Drafting the Past: How Historians Write History

In this episode, I spoke with historian, podcaster, speaker, and wellness instructor Dr. Natalia Mehlman Petrzela. Natalia is an associate professor of history at The New School. Her first book, Classroom Wars: Language, Sex, and the Making of Modern Political Culture, was published in 2015. She is a co-host of the weekly podcast Past Present, and also hosted the amazing podcast Welcome to Your Fantasy, about the cultural phenomenon of Chippendales. Natalia's newest book, Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession is coming next month from the University of Chicago Press.

In this episode, host Kate Carpenter spoke with historian and bestselling novelist Dr. Deborah Harkness. Deb's first novel, A Discovery of Witches, debuted at #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. She has written three more books in the All Souls Series, including the most recent, Time's Convert, which was published in 2018. Before that, Deb was trained and worked as a historian of science. She is the author of two academic books. Deb also teaches European history and the history of science to undergraduates and graduate students at the University of Southern California. We had a great time talking about the relationship between her work as a historian and as a novelist, the research that goes into her books, and why she believes her fantasy novels are her best historic work.

In this episode, I spoke with environmental historian Dr. Adam Sowards. Adam is a historian and writer whose work focuses on the histories of the environment, public lands, the American West, and much more. He has published four books, as well as one edited volume. His most recent book, Making America's Public Lands: The Contested History of Conservation on Federal Lands, was published earlier this year. Adam has also regularly written for public audiences, everything from pieces in the the Los Angeles Times and Slate to personal essays in literary journals. From 2018 to 2020, he also wrote a column for High Country News called "Reckoning with History." We spoke about the new directions in Adam's career, how he thinks about public writing as an extension of teaching, and more.

In this episode, Kate interviews Dr. Marcia Chatelain, professor of history and African American studies at Georgetown University. She is the author of two books. The first, South Side Girls: Growing up in the Great Migration, came out from Duke University Press in 2015. The second, Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, won the Pulitzer Prize for history in 2021. I spoke with Marcia about how she approaches writing history, the reasons Franchise was rejection by some editors, and the lessons in journalism that she learned at our mutual alma mater, the University of Missouri School of Journalism.

In this episode, host Kate Carpenter interviews historian Dr. Abby Mullen, assistant professor of history at the United States Naval Acadmey. In her former role at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, Abby not only worked on software designed for historians, but she also created and hosted a narrative history podcast, Consolation Prize, which looked at U.S. diplomacy through the lens of the country's consuls. Kate and Abby talk about what it takes to write for a listening audience, the joys of using Tropy to manage primary source research, and much more.

For this episode of Drafting the Past, Kate Carpenter interviewed historian and writer Dr. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox. In addition to teaching history at Case Western Reserve University, Dr. Rabinovitch-Fox has also worked as a public historian and curator, and regularly writes for public audiences in outlets like the Washington Post, Zocalo Public Square, and Nursing Clio. Her first book, Dressed for Freedom: The Fashionable Politics of American Feminism, came out in 2021 from the University of Illinois Press.

In this episode, we talk about both the challenges and advantages of writing in a language other than your first language, what it's like to publish a book when you're not on the tenure track, and why she spends a lot of time crawling on the floor when she's editing.

In this episode, host Kate Carpenter talks with historian Dan Bouk about his new book, Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the US Census and How to Read Them, how he turns seemingly boring topics into fascinating histories, repeated drafting, and the importance of maintaining a capacity for wonder and communicating that to readers. They also talk about reader feedback, how the book started as a blog project, and more.

For this episode of Drafting the Past, I interviewed Dr. Isabela Morales, writer and public historian. She is the editor and project manager of The Princeton & Slavery Project and the digital projects manager at the Stoutsburg Sourland African American Museum, central New Jersey's first Black history museum.

​Dr. Morales received her Ph.D. in history from Princeton University in 2019, specializing in the 19th-century United States, slavery, and emancipation. Her first book, Happy Dreams of Liberty: An American Family in Slavery and Freedom, was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press. We talked about how work as a public historian influences her writing, why guinea pigs are essential to her process, and the fiction she reads to learn how to evoke a place and time.

For this episode of Drafting the Past, I interviewed Dr. Victoria Wolcott, professor of history at the University of Buffalo. Dr. Wolcott is the author of three books: Remaking Respectibility: African-American Women in Interwar Detroit; Race, Riots, and Roller Coasters: The Struggle Over Segregated Recreation in America; and her most recent, Living in the Future: Utopianism and the Long Civil Rights Movement, which we talk about more in this episode. She is also the author of numerous academic articles and essays published everywhere from the Washington Post to Buzzfeed. We talked about finding and processing source materials, finding a writing routine that suits you, and why you might still want to publish academic articles, even if your books are focusing on broader audiences.

For this episode of Drafting the Past, I interviewed art historian (and lawyer!) Erin L. Thompson. Erin's new book is Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America's Public Monuments (W.W. Norton, 2022). She has written many essays and op-eds for a wide range of publications, in addition to regularly being interviewed for her expertise as "America's only professor of art crime." We had a fantastic conversation about keeping your audience interested, finding the strange details and asking the questions that intrigue you, and the power of humor in history.