By Carl H. Nightingale*, University of Buffalo
The Archive Box is a series featuring global urban historians reflecting on their archival experience, and on the practical and theoretical challenges they faced while working with a variety of archives across the world.

How does one write a continent and millennia-spanning “biography of an Urban Planet,” while maintaining a strong grasp of the different sources which allow us to tell such story? Carl H. Nightingale has taken on this arduous task, and reflects here on the necessary interplay between primary, secondary, and tertiary archives to push global urban history forward at a moment of political and environmental crisis.
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