Brand New    Street Archives and City Life: Popular Intellectuals in Postcolonial Tanzania
by Emily Callaci (History, Wisconsin Madison)
(Duke University Press, 2017)

In Street Archives and City Life Emily Callaci maps a new terrain of political and cultural production in mid- to late twentieth-century Tanzanian urban landscapes. While the postcolonial Tanzanian ruling party (TANU) adopted a policy of rural socialism known as Ujamaa between 1967 and 1985, an influx of youth migrants to the city of Dar es Salaam generated innovative forms of urbanism through the production and circulation of what Callaci calls street archives. [more]

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Latino City: Immigration and Urban Crisis in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1945-2000
by Llana Barber (American Studies, SUNY Old Westbury)
(University of North Carolina Press, 2017)

Latino City interweaves the histories of urban crisis in U.S. cities and imperial migration from Latin America by exploring the transformation of Lawrence, Massachusetts into a Latino-majority city in the late twentieth century. Pushed to migrate by political and economic circumstances shaped by the long history of U.S. intervention in Latin America, poor and working-class Puerto Ricans and Dominicans then had to reckon with the segregation, joblessness, disinvestment, and profound stigma that plagued U.S. cities during the crisis era, particularly in the Rust Belt. Facing hostility from their neighbors, exclusion from local governance, inadequate city services, and limited job prospects, Latinos fought and organized for the right to make a home in Lawrence. [more]

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The Habitable City in China: Urban History in the Twentieth Century
Edited by Toby Lincoln (History, Leicester)
and Tao Xu (History, Shanghai Academy of Social Science)
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

This book offers a new perspective on Chinese urban history by exploring cities as habitable spaces. China, the world’s most populous nation, is now its newest urban society, and the pace of this unprecedented historical transformation has increased in recent decades. The contributors to this book conceptualise cities as first providing the necessities of life, and then becoming places in which the quality of life can be improved. They focus on how cities have been made secure during times of instability, how their inhabitants have consumed everything from the simplest of foods to the most expensive luxuries, and how they have been planned as ideal spaces. [more]

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"Alexandria, 1898: Nodes, Networks, and Scales in Late Nineteenth-Century Egypt,"
Comparative Studies in Society and History
by Lucia Carminati (History, Arizona)
Vol. 59, no. 1 January 2017, 127-153

In October 1898, the Italian vice-consul in Alexandria charged a group of Italians with participating in an anarchist plot to attack German Emperor Wilhelm II during his planned tour through Egypt and Palestine. This collective arrest produced unexpected outcomes, left a trail of multi-lingual documents, and illuminated specific forms of late nineteenth-century Mediterranean migration. Anarchists were among those who frequently crossed borders and they were well aware of and connected to what was happening elsewhere: they sent letters, circulated manifestos, raised and transported money, and helped fugitive comrades. They maintained nodes of subversion and moved along circuits of solidarity. [more]

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