Just a reminder to graduate students to submit a piece to the UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, one of our favorite annual features. Where else can you reach a wide audience of urban historians eager to read about the innovative new directions current students are pushing urban history? Submission deadline is July 15, 2023.

And we’d also like to announce that our judges this year will be Dr. Joe W. Trotter of Carnegie Mellon University, Dr. Andrew Sanduval-Strausz of Pennsylvania State University, and Dr. Nancy Kwak of the University of California San Diego.

For more on this years theme, Stumble, and submission details, see the Graduate Student Blogging Contest Announcement.

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For many of us, writing is not easy.

While I, like many historians, love to dig through an archive and dwell within the minutiae of the past, I often find that gleaning a story from that journey, particularly one that will resonate with others and expand our understanding of the world around us—and then finding the right words to use to share it with others—is really hard work. Yet, it is important work, because we must share what we learn about the past to make our research matter in the present.

As a PhD student in the thick of my thesis research, possessing thumb drives full of pdf images from the archives but having only occasional, fleeting glimpses of the argument that they would support, I was intrigued by the 2018 call for entries to The Metropole’s graduate student blogging contest. That year’s theme, Striking Gold, resonated with themes in my research, and I decided to write and submit an essay. I did my best to make that piece connect with the contest theme; it turns out I probably took it too literally and too far.

After reviewing my submission, the editorial team at The Metropole walked me back from that misdirection and gently nudged me toward what the piece wanted to be all along, an argument I had framed in my introduction but had wandered off from, trying to write what I thought they wanted.

My point here is: Graduate students, take your own leap and submit to the contest! Don’t wait to have a complete answer to your thesis question; don’t worry that your writing isn’t without faults; don’t try to shoehorn what you have to say too closely to the contest theme. We can help you with all that—it is what editors are for!

And for more guidance on writing for The Metropole (or any blog) see Lessons Learned from Three Years of the Blogging Contest.

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Featured Image (at top): Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923). National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.