The Urban History Association in Historical Perspective

In early March 2025, as we were working on the program for our Los Angeles conference that October, Kenneth T. Jackson contacted the conference committee to suggest a special session: a retrospective of the Urban History Association (UHA). He proposed that since we had hosted such a session nearly ten years earlier at the 2016 conference in Chicago, it was the right time to take another look back and formally assess how the association had developed in the intervening decade. The program committee was enthusiastic about the prospect, and so with their approval I contacted some of the UHA’s former presidents and executive directors to ask if they would be interested in participating; they were similarly enthusiastic, and within a week’s time the panel had been formed. When the session convened in Los Angeles, the participants and audience told origin stories, raised important issues, and marked key milestones.