In the Department of History, one may study cities across space and time, from various methodological perspectives.  Faculty members investigate urban spaces and urban issues, approaching the city through the lenses of political history, social history, cultural history, legal history, public history, history of science, and environmental history.  Studying cities and metropolitan areas in North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, these historians investigate issues of urbanization, community formation, racial and ethnic divides, religious and gendered experiences, intellectual life, and historic preservation.

Graduate courses offered in urban history in recent years include “The Metropolis in Europe and America,” “Paris, London, and Berlin,” “Urban Environmental History,” “Community History,” and “Historic Preservation.”  Many graduate students, both in the general and public history programs, work in various aspects of urban history. Urban history is also a major staple of the undergraduate curriculum, with courses on urban and suburban history, as well as specialized areas such as medieval cities and Phoenix.  The faculty is exploring new methods such as GIS to enhance learning, including lesson plans that incorporate urban themes (see the History Department Funded Projects description of the GIS project).

History faculty also are engaged in urban history as publishing scholars, teachers, and in other professional activities. Department members participate in the major urban history organizations, including the Urban History Association, which held its 3rd Biennial meeting at Arizona State University in 2006, as well as the European Association of Urban Historians, H‑Urban, and the Society for American City and Regional Planning History.  At the university level, they have drawn on the support of the Institute for Humanities Research to organize a monthly seminar on “Cultures of Urban Space: International Perspectives,” which has included past speakers such as Professor Vanessa Schwartz on the “Urban Icons” project.  In the spring of 2005, they organized a weekly interdisciplinary “Phoenix Seminar” involving faculty and students from across the university.  Both faculty and graduate students seek to add an historical perspective to various university and community efforts to understand Phoenix and other desert cities.

Resources outside the department create a vibrant interdisciplinary environment for the study of urban issues at the University. These include various schools and departments such as Architecture & Landscape Design, Geographical Sciences, Global Studies, and Human Evolution & Social Change; programs in African and African-American Studies and American Indian Studies; and a variety of interdisciplinary centers and institutes, including the Center for Asian Research, North American Center for Transborder Studies (Canada, U.S., Mexico), Decision Center for a Desert City (DCDC), Global Institute of Sustainability (GIOS),  and Urban Ecology IGERT program. As part of this scholarly endeavor, the Department of History at Arizona State offers a truly global, interdisciplinary approach to urban history.

Faculty

Edward Escobar is the author of Race, Police, and the Making of a Political Identity: Mexican Americans and the Los Angeles Police Department, 1900-1945 (U. of California Press, 1999). His article, “Bloody Christmas and the Irony of Police Professionalism,” won the Urban History Association’s Award for Best Article in 2003.

Rachel Fuchs has examined gender, public welfare, and community networks in major European cities, especially Paris in the 19th and 20th centuries.   Her books include Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge, 2005) and Poor and Pregnant in Paris: Strategies for Survival in the Nineteenth Century (Rutgers, 1992).

Monica Green’s interests in urban history include a course on “Medieval Cities.”  Her research has focused on the famous medieval medical “school” of Salerno in southern Italy, and recently she has begun a collaborative project on the medical history of later medieval Marseille.

Gayle Gullett studies women’s political activism in Los Angeles and San Francisco during the turn of the last century. She has documented how these women built the state suffrage movement. Currently she focuses on Los Angeles, asking how organized women and newspaper women, black and white, constructed modernity.

Christiane Harzig has co-edited Peasant Maids, Urban Women: From the European Countryside to Urban America (Cornell, 1997), juxtaposing life in the (rural) cultures of origin with that in the urban environment.  Her current study, Global Migration Systems of Domestic Workers, examines migration patterns that most often end in urban environments.

Paul Hirt is an environmental historian currently completing a manuscript entitled “The Wired Northwest: How Electric Power Transformed Life and Landscape in the Pacific Northwest.” He is also working with scholars at the Global Institute of Sustainability on water supplies and urban growth in Arizona. 

Dirk Hoerder has a strong interest in urban mobility, rural-urban migrations, and ethnocultural interaction in the metropolis. He has co-edited Hoerder and Rainer-Olaf Schultze, eds., Socio-Cultural Problems in the Metropolis: Comparative Analyses (ISL-Verlag, 2000) and authored Creating Societies: Immigrant Lives in Canada (McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1999).

Anna Holian is a European historian interested in 20th century urban history, modernist architecture, urban planning, and political-ideological uses of space.  She is currently completing a study of displaced persons in post-1945 Munich entitled “Between National Socialism and Soviet Communism: The Narration of Community among Displaced Persons in Germany, 1945-1955.”

Wendy Plotkin is a historian of the modern U.S. who works on urban history, urban social theory, and urban historical GIS.  Her research has examined the politics of rent control, race, neighborhoods, and housing, with a forthcoming book entitled “Deeds of Mistrust: Race, Housing, and Restrictive Covenants in Chicago, 1900-1953.” 

Victoria Thompson is an urban cultural historian of France and the French empire.  Her work includes The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830–1870 (Johns Hopkins, 2000) and “Paris in Ruins: The Revolutionary Urban Landscape and the Politics of the Past” (in progress).

Philip VanderMeer is a historian of the U.S. whose research emphasizes community and urban development.  He has published Phoenix Rising (Heritage, 2002) and “Postwar Phoenix” in Provincias Internas: Continuing Frontiers (Arizona Historical Society, 2007), and is finishing a full study of Phoenix entitled “The Making of a Desert City.”

Jannelle Warren-Findley is co-director of the Graduate Program in Public History.  She is currently completing a study entitled, Governor’s Island, New York Harbor: A Historic Resource Survey, 1600- 1996. She is interested in historic preservation in urban settings worldwide.