Drafting the Past

In this episode, host Kate Carpenter is joined by Dr. Daniel Neep to talk about his new book, Syria: A Modern History.

Daniel is a non-resident fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University and is currently senior editor at the Arab Center Washington DC, a think tank focused on the relationship between the Arab world and the US. Previously, he has worked as a faculty member, researcher, and leader at universities, NGOs, and research centers as he seeks to bridge academic work and institution building. He is the author of a previous book on Syria, as well as many articles and analyses in a wide variety of venues. His new book tells the history of Syria from the 1800s through the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, focusing on how the Syrian people themselves have understood and advocated for their country's politics, economic relationships and social structures.

Kate and Daniel talked about how his many years steeped in research about the Arab world and Syria went into this book, and how he thought about its structure and purpose. We also talked about some of the quirks of publishing a book in both the US and the UK, including how this one book has two slightly different titles, and about what it's like to be writing and revising a book when the ending is changing in real time.

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Daniel Neep's website
• Daniel Neep, Syria: A Modern History (US version)
• Daniel Neep, A Modern History of Syria (UK version)
• Daniel Neep, Occupying Syria Under the French Mandate
• Arab Center Washington D.C.
• Timothy Mitchell, Colonizing Egypt
• Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity
• Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Vol. 1

In this episode, Kate is joined by Dr. John Garrison Marks, whose new book is Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory. This is a fantastic book that takes a careful, and often surprising look, at how generations of Americans have remembered and forgotten George Washington's relationship to slavery and used that memory to bolster their own arguments.

John Garrison Marks is the vice president of research and engagement at the American Association for State and Local History, so he is steeped in the role of public history across the country. He is the author of a previous book, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery, and co-editor of an anthology. John has written essays and op-eds for outlets including TIME and Smithsonian Magazine. Recently, his expertise on the memory of Washington's relationship to slavery became particularly relevant when the National Park Service removed an exhibit about the history of slavery at the President's House in Philadelphia, and John was ready to jump into the fray and offer vital historical context. I asked John about the relationship between his work with public historians and how he thinks about writing history, as well as how he manages to write while having a busy day job and a young family.

Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you purchase books through these links, Drafting the Past gets a small percentage at no additional cost to you. Thanks for supporting our guests and the podcast!

Mentioned in this episode:

• John Garrison Marks, Thy Will Be Done: George Washington's Legacy of Slavery and the Fight for American Memory
• John Garrison Marks, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery: Race, Status, and Identity in the Urban Americas
• John's website
• American Association for State and Local History (AASLH)
• John Garrison Marks, "We've Never Agreed About George Washington and Slavery," TIME
• Write Now with Scrivener Episode 60: John Garrison Marks, Historian
• Mary V. Thompson, The Only Unavoidable Subject of Regret: George Washington, Slavery, and the Enslaved Community at Mount Vernon
• Bill Hader's excellent writing advice
• John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World
• David Grann, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
• Megan Greenwell, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream Amanda Mull, "Do You Want a Boring Floor Lamp or an Ugly Floor Lamp?,"The Atlantic

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In this episode, Kate welcomes back episode 1 guest Dr. Megan Kate Nelson as the very first return guest on Drafting the Past! Megan is a historian and the author of five books, and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. In our first conversation, we talked about Megan's writing process, favorite writing advice, and more. But in this episode, we're going deeper! While we talk about Megan's new book, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier, she's sharing a look behind the scenes at the timeline of a trade press book, how she balances promoting one book and researching the next one, and even some of the behind-the-scenes drama. Plus, she let me take a look at the book's original proposal, and share FIVE failed proposals before she landed on a winner for her next book. This episode is a rare glimpse into the nitty gritty of publishing as a trade press historian, and you're going to get a ton out of it. Plus, stick around to the end—we have a little (okay, BIG) announcement to share!

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Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. When you buy books through these links, you not only support the authors, you also help to keep Drafting the Past going. Thank you!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Megan Kate Nelson, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier
• Megan Kate Nelson, Saving Yellowstone: Exploration and Preservation in Reconstruction America
• Megan Kate Nelson, The Three Cornered-War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West
• Megan Kate Nelson, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War
• Megan Kate Nelson, Trembling Earth: A Cultural History of the Okefenokee Swamp
• Drafting the Past Episode 1: Megan Kate Nelson Experiments with Structure
• Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

Before we get to the episode, I need a favor: Will you take a minute to fill out this survey about Drafting the Past, and let me know what is and isn't working for you about the show? It will help me bring even better episodes to you. Thanks in advance for your help!

In this episode, I'm happy to welcome historian of religion Dr. Matthew Avery Sutton. Matt's newest book is called Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity, following the relationship between Christianity and the nation from the arrival of the first Europeans up to Donald Trump's second term in office. Matt is the author of three previous books, along with an edited collection and a documentary history, and he regularly writes about the history of Christianity in America for a general audience. We talked about how he thinks about all those different audiences and how he keeps writing so much despite many personal and professional responsibilities—including seven years as department chair.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Matthew Avery Sutton, Chosen Land: How Christianity Made America and Americans Remade Christianity
• Matthew Avery Sutton, Double Crossed: The Missionaries Who Spied for the United States During the Second World War
• Matthew Avery Sutton, American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism
• Matthew Avery Sutton, Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America
• American Experience: Sister Aimee
• Jane Sherron De Hart, Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life
• Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture
• David Hollinger
• Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
• John le Carré
• Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States
• Matthew Avery Sutton, "The antichrist has long haunted American politics. Now it's rearing its head again," The Guardian

Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.

In this episode, host Kate Carpenter is joined by Dr. Rhae Lynn Barnes to talk about book Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment. Rhae Lynn is an assistant professor of history at Princeton University. With meticulous research and piles of evidence, Darkology reveals the widespread and persistent use of amateur blackface minstrelsy across the United States from the Civil War through the early 2000s. Rhae Lynn is also the co-editor of three books, the founder of open-access teaching resource U.S. History Scene, and was featured in and served as an executive advisor for the PBS documentary series Reconstruction.

Researching and writing Darkology took a stunning amount of research, as well as a mental toll, and I'm grateful to Rhae Lynn for talking about how she grappled with all of it, the unusual challenges she faced when thinking about visuals for the book, and much more. Plus, she shares some excellent wisdom for how to keep going even when it seems too hard, or when you don't feel like you belong.

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Rhae Lynn Barnes, Darkology: Blackface and the American Way of Entertainment
• Rhae Lynn Barnes, Keri Leigh Merritt, and Yohuru Williams, eds., After Life: A Collective History of Loss and Redemption in Pandemic America
• Rhae Lynn Barnes and Catherine Clinton, eds., Roe v. Wade: Fifty Years After
• Rhae Lynn Barnes and Glenda Goodman, eds., American Contact: Objects of Intercultural Encounters and the Boundaries of Book History
• Rhae Lynn Barnes, "Yes, politicians wore blackface. It used to be all-American 'fun.'" The Washington Post
• Maya Angelou's 1992 commencement address at Spelman College, in which she tells her audience "bring your people with you"
• Sandra Cisneros, "I Hate the Iowa Writers Workshop"

Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.

Historian and writer Emily Lieb's professional history is a fascinating one, from crafting textbooks for kids to leaving a job as a professor to become a full-time writer. She taught history and urban studies at Seattle University for more than a decade. Now, in addition to her work as a historian, she also works for the Derfner & Sons writing agency.

Her first book came out in 2025 after many years of research, writing and revision. It's called Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, and it tells the story of a plan to build an expressway through Black, middle-class community in Baltimore, and how even though the road was never built, the plan paved the way for the destruction of a vibrant neighborhood. It's a history that echoes similar ones in cities across the United States, and Emily uses it to tell a fascinating but frustrating, deeply human story about racial inequality and the resistance of determined residents. Emily had a clear vision of how she wanted to tell this history, right down to the kind of book it should be, and you'll learn a lot in this interview from how she got there and her frank approach to writing and editing.

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Mentioned in this episode:

Emily Lieb, Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore

Derfner & Sons

Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird, the origin of the phrase "shitty first drafts"

Andrew Hartman also praised editor Tim Mennel in episode 69

Calvin Trillin, "Thoughts Brought On By Prolonged Exposure to Exposed Brick"

Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.

In this episode, Kate is joined by Dr. Matthew Delmont. Matt is a professor and associate dean at Dartmouth University, and he is the author of six books. His two most recent books are Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad, which came out in 2022, and Until the Last Gun is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America's Soul, which just came out this year. Matt has also worked on numerous digital history projects, and he is the winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar award.

In Until the Last Gun is Silent, Matt pairs the story of Coretta Scott King's antiwar activism during the Vietnam War with that of Dwight "Skip" Johnson, who received the Medal of Honor for his service in Vietnam before his life ended tragically after his return to Detroit. It's a combination that illuminates the meaning of the Vietnam War for Black Americans. We talked about how Matt has worked on his voice and narrative style to reach new audiences, as well as how the intriguing historical narrative pairing in this book came to be.

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Matthew F. Delmont, Until the Last Gun is Silent: A Story of Patriotism, the Vietnam War, and the Fight to Save America's Soul
• Matthew F. Delmont, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home and Abroad
• Matthew F. Delmont, Black Quotidian: Everyday History in African American Newspapers
• Matthew F. Delmont, Making Roots: A Nation Captivated
• Matthew F. Delmont, Why Busing Failed: Race, Media, and the National Resistance to School Desegregation
• Matthew F. Delmont, The Nicest Kids in Town: American Bandstand, Rock 'n' Roll, and the Struggle for Civil Rights in 1950s Philadelphia
• Tiya Miles
• Annette Gordon Reed
• Jeanne Theoharis, The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks and King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.'s Life of Struggle Outside the South
• Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America

Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.

In this episode we're taking a look at another great new book on this history of the American Revolution: The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, by Richard Bell. In this book, we get to see how the revolution affected not only North America, but most of the world. To learn more about how you write a book that manages to cover such a massive subject with remarkable alacrity, I'm joined by the author of The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, Dr. Richard Bell.

Rick Bell is a professor of history at the University of Maryland and is the author of three books, as well as an edited collection. His first book was We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States, which came out in 2012. He followed that up with Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, an award-winning book that was published in 2019. The American Revolution and the Fate of the World came out at the end of last year. He has also created two streaming courses through the Great Courses series online, with a third on the way.

I have to tell you, I was a little surprised at how I absolutely devoured this book, and I was even more surprised to learn how it came together. I think you'll love learning about Rick's approach to writing, his thinking about structure and character, and his habit of wandering the halls of his department, talking to himself. Here's my interview with Dr. Rick Bell.

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Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World
• Richard Bell, Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home
• Richard Bell, We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States
• Richard Bell on Great Courses Plus: "America's Long Struggle Against Slavery"
• Richard Bell on Great Courses Plus: "Ordinary Americans in the Revolution"
• Zotero
• Octet musical
• Alan Taylor
• Jill Lepore
• Eric Foner
• Ira Berlin
• Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
• Edward P. Jones, The Known World

In most episodes, I interview an author of nonfiction history about their research and writing process, but in today's episode we get to do something a little different. We're taking a closer look at how authors and presses get the word out about new books. And we're going to do that with an insider's perspective. I'm very excited to be joined in this episode by Sonya Bonczek, the director of publicity and communications for University of North Carolina Press.

I have exchanged many emails with Sonya over the past few years whenever I've had podcast guests who publish with UNC Press, and I've been impressed at the great publicity work that Sonya and her team are doing. So when I thought about who might be able to bring us a publicist's perspective, she was first on my list. I was eager to hear from Sonya about how book publicity has changed throughout her career, what works and what doesn't, what she wishes more authors know, and how she's feeling about the state of the book industry today, especially when it comes to nonfiction history.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Support Drafting the Past on Patreon
• Amanda Ice, Harvard University Press publicist, on Your Words Unleashed
• UNC Press on Instagram
• UNC Press on TikTok
• New York Magazine's 2008 article on whether book publishing would end
• The New York Times, "'Luddite' Teens Don't Want Your Likes", December 2022

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In case you haven't been paying attention—or maybe you don't live in the United States--you should know that this year marks 250 years since the Declaration of Independence. If you prefer funny words, you can call it America's semiquincentennial. Anyway, what this means for us is that there are a shocking number of books about the American Revolution, the early United States, and related subjects coming out this year. You're going to hear some of them on this show, starting with today's episode. One of the fascinating things that these books will show us is just how many ways you can approach history. So first up, in this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Andrew Edwards to talk about his new book, Money and the Making of the American Revolution. Andrew is a lecturer at the University of St. Andrew in Scotland, and a historian of capitalism, money, and early America. In Money and the Making of the American Revolution he takes a deep dive into the role of money—and the meaning of money—as one of the key causes of the American Revolution. Andrew tells the story of money in the American colonies and in Great Britain to explain that it was a fight over money and who got to define it, rather than taxes, that kicked off the colonists' rebellion. If that sounds dry and maybe a little confusing to you, I'm happy to report that Andrew does a remarkable job of telling this history in a way that is interesting even to those of us who don't love making sense of obscure fiscal policies. In our conversation, we talked about just how he did that and why he wrote an avid defense of narrative history in the book's introduction. But first, he tells us about the very winding road he took to becoming a historian in the first place.

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Mentioned in this episode:

• Andrew David Edwards, Money and the Making of the American Revolution
• Zotero
• Eelco Runia, "Presence," History and Theory 45, no. 1 (2006), 1-29
• Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings
• Martha Sandweiss, The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West and Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (Isabela Morales also mentioned Martha Sandweiss' history writing course in her episode of Drafting the Past)
• Karl Jacoby, Shadows at Dawn: An Apache Massacre and the Violence of History
• R. F. Kuang, Katabasis

Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.