Aleksandr Bierig Early modern London was the planet’s first coal-fired city. While the causes and timing of its transition to fossil fuel are still debated, historians have argued that the change was initially triggered in the early seventeenth century, when apparent timber shortages began driving up firewood prices in the…
Stacey Sloboda Perched inside a window box, an artist in a loose smock and a skullcap bends over his unseen work, the head of sculpted putti peering over his shoulder (Fig. 1). The artist’s back is turned to an urban neighborhood dense with brick and plaster terraced buildings, older timber-framed…
Anne Hultzsch Introduction When Sophie von La Roche (1730-1807), often referred to as the first female professional journalist writing in German, described Paris to her readers in 1787, she began with accounting for the role women had played in the history of this “Zauberort,” this “magical place”: “The love and…
Richard Wrigley Although the figure of the flâneur—the leisurely, urban male pedestrian observer—is associated with France’s July Monarchy (1830-1848), it was already current throughout the 1820s. Yet it is striking that texts from this decade are unequivocal that the phenomenon had its roots in the Revolution. For Beauregard and Pain…
Sigrid de Jong The eighteenth century saw an urge to draw comparisons between cities, most frequently between the two major European capitals, London and Paris. Their special relationship of rivalry, competition, and emulation found its vibrant expression in Louis Sébastien Mercier’s Parallèle de Paris et de Londres (ca. 1780): London,…