The Ideal City, attributed to Fra Carnevale, c. 1482. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

The Ideal City, attributed to Fra Carnevale, c. 1482. The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

The City

Volume III, Number 4 | fall 2010

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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.

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Spring Morning in the Heart of the City, by Childe Hassam, 1890. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Ethelyn McKinney, in memory of her brother, Glenn Ford McKinney, 1943.

Urban Scrawl

By Jamie James

The city novel begins with a young person arriving from the provinces—and the world rising up to greet them.

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Map

City Narratives

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

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1849 | San Francisco

Mud and Mules

William Tecumseh Sherman’s adventures in California.More

c. 1846 | Walden Pond

Traffic Pattern

Thoreau watches the trains go by.More

c. 330 BC | Athens

Census

The demographics of the ideal city.More

Charts & Graphs

The gangs of New York.

Turf Wars

The gangs of New York.

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Black and white photograph of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig.

British author J.G. Ballard.

Photograph of Soviet playwright and writer Mikhail Bulgakov.

Sufi mystic and poet Rumi.

Portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky

Essayist and novelist Pico Iyer.

No city should be too large for a man to walk out of in a morning.

—Cyril Connolly, 1944

Pliny the Younger & Georg Simmel

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