Indigenous London: Native Travelers at the Heart of Empire
by Coll Thrush, Associate Professor of History
University of British Columbia
(Yale University Press, 2016)

An imaginative retelling of London’s history, framed through the experiences of Indigenous travelers who came to the city over the course of more than five centuries. London is famed both as the ancient center of a former empire and as a modern metropolis of bewildering complexity and diversity. In Indigenous London, historian Coll Thrush offers an imaginative vision of the city's past crafted from an almost entirely new perspective: that of Indigenous children, women, and men who traveled there, willingly or otherwise, from territories that became Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the United States, beginning in the sixteenth century. [more]

GUHP profile, Author website 

Brand New! To Be Free and French: Citizenship in France’s Atlantic Empire
by Lorelle D. Semley, Associate Professor of History
College of the Holy Cross
(Cambridge University Press, 2017)

The enduring symbol of the Haitian Revolution has long inspired subjects of French empire in the Americas and Africa struggling to define freedom and 'Frenchness'; for themselves, but Lorelle Semley reveals that this event was just one moment in a longer struggle for rights during French colonial rule. Focusing on urban enclaves on both sides of the Atlantic, Semley examines the ways in which colonial subjects used methods ranging from armed struggle to literary expression to challenge and exploit the promises of French Republican rhetoric. Often during moments of crisis shaped by the social and physical landscape of their urban environment, they defined an alternative French citizenship, which recognized difference, particularly race, as part of a 'universal'; French identity. Spanning Atlantic port cities in Haiti, Senegal, Martinique, Benin, and France, this book is not only a study in Atlantic urban history but it is also major contribution to scholarship on citizenship, race, empire, and gender that sheds new light on human rights and immigration debates in contemporary France. [more]

GUHP profile, Author website

Brand New! Emotional Cities: Debates on Urban Change in Berlin and Cairo, 1860-1910
by Joseph Ben Prestel, Assistant Professor of History 
The Free University of Berlin
(Oxford Univeresity Press, 2017)

Emotional Cities offers an innovative account of the history of cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. Analyzing debates about emotions and urban change, it questions the assumed dissimilarity of the history of European and Middle Eastern cities during this period. The author shows that between 1860 and 1910, contemporaries in both Berlin and Cairo began to negotiate the transformation of the urban realm in terms of emotions. [more]

GUH blog entry, GUHP profile, Author website 

"The Sundry Acquaintances of Dr. Albino Z. Sycip: Exploring the Shanghai-Manila Connection, circa 1910–1940"
by Phillip Guingona, Assistant Professor of History 
Wells College
Journal of World History, vol. 27, no. 1 (2016): 27-52

This microhistorical account of the understudied Philippine-Chinese leader Albino Z. Sycip explores the many early twentieth-century connections between Shanghai and Manila that he fostered and represented. Coming from an elite background that linked him with influential people in the United States, China, and the Philippines, Sycip built a transnational network of acquaintances. [more]

GUHP profile

SACRPH
Society for American City and Regional Planning History

GUHP salutes our dear colleagues at SACRPH on the final run-up to the organization’s Biennial National Conference on Planning History in Cleveland, Ohio from October 26-29. We are grateful for SACRPH’s kind invitation to hold our first Roundtable on Global Urban History at the conference on Saturday, the 28th from 2:30pm to 4:15pm.

The Society for American City and Regional Planning History (SACRPH) is an interdisciplinary organization dedicated to promoting scholarship on the planning of cities and metropolitan regions over time, and to bridging the gap between the scholarly study of cities and the practice of urban planning. {more] on main web site. The organization’s members come from a range of professions and areas of interest, and include historians, architects, planners, environmentalists, landscape designers, public policy makers, preservationists, community organizers, and students and scholars from across the country and around the world. [more]