Welcome to The History Sidebar, the personal website curated by historian, folklorist, and award-winning writer David Rotenstein. This site isn’t a dump, but it’s close enough. It’s where my research and writing projects go for test runs or where they go to die. The History Sidebar traces its roots to my first website, Ziggy’s Blues. Back in the early 1990s, I was writing for newspapers and music magazines while finishing graduate school. Those were the days before massive Internet archives scooped up everything and I wanted a central place to archive my music journalism and other features. Ziggy’s Blues evolved into a more general website and this blog debuted in 2010.
These days I’m based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I work as a freelance writer and I contribute to several local newspapers, online news sites, and magazines. Since 2020, I have won two Press Club of Western Pennsylvania Golden Quill awards for excellence in journalism and have been nominated as a finalist seven other times. In 2024, I won two Pittsburgh Black Media Federation Robert L. Vann awards.
Since 2019 I’ve been researching and writing about the history of organized crime in Pittsburgh. I designed and led walking tours in four Pittsburgh neighborhoods and in 2022 I curated a pop-up museum to support the historic landmarking of a prominent racketeer’s home and I reprised it for the 2022 Italian American Studies Association annual meeting. The Tito-Mecca-Zizza House became a City of Pittsburgh historic site because of my research and the public advocacy campaign, including the pop-up museum, that I designed. The community development corporation that hired me to do the work won an award from the Pittsburgh Community Reinvestment Group for the successful designation.
Additional public history work in Pittsburgh includes writing the Pittsburgh context essay for the University of Richmond’s Mapping Inequality project. My 2024 investigation into the history of racially restrictive deed covenants influenced advocacy by local affordable housing advocates and was used in a new study documenting the history of discriminatory land use policies in Pittsburgh.
For professional updates, publications, and more, drop by my LinkedIn page at http://www.linkedin.com/in/dsrotenstein.
Email: david.rotenstein [at] earthlink.net
Phone: 412-328-3830