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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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.

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Photograph of a crowd of people seated in bleachers and looking up.

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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1840 | Venice

Tourist Destination

Hans Christian Andersen pays homage to Venice.More

1920 | San Francisco

The Scene Almost Staggers

H.L. Mencken leaves his heart in San Francisco.More

c. 1185 | England

Shopping Mall

Overwhelmed by overabundance.More

Charts & Graphs

The gangs of New York.

Turf Wars

The gangs of New York.

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Photograph of Italian writer Italo Calvino.

Novelist and psychiatrist Daniel Mason.

Painting of François Rabelais.

American writer, editor, and translator Eliot Weinberger.

Black and white photograph of French writer and film director Marguerite Duras.

Classical bust of Thucydides.

German philosopher Oswald Spengler.

Black and white photograph of a young F. Scott Fitzgerald sitting at a desk.

By the blessing of the upright the city is exalted, but it is overthrown by the mouth of the wicked.

—Book of Proverbs, c. 350 BC

Engraving of Roman author and administrator Pliny the Younger.

German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel.

Pliny the Younger & Georg Simmel

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Lapham’sDaily

Roundtable

Lapham’s Quarterly Is on Hiatus

By Lapham’s Quarterly

But the American Agora Foundation is already planning for the future. More

The Colosseum, attributed to Robert Eaton, c. 1855.

DÉjÀ Vu

Monumental Mistakes

2023:

Fitness instructor carves his girlfriend’s name into the Colosseum.

c. 1850:

Thompson of Sunderland makes his mark on Pompey’s pillar.

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Terracotta funerary plaque, Greek, Attic, c. 520 BC.

The World in Time

Robert D. Kaplan

Lewis H. Lapham speaks with the author of The Tragic Mind: Fear, Fate, and the Burden of Power. More

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