The Official Blog of the Urban History Association
By Avigail Oren We decided to change up the theme of this year’s Graduate Student Blogging Contest because we wanted to encourage storytelling. Graduate coursework and advising generally prepares historians to write persuasive, evidence-based arguments, but only some programs and advisors emphasize the elements of narrative—scene, character, dialogue, voice, style—that can make a piece of […]
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The Metropole/Urban History Association Graduate Student Blogging Contest exists to encourage and train graduate students to blog about history—as a way to teach beyond the classroom, market their scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities. This year, the contest prompt is slightly different than it has been in the past. From topical themes like “life […]
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Believing that blogging is an excellent way to teach beyond the classroom, market scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities, The Metropole established the Graduate Student Blogging Contest in 2017. This year, the theme of the contest was “Embrace,” in what turned out to be an overly optimistic nod to the “end” of the […]
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In this, the third and final entry into the Fifth Annual Urban History Association/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Rachel Pitkin follows the story of activist Katy Van Deurs’s “Workshop of the Children” (1961-64) in New York City’s Greenwich Village, which some community members embraced and others protested, and examines how the experience led Van […]
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Our second entrant into the Fifth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest is Rachel Klepper, who takes us back to New York City’s Yorkville neighborhood in the late 1940s to examine white, Black, and Latinx parents’ complicated embrace of an after-school program. At Public School 151, in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan’s Upper East […]
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This piece by Brian Whetstone is the first entrant into the Fifth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to “write about a moment in urban history when individuals, groups, or cities attempted to unite or to try a new idea,” and in this essay Whetstone examines the consequences of preservationists’ […]
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This week we will begin publishing the three excellent entries into the Fifth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, which center around the theme of “Embrace.” Embrace: write about a moment in urban history when individuals, groups, or cities attempted to unite or to try a new idea—even if they didn’t succeed. Whether it’s […]
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The Metropole/Urban History Association Graduate Student Blogging Contest exists to encourage and train graduate students to blog about history—as a way to teach beyond the classroom, market their scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities. This year’s theme is embrace. We’re looking for blog posts about a moment in urban history when individuals, groups, […]
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The Urban History Association/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest was established to promote blogging among graduate students–as a way to teach beyond the classroom, market their scholarship, and promote the enduring value of the humanities. The theme of the fourth annual contest ended up being “Stretch,” which seemed appropriately ironic after our initial theme idea (“Pandemonium”) […]
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In this, the fourth and final entry into the Fourth Annual Urban History Association/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Kenneth Alyass turns a skeptical lens towards the stretches one Detroit suburb made to justify a name change—and asks the reader to also stretch and see that the ‘burb’s supposedly colorblind arguments were anything but. In […]
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