Sense and Scene

June 6, 2022.Reading time 14 minutes.

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 […]

How to Discover Visual Historical Storytelling, Without Leaving Home

May 14, 2020.Reading time 23 minutes.

By Avigail Oren On April 28th UHA past-president Richard Harris emailed me the link to Ariel Aberg-Riger’s newest visual story for CityLab, and my immediate response after reading it was “we should reach out and interview her for The Metropole about how she came up with this idea!!” I had the privilege of chatting with […]

Lessons Learned from Three Years of the Blogging Contest

October 23, 2019.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Avigail Oren (with help from Tom Sugrue and Ryan Reft) Despite having read, written for, and edited blogs for over a decade, administering the Graduate Student Blogging Contest over the past three years is what has taught me the best practices of writing history for the web. The combination of cutting-edge research, stylish graduate […]

Member of the Week: Margaret O’Mara

February 13, 2018.Reading time 7 minutes.

Margaret O’Mara Professor of History University of Washington Describe your current research. What about it drew your interest? I’m currently working on a book about the history of the American high-tech industry—from semiconductors to social media—and its relationship to the worlds of politics and finance. My interest and intent here is, to adapt a phrase, […]

Seattle History, Gay Activism, and the Future of LGBTQI Scholarship

June 14, 2017.Reading time 30 minutes.

In many ways, 1977 represented a great deal of possibility for Seattle’s LGBTQ community. Granted in years prior, the Gay Community Center on Renton Hill had been bombed and Robert Sirico’s gay Metropolitan Community Church faced possible closure, yet on July 1, 1976 the state’s anti-sodomy law was repealed and the Seattle City Council had […]

Poisoners, Policemen, and a Scandal in the Court of King Louis XIV: Exploring the Origins of Parisian Policing with Holly Tucker

June 12, 2017.Reading time 33 minutes.

Although Professor Holly Tucker wrote her new book for a non-academic audience, City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic, and the First Police Chief of Paris begins with a scene uniquely suited to evoke terror and handwringing from historians. The preface, which Tucker entitles “Burn Notice,” is set in the palace of Versailles in […]