Author Archive
24 June 2013 – David Rotenstein 1
Back in February I wrote about some of the challenges of donating old interviews done during graduate school in the 1990s for newspapers to the Atlanta History Center’s archives as oral histories. After some interesting attempts to get release forms signed more than 20 years after the interviews were done and more than a few collisions with data rot, the donation was completed in June. Read More
13 February 2013 – David Rotenstein 2
Can you remember where you worked during graduate school? To pay my way through Penn in the 1980s and 1990s I worked in cultural resource management and as a freelance writer. Although history and material culture are my true professional loves, the writing gig was the more interesting, though less profitable, job. Read More
21 September 2012 – David Rotenstein 8
Before the mid-1960s, except for domestics and a few other exceptions, South Decatur was exclusively white. It was a place Decatur’s blacks knew to not be after sundown. They knew that they were welcome to clean houses, cut lawns, and bag groceries there during the day but the suburban dream being lived by their white employers was beyond reach. Read More
14 September 2012 – David Rotenstein 6
What if after you bought the historic house of your dreams in a neighborhood that billed itself as “historic” you found out that your definition of historic clashed with that of your new neighbors? As a historian with nearly thirty years under my belt in history and historic preservation, that’s precisely what happened in 2011 when my wife and I bought a small Craftsman-influenced home in a Decatur, Georgia, neighborhood. Read More