ABSTRACT
The question this volume of essays poses is both important and straightforward. It is how has international violence been inscribed in symbolically charged urban space over the past century? The answers different scholars provide are complex, rich, and filled with revealing ambiguities. On one point, though, most authors concur: the nation and its history are not co-terminus with the metropolis and its history. Metropolitan history is both more and less than that of the nations in which they rest. What does he know of England, Rudyard Kipling might have said, who only London knows? A very brief study of English accents would yield one answer to this imagined query; such a person would know very little at all. But if we reverse the question, and ask what does national history tell us of metropolitan space, the answer is similarly elusive: something, not everything, and frequently not enough.
