Samuel Zipp

teaches American Studies and Urban Studies at Brown University and is the author of The Idealist: Wendell Willkie’s Wartime Quest to Build One World.

Nighttime view of people in a vacant lot as they watch a fire burning on the top floors of an apartment building in the Bronx, New York, 1983.

The Uncertain History of the Bronx Fires The Uncertain History of the Bronx Fires

In Born in Flames, Bench Ansfield asks, who, or what, is responsible for the arson epidemic that afflicted the borough in the 1970s and ’80s?

Nov 4, 2025 / Books & the Arts / Samuel Zipp

How Private Capital Strangled Our Cities

How Private Capital Strangled Our Cities How Private Capital Strangled Our Cities

By following the money, a new history of urban inequality turns our attention away from federal malfeasance and toward capital markets and financial instruments.

Jan 4, 2022 / Books & the Arts / Samuel Zipp

The Ethical Commitment to Be a Punk

The Ethical Commitment to Be a Punk The Ethical Commitment to Be a Punk

How 1980s punk music birthed its own kind of radical politics. 

Jan 6, 2021 / Books & the Arts / Samuel Zipp

The Lost Internationalism of Wendell Willkie

The Lost Internationalism of Wendell Willkie The Lost Internationalism of Wendell Willkie

David Levering Lewis’s new biography recovers Willkie’s anti-imperialist vision.

Mar 14, 2019 / Books & the Arts / Samuel Zipp

Burning Down the House: On Ed Koch

Burning Down the House: On Ed Koch Burning Down the House: On Ed Koch

Ed Koch rebuilt New York City by demolishing its long-running experiments in urban liberalism.

Nov 23, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Samuel Zipp

Living for the City Living for the City

There's more to the legend of Jane Jacobs than her showdown with Robert Moses.
 

Mar 18, 2010 / Books & the Arts / Samuel Zipp

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