Upcoming events

Switch to Calendar View

• IMAGINING THE FUTURE OF URBAN HISTORY: DIGITAL TOOLS AND COLLABORATION

  • When
    24 Jul 2025
  •  
    12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
  • Location
    Zoom

  Register

  
  

  IMAGINING THE FUTURE OF URBAN HISTORY: DIGITAL TOOLS AND COLLABORATION 

  
  

  UHA Zoom Panel 

  
  

  Thursday, July 24, 2025 

  
  

  12 Noon, EDT

  
  

  Event Description:

  
  

  The way we do urban history is changing. In 2023, the American Historical Association approved guidelines that broadened the definition of historical scholarship. In addition to traditional modes of historical writing, such as academic monographs and peer-reviewed journal articles, the new AHA guidelines also include op-eds, public lectures, podcasts, and other formats. 

  
  

  Join us for a dynamic academic event featuring a panel that surveys various ways in which artists, scholars, and critics are embracing new methods in urban history. The discussion will highlight digital archiving, public history initiatives, and the impact of digital tools on historical scholarship and education. This panel offers a unique opportunity to engage with current debates and future directions in the rapidly evolving field of digital history. Open to students, faculty, and the public.

  
  

  Join us! Upon registration, you will receive an email to confirm your registration and a Zoom link for the event. 

  Ryan Purcell, Moderator 

  Modern American History 

  Fordham University 

  
  

  Jessica Lynne

  Writer, critic, and founding editor of ARTS.BLACK, an online journal of art criticism from Black perspectives.

  
  

  Lynne’s five-part audio series features a dynamic cast of speakers who reflect on the legacy and cultural impact of the Harlem Renaissance.

  See Lynne’s podcast on the Harlem Renaissance for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Harlem is Everywhere

  
  

  Stephen Petrus, Director of Public History Programs

  LaGuardia and Wagner Archives

  
  

  Petrus’s work demonstrates how digital historical exhibitions can expand audiences and deliver the content directly to classrooms. 

  See Petrus’s online exhibit The Battle for Intro. 2: The New York City Gay Rights Bill, 1971-1986 

  
  

  Eric Haeusler, Postdoctoral Research Scholar

  D-ARCH, ETH Zürich 

  and

  Thomas Hänsli, Director GTA Digital

  
  

  The Archive of the Urban Age combines historical scholarship with cutting-edge digital methods to reinterpret the emergence of the “Urban Age” as a global discourse. At its core is the journal Ekistics (1955–2007), a rich but under explored archive of debates on cities, planning, and urban futures. Through AI-assisted digitization, semantic modeling, and large language models, the project creates an open-access, machine-readable research platform that enables new forms of inquiry into urban history.

  Genji Siraisi, Executive Director

  MOMENT NYC 

  
  

  MOMENT is the past, present, and future of music as seen through the unique lens of New York City. A collective archive and living museum of music, dedicated to the history of cultural diversity in NYC.

  Learn more about MOMENT NYC here. 

  
  

  Show details
• UHA 11th Biennial Conference: Metropolitan Majorities

  • Start
    09 Oct 2025
  •  
  • End
    12 Oct 2025
  •  
  • Location
    Los Angeles, CA

  Register

  Welcome to the UHA conference registration page! 

  Registration is required of all presenters by July 15, 2025. A program will be posted this summer with full session details. 

  The UHA will host two receptions, free of charge: 

  October 9, 2023: Welcome Reception at the Biltmore Los Angeles

  October 11, 2023: The UHA President-Elect's Reception at the Biltmore Los Angeles 

  Tickets for the Friday (Oct. 10) evening banquet are available now. Admission includes dinner and wine. You will receive an email closer to the event to make your menu selections. 

  FRIDAY NIGHT BANQUET TICKETS HERE!

  
  

  The UHA is offering 5 tours during the conference, led by experts in LA and California history. Tickets available at urbanhistory.org/events.

  
  

  Show details
• Imagining Bunker Hill: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

  • When
    09 Oct 2025
  •  
    2:00 PM - 5:00 PM
  • Location
    Los Angeles
  • Spaces left
    25

  Register

  Imagining Bunker Hill: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

  Thursday, Oct. 9, 2-5 pm

  Transport: Walking tour. Meet at Rendezvous Court, Biltmore Hotel.

  Tour Maximum: 30 people

  Cost: $10

  Tour Description: 

  Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill looms larger in the imagination than its geographical footprint would suggest. From its beginnings as an elite enclave at the end of the 19 th century to the gritty film noir fictions of the Cold War era and the global corporate skyscrapers of the late twentieth century, the neighborhood has been a testing ground for ideas about how cities should develop and what the urban life of Los Angeles should be. This walking tour examines Bunker Hill's shift from a residential neighborhood to a target for redevelopment and its reemergence as a commercial and cultural hub through the framework of thirty-year cycles of literal and symbolic imagining in the 1930s, 60s, 90s, and 2020s.

  
  

  This engaging and interactive walking tour covers roughly 2 miles round trip, including some stairs. We begin at the base of Bunker Hill, view the Depression-era lobby of the One Bunker Hill building, ascend to Hope Street, and walk along Grand Avenue to LA’s mid-century “cultural acropolis” at the Music Center. The tour ends at the bottom of the Angels Flight funicular across from Grand Central Market, where participants can stop in for snacks or happy hour.

  
  

  Tour Leaders:

  
  

  Dr. Andrea Thabet is a historian and historic preservation consultant specializing in Los Angeles, urban, and public history. She is currently on the Humanities Faculty at the Colburn School, Conservatory of Music.

  
  

  Dr. Meredith Drake Reitan is an Associate Dean at the University of Southern California’s Graduate School and Lecturer at the Price School of Public Policy and School of Architecture. She is founder and co-director of the Bunker Hill Refrain project, an immersive digital recreation of a neighborhood lost to urban renewal.

  Show details
• UHA Conference Banquet

  • When
    10 Oct 2025
  •  
  • Location
    The Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles

  Register

  The Urban History Association will host a banquet at the Biltmore Hotel, Los Angeles on Friday, October 10. 

  Admission includes dinner and wine. You will receive an email closer to the event date to submit your menu selections. 

  Please note the reduced ticket price for graduate students!

  Show details
• Lost Chicano Urban Design: A Tour of LA’s Eastside

  • When
    10 Oct 2025
  •  
    8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    Los Angeles

  Register

  Lost Chicano Urban Design: A Tour of LA’s Eastside

  Friday Oct 10, 8am - noon

  Transport: Meet at Rendezvous Court, Biltmore Hotel. We will ride the Metro together to 3 stops: Mariachi Plaza, ELA Civic Center, and Indiana, walking around each site.

  Bring either a Metro pass or $5.25 for three Metro tickets. There will be an option to linger afterwards for lunch near Indiana Station.

  Tour Maximum: 30 people

  Cost: $10

  Tour description:

  In East Los Angeles, a 1960s-era emphasis on cultural memory and meaning became visible through a series of fine-grained urban design interventions led by Chicano artists, architects, and residents. The neighborhood evolved into a living representation of Aztlán—the mythical homeland of the Aztecs. Murals became the visual language of resistance and pride, transforming blank walls of public and private buildings into vibrant canvases. Public buildings embraced the aesthetics of Latin America’s international architecture movement, but with a distinct Chicano twist. Indigenous figures, now seen as Chicano political icons, appeared on both public and commercial buildings, transforming them into cultural landmarks. These structures told stories, blending images of the past with a vision of an idealized, utopian future. These structures remain even as the region has transformed into one part of a sprawling, polycentric Latinx metropolis.

  
  

  Tour stops include the Edward R. Roybal Health Center (La Clinica de Colores),

  Belvedere Park, the Pan-American Bank with its José Reyes Mexa mosaic mural, First Street Store, and Mariachi Plaza. Tourgoers may choose to stay for lunch at El Mercado de Los Angeles, Birria Los Socios, or Los Cinco Puntos.

  
  

  Tour leader:

  James Rojas is an urban planner who grew up in Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles.

  
  

  Show details
• Landmark Gems of LA’s Historic Core

  • When
    10 Oct 2025
  •  
    1:00 PM - 3:00 PM
  • Location
    Los Angeles

  Register

  
  

  Landmark Gems of LA’s Historic Core

  
  

  Friday Oct. 10, 1:00-3:00 pm

  Transport: Walking tour. Meet at Rendezvous Court, Biltmore Hotel.

  Tour Maximum: 36 people – will be split into 3 groups of 12 each. 

  Cost: $25

  Tour Description:  

  Join the Los Angeles Conservancy for a guided exploration of the city’s Historic Core, home to a remarkable concentration of early 20th-century architecture. This two-hour walking tour begins at the 1923 Beaux Arts-style Biltmore Hotel, once the largest hotel west of Chicago and famously known as the “Host of the Coast.” Highlights include the original lobby with its Moorish beamed ceiling, a sweeping Spanish Baroque staircase, and a 350-foot-long galleria leading to a series of lavishly decorated ballrooms.

  Next, tourgoers visit the Los Angeles Central Library, Bertram Goodhue’s richly symbolic 1926 landmark that merges ancient iconography with early Moderne design. A devastating fire and threats of demolition in the 1970s helped inspire the founding of the Los Angeles Conservancy. The tour concludes at the Bradbury Building, an 1893 commercial structure whose skylit atrium, open-cage elevators, and intricate ironwork remain one of the most iconic and visually striking interiors in Los Angeles.

  Tour leaders: 

  L.A. Conservancy docents.

  
  

  Show details
• California Suburban Dreams and Dystopias: Altadena and Pasadena

  • When
    11 Oct 2025
  •  
    8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
  • Location
    Pasadena and Altadena

  Register

  
  

  California Suburban Dreams and Dystopias: Altadena and Pasadena

  Tour sponsored by the Schuele Family Charitable Fund

  Saturday, October 11, 8am - noon

  Transport: Van tour.  Meet at Rendezvous Court, Biltmore Hotel.

  Tour Maximum: 26 people

  Cost: $25

  Tour description:  

  One of the oldest tropes about Los Angeles is the juxtaposition between "sunshine and noir" in the nation's original suburban city. This tour explores the history of suburban dreams and dystopias in one corner of the LA metropolis, Pasadena and Altadena.  Set against the San Gabriel Mountains, these suburbs were formative locations for the evolution of suburban dreaming in California. In the late 19^th century, Eastern millionaires and Midwestern home-seekers created a landscape of affluent leisure and communion with nature in Pasadena. Elite white settlement attracted a parallel migration of Black families (including future baseball pioneer, Jackie Robinson) who pursued opportunities in service jobs, property ownership and political and social freedom. These dreams clashed repeatedly in conflicts over segregation and civil rights. By the 1960s and 1970s, neighboring Altadena beckoned as an interracial suburban haven, and ultimately achieved unusually high rates of Black multigenerational homeownership. The 2025 Eaton Fire challenged the area’s suburban dream once again, destroying nearly 50 percent of Altadena’s structures. In its aftermath, competing voices are advocating different paths for building back in the context of housing, justice, and climate crises.  This van tour explores these histories, including stops along Orange Grove Boulevard and the Rose Bowl area, historic Old Town Pasadena and the 710 freeway, Eaton Canyon, Altadena, and impacts of the 2025 fire. The tour concludes with a Q&A with community activists and organizations advocating for a just and sustainable reconstruction. 

  
  

  Tour leaders:

  Becky Nicolaides, research affiliate at the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, is author of The New Suburbia: How Diversity Remade Suburban Life in Los Angeles After 1945 (Oxford), and co-editor with Andrew Wiese of The Suburb Reader (Routledge).

  
  

  Andrew Wiese, Professor of History at San Diego State University, is author of Places of Their Own: African American Suburbanization in the Twentieth Century (Chicago), and co-editor with Becky Nicolaides of The Suburb Reader (Routledge).

  
  

  
  

  Show details
• Literary Los Angeles

  • When
    11 Oct 2025
  •  
    3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
  • Location
    Emerald Room, The Biltmore Los Angeles

  Register

  Literary Los Angeles: Writing Urban Pasts through Fiction 

  Panel Discussion and Book Signing
  

  Saturday October 11 3:00-4:30pm - Emerald Room

  This page is only for those who wish to register for 1-day access to this event. If you have already registered for the conference, this event is already open to you. 

  Join a panel discussion with three of Los Angeles’s stellar literary voices – Naomi Hirahara, Walter Mosley, and Hector Tobar – who engage in a conversation with David L. Ulin about their craft, their sense of history, and the influence of Southern California on their work.

  The panel discussion will be followed by book sales and signings and an informal reception in the Biltmore’s Gold Room. Book sales will be handled by Octavia’s Bookshelf, Pasadena.

  Moderator: 

  David Ulin

  David L. Ulin is the author of the novel Thirteen Question Method, and the nonfiction books Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles; The Lost Art of Reading: Books and Resistance in a Troubled Time; and Writing Los Angeles: A Literary Anthology, which won a California Book Award. He is the former book editor and book critic of the Los Angeles Times, and a Professor of English at the University of Southern California, where he edits the journal Air/Light.

  Panelists:

  Naomi Hirahara

  
  

  Naomi Hirahara is an Edgar Award-winning author of multiple mystery series and noir short stories. Her Mas Arai mysteries, published in Japanese, Korean and French, feature a Los Angeles gardener and Hiroshima survivor who solves crimes. Her historically-set Japantown Mystery Series include the award-winning Clark and Division, Evergreen, and her forthcoming Crown City set in 1903 Pasadena. A former journalist with The Rafu Shimpo newspaper, Hirahara’s numerous non-fiction history books include the award-winning Terminal Island: Lost Communities of Los Angeles Harbor, co-written by Geraldine Knatz, and Life after Manzanar, co-written by Heather C. Lindquist.

  Walter Mosley

  
  

  Walter Mosley, author of 60 books translated into 25 languages, has won Edgars, a Grammy, and many other awards reflecting his wide range of work.  His first novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, introduced the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.  Mosley has written and staged several plays including The Fall of Heaven, based on his Tempest Landry stories. Several of his books have been adapted for film and television including Devil in a Blue Dress and The Man in My Basement from Disney/Hulu.

  Héctor Tobar

  
  

  Héctor Tobar is the author of six books published in 15 languages, including the novels The Tattooed Soldier, The Barbarian Nurseries, and The Last Great Road Bum, and the nonfiction books Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino”, and the NY Times bestseller Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine and the Miracle That Set Them Free. He was a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages, and a columnist for the Los Angeles Times and its bureau chief in Buenos Aires and Mexico City.

  
  

  Show details
• The Hidden Histories of Los Angeles’ Beaches

  • When
    12 Oct 2025
  •  
    8:00 AM - 2:00 PM
  • Location
    Santa Monica

  Register

  The Hidden Histories of Los Angeles’ Beaches

  Sunday, Oct. 12, 8am-2pm

  
  

  Transport:  Meet at Rendezvous Court, Biltmore Hotel.  Walking and Metro Purple Line public transportation https://www.rome2rio.com/map/The-Biltmore-Hotel-Los-Angeles-South-Grand-Avenue-Los-Angeles-CA-USA/Santa-Monica-Pier#r/Tram

  It takes about an hour to reach Santa Monica from Downtown LA using public transport. Tour leaders or chaperone will be available to guide people from the Biltmore hotel to public transportation at 8am, then at 9am the tour will begin in Santa Monica. 

  Tour Maximum:  25 people

  Cost: $10

  Bring either a Metro pass or $5.00 for Metro ticket. Each participant will be responsible for their own lunch cost, up to $25 depending on what they want to dine on at the cafe.

  
  

  Tour description:  

  At first glance, it may seem as if all the beaches of the Los Angeles region resemble each other: sea, sand, seagulls, and those iconic powder-blue lifeguard towers. Yet there is more to the Los Angeles coastline than meets the eye. This tour explores the hidden histories of Los Angeles’ beaches, including the history of African American beach access and discrimination, the environmental history of the shores, the life, death and rebirth of world-famous Muscle Beach, and the repression of gay cruising at Crystal Beach. The tour begins at Historic Belmar Park, a Santa Monica commemorative justice initiative which features an outdoor exhibition exploring Black life in the first half of the 20th century. It continues on to early landmarks of Black Santa Monica, including Bay Street Beach, sometimes controversially called “the Inkwell,” followed by Crystal Beach, a cruising ground for gay men and women in the 1950s-70s, and the original location of Muscle Beach, where acrobats and bodybuilders included Jack LaLanne and Steve Reeves. Tourgoers will stop for lunch at the affordable beach cafe Cha Cha Cha (serving Caribbean cuisine). The tour concludes with a walk through Tongva Park, to explore the history of the Gabrieleño-Tongva people, their relationship to the sea, and how the city has commemorated its indigenous past.

  
  

  Tour leaders:

  Alison Rose Jefferson, independent historian and Heritage Conservation Consultant, is author of Living the California Dream: African American Leisure Sites during the Jim Crow Era (University of Nebraska Press).

  Elsa Devienne, Assistant Professor of Humanities, Northumbria University, Newcastle, is author of Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles (Oxford).

  
  

  Show details