As we have discussed in class, your two paper assignments this semester will focus on an urban/city neighborhood of your choice—preferably in Philadelphia (or another urban/city neighborhood nearby that you will be able to visit easily and frequently over the semester), and one that is small enough to write about with some analysis.  Your first paper will be an early history of this neighborhood (from its settlement to a time when a perceived sense of decline begins around WWII), and your second paper will be an ethnography and recent history of the same neighborhood (from around WWII to the present—see second paper assignment).

For the first half of your paper assignment, you will write a history of your chosen neighborhood by doing archival research and relating your study to relevant historical context.  Part of your research will involve gathering enough sources, but you will also need to explore the particular history of the neighborhood and seek to explain how this relates to the current status of the community.  In the course of your research you may be struck by a number of questions about the neighborhood today—write these down, as you will seek to answer one or more of these questions in the second half of your paper.

For your second half of your paper assignment, you will build on the neighborhood history you wrote for the first half of your paper by doing ethnographic fieldwork and continuing the story into the post-World War II era (1945-present).  You will need to identify a question that your project seeks to answer (for Anderson, it was the problem of youth violence in inner-city black neighborhoods).  Ethnographic research should be based on our limited class discussions of fieldwork and ethnographic method, which, for this assignment, requires minimal training and only needs to involve some observation, fieldnotes, and perhaps a few short interviews/oral histories of neighborhood residents.

You are already armed with a large amount of material on cities and city life, and you will also need to spend time relating your research to certain texts.  Ideally, you will build on what you already have read and learned this semester by making connections with what you are reading and writing about now—in other words, as you write, ask yourself how can you link your paper to material in your textbook and any relevant material on the syllabus that we covered in class?