The City

Volume III, Number 4 | fall 2010

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Painting of a sunlit plaza with people and a bell tower.

Preamble

City Light

By Lewis H. Lapham

When it comes to the medieval cathedral and mosque, the modern skyscraper and the slum, world history is city history.

Engraving of an overhead view of the city of Rome.

Essay

A Matter of Optics

By Warren Breckman

Rulers of cities have always had an interest in visibility, both in representing their power and in controlling people by seeing them.

Map

City Narratives

The tumultuous histories of Algiers, Istanbul, Beijing, and Mexico City.

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Voices In Time

1700 | London

Dens of Iniquity

Coffee talk with Thomas Brown.More

Voices In Time

c. 1936 | New York City

Blowing into Town

F. Scott Fitzgerald takes a bite of the Big Apple.More

Voices In Time

1708 | London

Burial Grounds

Christopher Wren requests a graveyard shift.More

Charts & Graphs

Town Meetings

Where to see and be seen.

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American writer, editor, and translator Eliot Weinberger.

Contributors

Photograph of American writer Ralph Ellison.

Italian poet and scholar Giovanni Boccaccio.

We must consider that we shall be a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a byword through the world.

—John Winthrop, 1630