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Wendy Plotkin, Ph.D.
Editor-in-Chief
H-Urban
http://www.h-net.org/~urban
wendyplotkin@wbhsi.net
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"The City" (1919) Ferdinand Leger http://www.thecityreview.com/leger.html	"Atomic Bomb Test in New Mexico" Harry S. Truman Library & Museum http://www.trumanlibrary.org/hst/d.htm

I am an independent scholar who has pursued interests in three areas : traditional academic research and writing; in-class teaching of undergraduates and graduate students; and the use of the digital revolution to expand communication and collaboration among scholars. I begin with the last of these because it is in this capacity that I presently have a formal role.

INTEGRATING HISTORY & THE INTERNET

H-Net

My major activity in this area was helping to establish H-Net (History on Line). In 1993, as a doctoral student, I worked with Professor Richard Jensen at the University of Illinois at Chicago to establish the organization, and served for a short period as one if its first Associate Directors. In 1995, H-Net moved to Michigan State University, and expanded its disciplinary focus, altering its name to Humanities and Social Sciences On-Line. H-Net is an umbrella organization for over 100 scholarly Internet forums on history and the humanities (at http://www.h-net.org).

H-Urban

My major activity within H-Net was establishing and acting as the chief editor of H-Urban (http://www.h-net.msu.edu/~urban) from February, 1993 to the present.  H-Urban was the first of the H-Net scholarly forums on history and the humanities, and served as a model for many of those that followed.  In addition to its discussions, H-Urban Reviews are available as a major scholarly resource to urban scholars across the world, comprising over 300 reviews of books, exhibitions, and websites since 1997.  In 2001, H-Urban announced its on-line Teaching Center. The Teaching Center , established by Charlotte Agustin, an independent scholar, and I, is a comprehensive site offering as its first initiative over one hundred undergraduate urban studies and history syllabi, organized by author, geographical scope, and subject. 

Comm-Org

I was founder & editor of COMM-ORG, the H-Urban On-Line Seminar on History of Community Organizing and Community-Based Development, from November, 1995 to December, 1996 (funded by the University of Illinois at Chicago Great Cities program). COMM-ORG was an on-line seminar involving periodic presentations of working papers and discussion on the history and practice of community organizing and/or community-based development. Comm-Org is now an independent list operated by Randy Stoecker of the University of Wisconsin, at http://comm-org.wisc.edu/.

Cities, Neighborhoods, and Housing

My major interest is in the dynamics of democracy in 20th century U.S., as mediated by formal governing structures, through the prism of America's pluralist heritage. As an urbanist, I have been most interested in clashes over the residential rights of racial and religious minorities in urban neighborhoods, and over the use of government-mandated rent control in inflationary eras. Most of my work has used Chicago (my home city) as a locus of study, although more recently I have expanded this to a national level.

I am close to completing the manuscript of Deeds of Mistrust: Race, Housing and Restrictive Covenants in Chicago: 1900-1953. This work examines the use of "racial restrictive covenants" against African Americans in Chicago in the first half of the century, until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1948 in Shelley v. Kraemer that the enforcement of covenants was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. It explores the creation of covenants by real estate institutions and white neighborhood organizations, asking who was involved and laying out the intellectual defenses offered. It then examines the responses of Chicago's early (1930s-1940s) civil rights movement to the existence and enforcement of covenants. Areas of focus include the case Hansberry v. Lee (initiated in 1937 by Carl Hansberry, father of Lorraine Hansberry, author of A Raisin in the Sun, and heard before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1940); the Chicago NAACP and the University of Chicago-educated black lawyers who comprised its executive board in the 1930s; and the tensions that existed within the all-white Cook County judiciary in enforcing covenants. An article on the topic was included in the special Spring, 2001 (94:1) issue of the Illinois State Historical Journal devoted to race and housing in Chicago, which also included articles by Roger Biles, Raymond Mohl, Amanda Seligman, and D. Bradford Hunt.  In addition, I have published entries on related topics in the James R. Grossman,Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff, ed. Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Stephen A. Reich, Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration (Westport: Greenwood Publishing, 2006), and David R. Goldfield, ed., Encyclopedia of American Urban History (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publishing, 2006).

I have also examined the use of racial and religious restrictive covenants and the broader issue of housing discrimination against Jews in the U.S. and Canada, including an entry on racial restrictive covenants in Richard S. Levy, ed., Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005).

Those interested in the overall topic may consult the Racial and Religious Restrictive Covenants site. I am interested in editing a volume on the experience with racial and religious restrictive covenants in cities throughout the U.S. and Canada.

I have begun a national study of racial deed restrictions and restrictive covenants within the United States, the first part of which is tentatively entitled Deeds of Whiteness: Racial Deed Restrictions and Restrictive Covenant Cases, 1892-1953. This study will examine the over 100 cases heard in state and federal appeals courts from the first recorded case (Gandolfo v. Hartman) in Ventura in 1892 to the cases heard after Barrows v. Jackson, the 1953 U.S. Supreme Court decision that closed the loopholes against enforcement of racial deed restrictions left open in its 1948 decision, Shelley v. Kraemer . I have also advised a student at Arizona State University on a paper about racial deed restrictions in the Phoenix area, which we hope to publish.

A separate topic of interest is the responses to rent control in Chicago in the World War II era and in the 1970s, as an indicator of the changing political culture in Chicago throughout this period. An article on the early period, "Rent Control in Chicago after World War II: Politics, People & Controversy," (n.b., 18MB!) was published in Prologue, the journal of the National Archives and Records Administration, in its Summer, 1998 issue, and articles on rent control are also included in the Encyclopedia of Chicago and Encyclopedia of American Urban History.

I am interested in the larger issue of urban public policy, and published a review essay on the topic in the September, 2003 issue of the Journal of Urban History.

History and the Digital Revolution

I have contributed a chapter -- “Electronic Texts in the Historical Profession: Perspectives from Across the Scholarly Spectrum" -- to Orville Vernon Burton, ed., Computing in the Social Sciences and Humanities (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002) as well as reviews of books addressing the topic [Howard Rheingold, The Virtual Community, 1993, in Journal of American Planning Association, Winter, 1995] and of on-line exhibits and primary documentary materials [Carl Smith, "The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory" WWW site, Chicago Historical Society, The Public Historian, Spring, 1997 (with Perry Duis) and Pennsylvania Gazette CD-ROM, Folio I: 1729-1750, Journal of American History, March, 1994].

*TEACHING*

I taught at Arizona State University from 2003 through 2009. My focus was on modern U.S. History (especially the post-World War II era), urban history, and integrating information technology into the classroom teaching of the department. Among the courses I taught were History 412 (U.S. History, 1973-Present), History 411 (U.S. History, 1945-1973), History 300 (Historical Inquiry): The American Metropolis. and History 498 (Historical Inquiry): Watergate.

*ORGANIZATIONAL AFFILIATIONS*

I am a member of the Board of Directors of the Society for American and Regional City Planning History , and a past member of the Board of Directors of the Urban History Association.

*EDUCATION*

I received my Ph.D. in history from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1999, and an M.A. in urban and environmental policy from Tufts University in 1997.

*PERSONAL*

I live in Chandler, Arizona, on the southern edge of Maricopa County, and on the outskirts of the fast-growing Phoenix metropolitan area.

Last revised on March 31, 2010.