comes from someone who must live within means not derived from windfall gains. According to figures in a recent Virginian-Pilot article, Norfolk can trim its tax …