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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Waiting for Goffman

By Michael Dirda

There are few better interpreters of modern metropolitan life than sociologist Erving Goffman.

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Map

City Narratives

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

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c. 1846 | Walden Pond

Traffic Pattern

Thoreau watches the trains go by.More

1883 | Los Angeles

Ancien Régime

Looking at the remnants of old California.More

c. 1200 BC | Athens

Commonwealth

Theseus unifies Attica.More

Charts & Graphs

Official and unofficial city slogans,

Welcome to...

Official and unofficial city slogans.

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Photograph of Italian writer Italo Calvino.

Engraving of the medieval Arab traveler Ibn Battuta.

French novelist Irène Némirovsky.

Black and white photograph of historian and man of letters Henry Adams.

Image of French writer Honoré de Balzac with hand on chest.

Black and white photograph of Mencken looking over his shoulder at the camera

English diarist and naval administrator Samuel Pepys.

Book critic Michael Dirda.

Divine nature gave the fields; human art built the cities.

—Marcus Terentius Varro, c. 70 BC

Pliny the Younger & Georg Simmel

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Walk on the Wild Side

By Virginia Woolf

On the lives passing through Kew Gardens on a summer day. More

DÉjÀ Vu

Dance Stance Revolution

2022:

Brazilian blocos ignore ban on Carnival celebrations.

1576:

Italian plague patients ignore ban on dance parties.

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The World in Time

Olivier Zunz

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis de Tocqueville. More

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