Urban History - Urban Biography

Urban Biography

Urban biography is the narrative history of a city, and often reaches a general audience. Urban biographies cover the interrelationships among various dimensions, such as politics, demography, business, high culture, popular culture, housing, neighborhoods, and ethnic groups. It covers municipal government as well as physical expansion, growth and decline. Historians often focus on the largest and most dominant city—usually the national capital—which geographers call a "primate city."

Some representative urban biographies are:

• Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace. Gotham: a history of New York City to 1898 (2000)
• S. G. Checkland, The Upas Tree: Glasgow, 1875-1975 (1981)
• Geoffrey Cotterell, Amsterdam, The Life of a City (1972)
• Janet Abu-Lughod, Cairo; 1001 Years of City Victorious (1971)
• Christopher Hibbert, London, the Biography of a City (1969)
• Robert Hughes, Barcelona (1992)
• Colin Jones. Paris: Biography of a City (2004)
• Blake McKelvey. Rochester (4 vol, 1961), Rochester NY
• Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography (2012)
• Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago (3 vol 1957), to 1893.
• Roy Porter, London: A Social History (1998)
• Alexandra Ritchie, Faust's Metropolis: A History of Berlin (1998)
• Ronald Taylor, Berlin and its Culture: A Historical Portrait (1997), considers literature, music, theater, painting, and decorative arts.

Historians have developed typologies of cities, emphasizing their geographic location and economic specialization. In the United States Carl Bridenbaugh was a pioneer in the historiography. He emphasized the major port cities on the East Coast, the largest of which were Boston and Philadelphia, each with fewer than 40,000 people at the time of the American Revolution. Other historians have covered the port cities up and down the East Coast, the Gulf Coast, and the West Coast, along with the river ports along the Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri rivers. Industrialization began in New England, and several small cities have scholarly histories. The railroad cities of the West, stretching from Chicago to Kansas City to Wichita to Denver have been well treated. Blake McKelvey provides an encyclopedic overview of the function's of major cities in The Urbanization of America, 1860-1915 (1963), and The Emergence of Metropolitan America, 1915-1966 (1968)