Drafting the Past: How Historians Write History

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In this episode, Kate is joined by Dr. Shane White, the emeritus Challis Professor of History at the University of Sydney. Shane is a historian of US history, especially African American history, and has written or co-written seven books. His newest book is A Moment in the Sun: Black Manhattan Before the Civil War, and it is the product of decades of thinking and research. In it, he details the world of Black men and women in antebellum New York, bringing to life characters and moments that might otherwise be overlooked. As you’ll hear, it’s a book that emerges out of Shane’s incredibly detailed and intimate knowledge of one dense body of sources in particular, the district attorney’s records in the Municipal Archives of the City of New York, hundreds of thousands of files that date back to the 1790s. Listen to their conversation to learn about Shane’s dogged approach to research and his reflections on a career as a historian of the United States who lives and works in Australia.

• Shane White, A Moment in the Sun: Black Manhattan Before the Civil War
• Shane White, Prince of Darkness: The Untold Story of Jeremiah G. Hamilton, Wall Street’s First Black Millionaire
• Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African American History Through Songs, Sermons, and Speech
• Shane White and Graham White, Stylin’: African American Expressive Culture from Its Beginnings to the Zoot Suit
• Shane White, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White, Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars
• Shane White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York
• Shane White, Somewhat More Independent: The End of Slavery in New York City, 1770-1810
• The David Abraham scandal
• Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790
• Ian Tyrrell
• Michael McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America
• Robert Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York and the Lyndon Johnson books

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When Katherine Grandjean’s new book, Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution, came out earlier this summer, somehow I missed it. But I’m awfully glad someone corrected that for me (shout out to historian Robert Parkinson), because this was a remarkable book.

In it, Grandjean follows the trail of a pair of brothers who terrorized the Kentucky and Tennessee countryside for nine months in 1798, murdering dozens of people for reasons that were unclear to their contemporaries and to the people who have written about them for the past two hundred years. Grandjean not only tells a gripping, beautifully written story, but she weaves it with the uncertain political and social atmosphere of the United States in the wake of the American Revolution. It’s a story about masculine violence, class, property, and the creation of the nation, and it has surprising resonance even now.

Dr. Katherine Grandjean is an associate professor of history at Wellesley University, and a historian of early America. Her first book was American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England. In our conversation, she had insightful things to say about building tension, balancing narrative threads, and the hard, tireless work it took to track down the evidence that makes a story like this possible to write.

• Katherine Grandjean, Kingdom of Devils: A Tale of Murder in the Shadow of the American Revolution
• Katherine Grandjean, American Passage: The Communications Frontier in Early New England
• Jane Kamensky
• Jill Lepore
• F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
• Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

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In this episode, Kate interviews Dr. Thomas Andrews, a historian who cares deeply about the writing—and revision—process. Thomas is a professor of history at the University of Colorado Boulder and is also the faculty director of the Center for the American West. He’s the author of three books, including the Bancroft-award winning Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies, and his newest book, The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Pandemic and the Fate of Reconstruction America. In addition to his own writing, he has interviewed historians as part of the Writer’s Studio feature in the journal Modern American History, which is a series of terrific interviews about how some of the most highly regarded American historians work. As you might imagine, Kate and Thomas had a great time talking about the writing process and especially Thomas’ love of revision. This one also includes a treadmill desk, a harrowing publishing tale, and why he might have taken Bill Cronon’s dissertation advice a little too seriously.

• Thomas Andrews, The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Pandemic and the Fate of Reconstruction America
• Thomas Andrews, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies
• Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War
• Susan Orlean, “The Walking Alive,” on using a treadmill desk
• Writer’s Studio feature archives in Modern American History journal
• Linda Gordon
• William Cronon
• Richard White
• Donald Worster
• Patricia Limerick
• Curb Your Enthusiasm

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For this episode, Kate is joined by Eric Jay Dolin, the New York Times-bestselling author of 17 books, to talk about his writing process and what it’s like to build a career as an author of popular histories. His books include Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America; A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes; Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates; and Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution.

His most recent book is The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail. His books have won awards and are frequently named best books of the year. Before writing history books, Eric worked in environmental policy and earned a PhD in environmental policy and planning from MIT.

We talked about how his career has developed, the ups and downs of the book market, and he dished about advances, career trajectories, and why he thinks he’d rather have a huge book now than early in his career.

Eric Jay Dolin, The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail

Samuel Eliot Morison, The Maritime History of Massachusetts, 1783-1860

Erik Larson, Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History

James Truslow Adams, The Founding of New England

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How many history books have kept you up late into the night, turning the page to find out what happens next? That’s exactly what the newest book from this episode’s guest did to Kate, but it was well worth the lost sleep.

Catherine Grace Katz joins the Drafting the Past podcast to talk about her newest book, Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War. Catherine is a writer, historian, and lawyer, with degrees in history from Harvard and Cambridge along with a JD from Harvard. Her first book was Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War.

She joined Kate to talk about what goes into writing such extraordinary true stories, from how she works without an outline to the writing tool she found in her mom’s basement, and the unlikely inspiration for the book in a classic holiday movie.

• Catherine’s website
• Catherine Grace Katz, Daughters of Yalta: The Churchills, Roosevelts, and Harrimans: A Story of Love and War
• Catherine Grace Katz, Shadow Before the Flame: The Hindenburg Disaster and the Prelude to War
• William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
• William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary
• Norman MacLean, Young Men and Fire
• Gioia Diliberto, Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition
• Tana French
• Patrick Radden Keefe, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
• Phillippe Sands, The Ratline: The Exalted Life and Mysterious Death of a Nazi Fugitive, and the podcast precursor, Intrigue: The Ratline
• Helena Merriman, Tunnel 29: The True Story of an Extraordinary Escape Beneath the Berline Wall and its podcast precursor, Intrigue: Tunnel 29
• The Creative Nonfiction Podcast with Brendan O’Meara
• Pitch Club

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In this episode, Kate spoke with Tai S. Edwards and Charlee Huffman, writers and editors of a new book, Shokhi: A Kanza Relative, A Monument, and Rematriation. This book is a little different from others that have appeared on the show: it tells the story of how a group of people, include Kaw Nation citizens, historians, artists, activists, and others worked together to bring a grandfather rock, In‘zhúje‘waxóbe, back to the Kanza people with whom they had a centuries-long relationship. The boulder had been appropriated as a memorial to the founders of Lawrence, Kansas, and the land on which it stood bore witness to many intersecting narratives of people and place. The book, is part history, part artistic expression, and part handbook for this kind of restorative work.

Tai and Charlee discussed their collaborative process, incorporating disability accommodation into the heart of their work, and how they let the land lead them in telling a history with many voices.

Tai S. Edwards is professor of history and director of the Kansas Studies Institute at Johnson County Community College. She is the author of Osage Women and Empire: Gender and Power and co-editor of Lyda Conley and the Fight to Preserve Huron Indian Cemetery, also published by Kansas. c. huffman is a Kaw Nation Citizen with an MFA and an MDiv who sits at the intersection of privilege, dis/ability and Indigeneity; a place where poetry and theology dance. Her writing has appeared in The Ending Hasn’t Happened Yet, a poetry anthology edited by Hannah Soyer.

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• Shokhi: A Kanza Relative, a Monument, and Rematriation
• Poet Marilyn Haeker
• Michael Grow, US Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War
• Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea series
• Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
• Doorkeeper of the Heart
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants
• Ilona Andrews, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me

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In this episode, Kate is joined by our first guest from New Zealand, archivist and independent historian Jared Davidson. Though he was not trained as a historian and originally comes from a graphic design background, Jared has written and published five books that focus on overlooked and radical histories of New Zealand, or Aotearoa, as you’ll hear him call it.

During the day, he works at the Alexander Turnbull Library, where he is the Research Librarian Manuscripts. His books have won multiple awards in New Zealand and have covered subjects ranging from anarchists to censorship. His most recent book, Blood and Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand, uncovers the ways that incarcerated labor literally shaped the country’s environment and landscape. If you’re a historian who comes to the subject without formal training, you’ll especially love this episode, but there’s a lot here to learn for all of us, including how to weave compelling individual stories into a strong argument, which Jared does brilliantly in this book.

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• Jared Davidson’s website
• Jared Davidson, Blood & Dirt: Prison Labour and the Making of New Zealand
• Jared Davidson, The History of a Riot
• Jared Davidson, Dead Letters: Censorship and Subversion in New Zealand 1914-1920
• Jared Davidson, Sewing Freedom: Philip Josephs, Transnationalism, and Early New Zealand Anarchism
• Jared Davidson, Remains to Be Seen: Tracing Joe Hill’s Ashes in New Zealand
• Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand
• Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History
• Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War
• Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa; Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves; To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
• “James Kelman: I’ll die at the desk. So what. Where’s the coffee?”
• Marcus Rediker books
• Marcus Rediker, “The Poetics of History from Below”

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How does the history of English colonialism in the Renaissance change when you tell that history through objects? In this episode, Kate spoke with Dr. Lauren Working, a historian whose work focuses on England’s colonialism and interactions with Indigenous people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Lauren is a lecturer in Early Modern Studies at the University of York. Alongside her research, Lauren is committed to sharing historical knowledge with the public. In fact, as you’ll hear in the interview, she was approached by a literary agent thanks to her work with the BBC. As a result, she published her new book, A Golden World: How The Americas Transformed Tudor and Stuart England, with a trade press. In order to help her tell a story of the Atlantic world from both Indigenous American and colonial British perspectives, Lauren turned to objects. The result is a tactile and beautifully written history of a world of encounter and influence. We talked about the rewards and challenges of writing history through objects and how Lauren brought so many people’s experiences to the page, even when they were largely missing from the archive.

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• Lauren Working, A Golden World: How the Americas Transformed Tudor and Stuart England
• Lauren Working, The Making of an Imperial Polity
• The internal illustrations for A Golden World were created by artist Rebecca Lee Kunz (Tree of Life Studio), a citizen of the Cherokee Nation
• Lauren’s episodes on BBC Radio 3, “Ruffs in Jamestown” and “Boy With a Pearl Earring”
• Lauren’s guest appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Free Thinking: “Trade and Traffic,” “The Mayflower and Native American History,” “Gifts and Gratitude,” and “The Botanical Past”
• Christine M. DeLucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast
• National Portrait Gallery learning resource: “Illuminating the global in Tudor and early Stuart portraits,” by Lauren Working
• Sara E. Johnson, Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World

In episode 110 of the Drafting the Past podcast, Kate interviews historian Richard Jobs and anthropologist and illustrator Steven Van Wolputte. Rick and Steven teamed up to write, illustrate and create In the Land of the Lacandón: A Graphic History of Adventure and Imperialism. Part graphic history, part historical essay, part poetic commentary and more, the book not only tells the history of one moment in 20th century imperial exploration and anthropology but also takes apart the act of historical research and narration and turns it inside out for the reader. Rick and Steven discussed how they conceived of and developed the project and how they collaborated across countries. They also talked about the possibilities of historical narrative, and why the book would be a great teaching tool. And don’t miss the pretty amazing reading list they slipped in at the end.

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• Richard Ivan Jobs and Steven Van Wolputte, with Manuel Bolom Pale, In the Land of the Lacandón: A Graphic History of Adventure and Imperialism
• Richard Ivan Jobs, Backpack Ambassadors: How Youth Travel Integrated Europe
• Richard Ivan Jobs, Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of France After the Second World War
• Manuel Bolom Pale
• Voyagers Without Trace
• Matthew Barrett and Robert C. Engen, Through Their Eyes: A Graphic History of Hill 70 and Canada’s First World War
• Joe Sacco, Journalism
• Alison Bechdel, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama, The Secret to Superhuman Strength
• Art Spiegelman, Maus: A Survivor’s Tale
• Michael Vann and Liz Clarke, The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam
• Nick Sousanas, Unflattening
• Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre
• Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller
• Louisa Passerini, Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968
• Bonnie Smith, Confessions of a Concierge: Madame Lucie’s History of Twentieth-Century France
• Craig Thompson, Ginseng Roots: A Memoir

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Megan Marshall estimated that it might take her 3 ½ years to write her first biography. In would up taking 20. Her commitment was worth it, though. In this episode of the Drafting the Past podcast, Kate interviews Megan Marshall about how she approaches the subjects and structures of her books, and what has kept her going—plus, why she believes biography is essential now.

Megan is a writer and biographer who got her start writing book reviews. Her first biography was The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism. It was awarded multiple prizes and became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in biography and memoir. Her second book, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, won the Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and her third book was Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast, a biography of the poet, Bishop, interwoven with chapters from Megan’s own life leading up to her study with Bishop. She has also been awarded the BIO award, the highest honor given by the Biographers International Organization.

This year, she published a book of essays called After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart. It includes pieces on her family’s history, her own encounters with historic events, and some further investigations into research that didn’t make it in to her other books.

• Megan Marshall, After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart
• Megan Marshall, Elizabeth Bishop: A Miracle for Breakfast
• Megan Marshall, Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
• Megan Marshall, The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism
• Megan Marshall, “How Do You Like Your History? With Imaginative Leaps or Grounded in Fact?” New York Times, March 7, 2025
• Biographers International Organization
• Megan Marshall, “Born in 1810, Margaret Fuller Was Labeled a Child Prodigy. She Later Used Her Intellect to Ask Important Questions About Women’s Role in America,” Smithsonian Magazine, Summer 2026
• Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian