History Graduate Student Blog page

 

This is the future site of a blog that will be operated by graduate students in the Department of History at Pitt.  While the blog is hosted by the WHC, the content management and administration of the blog will be handled by current graduate students.  The general format for this blog page will be bi-weely posts of 800-1000 words that are world historical or transnational in nature.  Please keep checking back to see how this page develops over the coming weeks. 

In the meantime, please read the inaugural post by Alex Mountain and Cory Brazile related to their GSAships in Public History.


City of Champ-yinz: Introductory Post

Welcome to City of Champ-yinz, an ongoing series on the World History Center Graduate Student Blog. City of Champyinz is an oral history project focused upon the intersections and divergences between the world of professional sports, and the local development of youth sports in Pittsburgh.

Throughout the semester, we’ll be interviewing people involved with ice hockey and soccer to understand how global trends like professionalization and commercialization have influenced players, coaches, and organizations in Pittsburgh. We’ll be covering topics like international competition, amateurism, training, specialization, and retirement in our interview series.

This project is also affiliated with the Heinz History Center’s Western Pennsylvania Sports Museum. Throughout the semester, we’ll post artifacts we find in the archives to supplement the oral histories we gather, and highlight the historical nature of sporting life in Pittsburgh. We strongly encourage local readers to go and check out the Museum - it’s a really thoughtful and interesting collection!

Finally, we’d like to introduce ourselves. This blog series is the product of a collaboration between two graduate students in the Department of History at the University of Pittsburgh. Alex is in her sixth year and is currently finishing her dissertation on the commodification and professionalization of youth ice hockey in the United States, Canada, and Sweden over the past fifty years. Cory is in her second year and currently finishing her master’s thesis on the role of education in youth soccer academies in the United States and England. We believe that putting these two sports in conversation other will enrich the dialogue around youth sport in a global context, especially in a city as sports-crazy as Pittsburgh.

We’ll begin posting interviews soon and we hope you’ll follow along with us. Please feel free to reach out with comments, questions, or if you’d like to get involved.

-Alex and Cory