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”) […]
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 […]
In this, our third entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest, Menika Dirkson examines the stretches made by competing organizations—the Police Athletic League and the Black Panther Party—to effectively address the problem of juvenile crime and police-community violence in Philadelphia during the 1960s and ’70s. In 1976, Andre Martin was a […]
Our second entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest is Willa Granger, who transports us to 1970s Texas to show how older Texans were stretching to their financial and economic limits to retain their mobility and independence. In the third week of September 1970, the Nixon Administration, in tandem with state […]
This piece by Marika Plater is the first entrant into the Fourth Annual UHA/The Metropole Graduate Student Blogging Contest. We invited graduate students to “write about a moment in urban history when the inflexible was asked to bend,” and in this essay Plater asks readers to stretch their interpretation of the fireworks that seemed ubiquitous […]
This has been a difficult year. In addition to lives taken prematurely by COVID and police violence, lost jobs and wages, schools going intentionally or disingenuously online, and the mental health toll of myriad other small cuts, many historians are struggling to conduct research with archives and libraries closed. For graduate students at the beginning […]
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 summer’s blogging contest theme is “Stretch.” Write about a moment in urban history when the inflexible was asked […]
The Metropole 