Author Archives: David Rotenstein

Twitter and the academy: a call for reflection and restraint (updated)

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Decatur, Georgia, gateway and the entrance to the gentrified Oakhurst neighborhood.

Last week a professional historian who lives in a community that I have been researching and writing about since 2011 published some inflammatory, malicious, and demonstrably false tweets. The historian has a substantial social media following: almost 13,000 Twitter followers. Many of them are my colleagues and peers: university faculty, public historians, museum curators, and journalists. These folks unwittingly were pulled into a social media tar pit that has been well documented. Perhaps the best explanation for what I am writing about here may be found in this October 2015 History News Network article.

I no longer use social media to litigate my issues with Decatur and its fragile white residents. This post is intended to mitigate some short-term harm: readers of the historian’s tweets can take to their preferred search engines and use multiple permutations of words that the historian tweeted to discover my identity. Though the historian didn’t name me in her tweets, she effectively provided her readers with an easily navigated route to my identity.

The Decatur historian’s actions last week were understandable considering the gentrified community in which she lives. Her response echoed those of her neighbors years earlier: attorneys, engineers, and journalists who couldn’t reconcile what I was writing about their community with the carefully constructed image of Decatur being a liberal, progressive, and diverse community. Their exploits were outlined in the 2015 History News Network article and they will be more fully analyzed in my book on gentrification, erasure, and race in Decatur. Contrary to what the Decatur historian tweeted last week, there has been only one official legal action stemming from Decatur’s fragile white residents’ defensive and abusive actions to preserve their community’s brand and their own self-images as liberal, progressive, and diverse: I was the plaintiff.

DeKalb County, Georgia, temporary protective order issued on my behalf against an individual that the court found sufficient evidence for the order under Georgia law.

My last word on the matter for now is a recommendation for folks landing here to read Robin DiAngelo’s insightful 2018 book, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. If visitors here don’t have time for the book, DiAngelo wrote a concise distillation of the book for The Guardian. If you’re on the run, no problem: NPR has a wonderful interview with DiAngelo that was broadcast in August 2018.

Meanwhile, for about 24 hours last week, thousands of people read the Decatur historian’s tweets; more than a hundred “liked” them and offered replies — definitive, blunt, and threatening — given without understanding the context for the tweets and without interrogating the tweeting author’s motives or the factual basis for them. Those replies included calls for me to be arrested, expelled from professional organizations, blackballed from academic conferences, and fired from my job. Several opined that I had a history of harassing and stalking women students. One implied that I should be assaulted.

This is a distraction from other important work. But, there is something from this distraction that I believe has educational value, especially with regard to how academics use social media. For that reason, I want to share some of the responses to the Decatur historian’s tweets. They will be cited in my future work on Decatur and on the complex issues around race, white privilege, and white fragility.

“If this person is acting this way with colleagues, imagine how he might be treating undergraduate women.” — Sara Norton, public history instructor.

“You need to have all of this on record, so talking to people about it is good. In addition, maybe get “Ring” as your new “doorbell” because it is a camera and can let you see who is there even if you’re not home. Please stay safe!” — Kristen Hillaire Glasgow, PhD candidate in history, UCLA.

“Gross gross gross!!!! I’m so sorry that happened to you. My cousin is an atty in the ATL if you need a firm recommendation” — Maggie Yancey, Independent Alcohol Scholar.

“I’m sorry you’re having to deal with a sentient piece of shit masquerading as a human.” — Dr. Rob Thompson, Historian, Documentary Team, Army University Press, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.

“Sorry this is happening to you. He deserves to be professionally blackballed for this kind of behavior.” — Evan Bennett, historian of the American South.

“Definitely talk to a lawyer and local police. A restraining order might inflame him—but it’s something to think about. Also get a home security system with a panic button if you don’t already have one.” — Rebecca Anne Goetz, Associate Prof. of History, NYU.

“Don’t take chances, don’t assume your’re over reacting. Talk to police you trust will take you seriously. Talk to others for advice who have had this experience. Be safe. @ProfMSinha” — Daniel Louis Duncan, Live for 19thc history, writer and musician.

“I am so sorry this nutjob is coming after you. Definitely time to bring in the police.” — Dr. Megan Kate Nelson, Writer. Historian. Working on a book about the Civil War in the Southwest.

“[REDACTED] of course you don’t deserve this. But get him in his place: don’t stop writing, advocating, and everything else you do.” — Debbie Gershenowitz, senior acquisitions editor, Cambridge University Press.

“Holy shit [REDACTED]. I’m so sorry this is happening to you. I’m glad you’re getting the police involved, and coordinating action with his other victims.” — Amy Haines, Lecturer University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

“Dear God! I know I’ve said it before … but, some people just scare the hell out of me! This guy sounds like a sick creep!!!” — Jesse Horne, broadcast journalist, Wisconsin.

“Fuuuuuuuck. That man needs a restraining order. [REDACTED] do you need to move?” — Sarah Neill, master’s student in art history.

“holy shit. What an asshole. What are the police doing about this? If there’s more than one person being stalked, shouldn’t that merit an investigation??” — Victoria Woeste, Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation in Chicago.

“That is craziness–you mean a job interview? Whoa. This is wayyyyy beyond the pale. Yep, I agree with others, time to get serious and report.” — Dr. Anne Whisnant, public historian.

“I would go to police. This is criminal behavior (literally)” — Susan D. Amussen, Professor of History in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced.

“This is awful. I would forward all of this info to his employer, as well as any pertinent law enforcement agencies.” — David Cordell, 8th grade social studies teacher.

“This is dreadful. Definitely go to police and consult professional organization. No one should have to put up with this nonsense.” — Kathryn Tomasek, Professor of Digital Humanities and Digital History at Wheaton College in Massachusetts.

“This should hold true as well for any university or college he’s affiliated with. Chances are that somebody like this has already harassed students.” — Zeb Larson, PhD student at Ohio State University.

“Report his sorry ass to whatever professional associations he belongs to.” — @Ole_Bonesy.

Continue reading →

Housing Opportunities Commission statement on River Road Moses Cemetery

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Delivered to the Montgomery County Housing Opportunities Commission.

STATEMENT OF DR. DAVID ROTENSTEIN
February 6, 2019

Good afternoon. My name is David Rotenstein and I am here to speak in support of preserving and commemorating the River Road Moses Cemetery site. The last time I appeared before the HOC in October 2018, I delivered a report I had prepared documenting the site’s history and its eligibility under multiple criteria for designation in the Montgomery County Master Plan for Historic Preservation and the National Register of Historic Places. Today I am here to clear up some misinformation about that report and my statement to the HOC at that time.

The first time I wrote about African American cemeteries and their preservation was in a 1992 article published in the Philadelphia Inquirer (Attachment A). Since then I have written many articles for academic and popular publications that deal with African American history and historic preservation.

Let those African American graveyards rest in peace. The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 4, 1992.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, August 4, 1992.

I believe the River Road Moses Cemetery deserves the utmost respect and care so that it will suffer no further disturbances. It should be a space of reflection, reverence, commemoration, and learning to celebrate the lives of the people who once lived in River Road and its affiliated communities. I wholeheartedly support the objectives stated by the many of the people advocating for its protection and commemoration. However, I cannot abide by the methods they are using to smear and demean everyone they perceive as opponents — HOC staff and commissioners, Montgomery County officials, academics who don’t tailor their findings to suit their needs, and ordinary citizens.

HOC protest, November 2017.

Marsha Coleman-Adebayo and her allies have a fraught relationship with the truth regarding the cemetery and its many issues. In recent months they have fabricated information about my work and my former association with them. These fabrications have been broadcast on the radio and disseminated in press releases and social media posts. These passionate advocates for preservation and commemoration are now using the same tactics they have accused Montgomery County government, real estate developers, and members of the general public of using in the displacement and erasure of the River Road African American community and the cemetery. Furthermore, their resistance to a more inclusive approach that draws on examples from throughout North America, like the one cited in my 1992 article, involving similarly desecrated sacred sites is puzzling. It’s almost as if they are trying to reinvent the wheel using a sharp multi-edged geometric shape instead of a smooth circle.  The tactics they are using taint the advocacy, diminish its efficacy, and create an unfortunate precedent for future efforts.

In addition to the 1992 article, I have prepared a timeline for the HOC and others to compare against information disseminated by members of the Bethesda African Cemetery Coalition and it is appended to this statement. I am prepared to answer any questions the Commission may have.

Thank you.

Download the complete February 6, 2019, handout.

Protestors arrested at the Feb. 6, 2019 Housing Opportunities Commission meeting.

Suburban retrofitting=suburban renewal

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To the downtown business interests and their allies, the answer was clear. Well-to-do Americans would return to the center only if the slums and blighted areas were eliminated and replaced by safe, healthy, and attractive middle- and upper-middle-class neighborhoods. In other words, it would be necessary to raze and rebuild much of the central city …. This was a huge undertaking. To carry it out, the downtown business interests and their allies would have to join the slum clearance movement, which had emerged in the late 1920s and early 1930s as an alternative to tenement house reform.

— Fogelson, Robert M. Downtown: Its Rise and Fall, 1880-1950. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001, p. 319.

Now for giggles, replace “central city” with “suburb” and “slum clearance movement” with “suburban retrofitting.” Isn’t “suburban retrofitting” just another euphemism for the same processes embodied in urban renewal?

Mother Jones in Suburban Maryland: Folklore and History

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Photograph shows labor activist Mother Jones in New York City, 1915. Library of Congress photo.

Thanks to the Internet and an endless stream of on-this-day (#OTD) social media posts, ordinary people are never far from history. Such is the case of my friend Glyn Robbins, a UK social justice activist and scholar immersed in housing and labor history and practice. Glyn recently read a post commemorating the anniversary of the death of 20th century labor activist Marry Harris “Mother” Jones (1830-1930).

Mother Jones emigrated to Canada from her native Ireland as a child. As an adult she worked as a schoolteacher and seamstress in Michigan and Chicago. In 1861, Harris married an ironworker and union member George Jones. In the 1870s, she began attending labor meetings and she became increasingly vocal.

Over the next several decades, Mother Jones traveled widely speaking on behalf of workers and supporting their demands for fair wages, hours, and working conditions. For more on Mother Jones, visit the Mother Jones Museum website for a curated collection of links and stories about her life,

“I didn’t know she was buried near you,” he wrote to me on Facebook. “I was told by local labor movement folk that Mother Jones is buried near Silver Spring.” He included a link to an Irish news article titled, “Remembering Irish-born Mary Harris ‘Mother’ Jones on the anniversary of her death.”

Naturally, I got a little curious. I knew that she had spent her last years in the Washington, D.C., area. But, my familiarity with the Mother Jones story didn’t go too deeply into her personal life. My friend’s message got me to thinking: If Mother Jones did die in Silver Spring, where is the site? Was she really buried here? A warm late fall day and some spare time after doing research at the Library of Congress gave me the cover I need to pursue a little extra-curricular research. Continue reading →

2018 in review, anticipating 2019

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The past year was a consequential one for me personally and professionally. Here are a few highlights from 2018 and some things that I am looking forward to in 2019.

The Talbot Avenue Bridge pop-up museum, April 21, 2018. L-R: Harvey Matthews, David Rotenstein, Rev. Ella Redfield. Photo by Charlotte Coffield.

2018 Is In The Books

  • My chapter on confronting erasure in Silver Spring’s history and historic preservation was published the volume, Demand the Impossible: Essays in History as Activism, edited by Nathan Wuertenberg and William Horne, 89–111.
  • I spoke about erasure and history at the University of Maryland (African American Studies program) and at several Silver Spring churches.
  • I was a speaker in the We Are Takoma series (Takoma, Park, Md.) and my topic was the Silver Spring Sundown Suburb.
  • The District of Columbia’s Tenley-Friendship Library branch invited me to speak about African American communities that had developed in and around Tenleytown and Chevy Chase.
  • I presented several conference papers: The Delta Symposium (Jonesboro, Ark.), The Vernacular Architecture Forum (Alexandria, Va.), the American Folklore Society (Buffalo, NY), and the DC History Conference.
  • I curated the Talbot Avenue Bridge pop-up museum in April.
  • I helped plan the Talbot Avenue Bridge Centennial Celebration.
  • My article on erasure and historic preservation in Decatur, Georgia, was accepted for publication in a special issue of the Journal of American Folklore dedicated to historic preservation.
  • I wrote blog posts for the Activist History Review, New Directions in Folklore, and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
  • I completed a one-year project documenting Bethesda’s River Road Moses Cemetery and presented the results to the descendant community and to government agencies in Montgomery County and the District of Columbia.
  • My article, “Erasing and Reclaiming History: A Delta Photo Essay,” was published in Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Studies.
  • I completed archival research projects for clients in Georgia, Montgomery County, Washington, and Wisconsin.
  • I was invited to be on a master’s thesis committee for Goucher University historic preservation student.
  • Finally, I finished four years of comparative data research for my book on erasure and displacement in Decatur, Georgia. This research on how Silver Spring produces history and historic preservation led to the Talbot Avenue Bridge work and to the programs on erasure and the Silver Spring Sundown Suburb done as part of the Invisible Montgomery project.

Big Plans for 2019

  • The year begins with two articles out for review in academic journals. They both deal with erasure and racialized history and historic preservation.
  • I will be revisiting my work on leather and meatpacking in Pennsylvania, including work on two encyclopedia articles and another article on Pittsburgh’s leather industry.
  • I will be hunkering down and finishing the Decatur book.
  • After being out of the academe for nearly a decade I will be hitting the bricks looking for some adjunct teaching gigs.
  • I will be doing more fieldwork in the Mississippi River Delta region.
  • I am working with colleagues planning the 2019 American Folklore Society meeting in Baltimore.

Happy New Year and best wishes for a healthy and prosperous 2019.

— David

Party ice

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Tomorrow is the first day of winter. I can’t think of a better way to mark the transition than to cobble together a little post about ice.

Ice freezer, 7-11 store, Silver Spring, Maryland.

Party ice is the product you can buy in the freezers outside of convenience stores or inside supermarkets. This bulk ice product hails from a time before home refrigeration and convenience stores. Before mechanical refrigeration, ice was imported from New England and Canada to Mid-Atlantic and Southern states. At first, it traveled by boat; later, refrigerated rail cars carried the large blocks harvested from northern lakes and ponds.

In the Washington metropolitan area, ice arrived via the Potomac River. In the nineteenth century, large ice warehouses were built in Alexandria, Virginia, and Georgetown in the District. By the turn of the twentieth century, the ice industry had adapted to mechanical production methods and new transportation systems. Ice manufacturers began specializing production lines to meet demands from household consumers, businesses, and industry.

Party ice is a twentieth century product that originated in community ice distribution networks created by ice entrepreneurs. Ice was produced in plants and packaged for sale according to local health codes. In Alexandria, Virginia, the Mutual Ice Company dominated the industry. Founded in 1900 on the riverfront, the company eventually moved to the Potomac Yard rail yards where it built a large ice plant.

Mutual Ice Company logo.

The Mutual Ice Company produced bulk ice for sale to local Alexandria consumers and it iced railroad cars passing through the city that were filled with perishable freight: meat and vegetables. Consumers could get ice delivered to them or they could buy it at one of seven “ice stations” that the company built throughout the city. These operated between 1924 and 1955. After that, the company continued selling ice at its plant and in grocery store freezers until it stopped making ice in 1969.

Former Mutual Ice Company ice station (2008), Alexandria, Virginia. Photo by David Rotenstein.

Oliver Ashby Reardon obituary photo. Credit: Legacy.com.

In 2008, I interviewed O. Ashby Reardon (1928-2011). Reardon’s family had established an ice wharf in Alexandria in the 1850s and he was the Mutual Ice Company’s last president. He attended the U.S Naval Academy and served for eight years in the U.S. Navy. Reardon returned to Alexandria after being discharged and he began working in his family’s ice plant. Reardon served in several executive positions with the firm until it closed in 1969. The following year the company changed its name to Mico, Inc., and continued to do business as a holding company for several of the older firm’s subsidiary enterprises.

We spoke about a lot of things in the two interviews, including party ice. The Mutual Ice Company initially sold fifty- and twenty-five pound bags of ice at its plant while twelve-pound bags were sold in a dozen vending machines placed in small wood frame shelters built inside the plant and delivered to locations throughout the city. Self-serve ice chests, according to Ashby Reardon Jr., were “made by the Lear Company that were just sitting out there in front of an entrance to the gas station where you could go in and buy some ice and then take it out and put it in your car.” Continue reading →

Is the Purple Line a pig in a poke?

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Purple Line construction sign.

Some Montgomery County, Maryland, residents think they’ve been sold a pig in a poke as far as the Purple Line is concerned. Early on, they enthusiastically supported the 16-mile light rail project linking Langley Park and Bethesda. But after construction started and some of the short- and long-term impacts began appearing, their opinions changed.

Whether it’s the observant Jews who will lose a key walking route to synagogue or the homeowners whose new neighbors include piles of cut trees, trash, and vermin, one thing has become clear ever since construction began in 2017: the new light rail line has a bigger price tag than Maryland transportation officials told people during nearly 30 years of planning.

“Under any circumstances where construction is taking place, you have to expect a level of inconvenience for a window of time,” said Leslie Herrera, a Silver Spring resident whose house abuts the Purple Line corridor in Lyttonsville. Once a big Purple Line advocate, Herrera has soured on the project.

She cites the piles of cut trees, trash, and animals, and unresponsive Purple Line officials as the reasons. “I’ve been to all of the meetings but one and it’s generally the same. It’s generally the same. They say they’ll get back to you. You call, no answer. No call back,” she said while standing near a clear-cut lot next to her home.

Cut trees, debris piles, and trash in the Purple Line clearcut corridor behind homes along Pennsylvania Avenue in Silver Spring’s Lyttonsville neighborhood.

Continue reading →

Holy Holstein

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New York Times screen capture, December 2, 2018.

This terrific New York Times photo became a meme and went viral on the Interwebz. It shows what appears to be a gargantuan Holstein cow — Knickers — dwarfing an adult human.

The accompanying article is a funny piece that digs into the photo and how it’s misleading, i.e., folks who have never gotten up close and personal with a Holstein probably don’t know how big they are in real life. Most cityslickers’ only experiences with Holstein cattle come from Gary Larson’s Far Side cartoons, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream art, and the burgers we eat, They know very little about cattle and Holsteins in particular. The NYT article and the folks who know my “thing” with cattle who have shared the image reminded me that I haven’t written much lately about livestock and leather tanning. I think it’s time to fix that situation.

Pittsburgh History cover, Spring 1997 issue, featuring my article on the history of Pittsburghs leather industry.

I spent a lot of years researching and writing about tanning, stockyards, and the interconnected meatpacking and meat byproducts industries. While researching Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania’s tanneries in the mid-1990s I encountered one of those people whose names eerily fit the jobs they do. You know, Mr. Butcher the butcher. Or, Mr. Macro the math teacher. Here in the DC suburbs I always chuckled when I saw a Peed Plumbing truck.

This fun little post is about a Pittsburgh tannery owner named Alexander Holstein (1812-1895). Holstein came to Pittsburgh from Bavaria. He arrived in New York in 1836. Within a decade, he appeared in Pittsburgh city directories as a saddler and harness maker with a shop in Wood Street in the city’s downtown. Wood Street was near the confluence of the Allegheny, Ohio, and Monongahela rivers. Its proximity to to the rivers and to the later Pennsylvania Canal made it an ideal location to become Pittsburgh’s earliest leather tanning district. Hides, tanbark, and water were easily obtained. The same transportation routes made it possible to ship the finished leather not sold locally to eastern markets. Continue reading →

A Pittsburgh flashback

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Pittsburgh 2018.

Back in 1992 I was working as an archaeologist for a Philadelphia-based consulting firm. I had been spending a lot of time that summer in Southwestern Pennsylvania doing research to write a regional historic context for a large transportation project.

Earlier that year, both of Pittsburgh’s newspapers were impacted by striking delivery drivers. One of the papers, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, didn’t want to fade into obscurity in these waning days of analog publication and delivery. To try and keep attention focused on itself and on the news, the Post-Gazette hired town criers to stand in downtown Pittsburgh and read the news. It was more public relations stunt than news delivery, but it sounded like a really interesting story that also appealed to the historian and folklorist in me.

Besides working as an archaeologist and finishing my Penn PhD coursework, I also was writing for several newspapers, including the Philadelphia Inquirer. One day I called my editor and told her that I had been spending a lot of time just south of Pittsburgh and I pitched writing a story about the town criers. She liked it and she gave me the green light to run with my idea. Late one morning, I hopped in my car after grabbing my reporter’s notebook and tape recorder and headed north, from the Monongahela River Valley to downtown Pittsburgh. The Inquirer published my article on Pittsburgh’s town criers on September 1, 1992.

© 2018 D.S. Rotenstein