For this episode, Kate Carpenter spoke with Dr. Andrew Wehrman, an associate professor of history at Central Michigan University. Andrew's first book, The Contagion of Liberty: The Politics of Smallpox in the American Revolution, came out in December 2022, and he has also published many essays and op-eds on the subjects of epidemics, public health, inoculation and vaccination. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and, since our interview it was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in history. Our conversation gives an excellent look into the long process of writing this book, and I hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoyed talking with Andrew.

Host Kate Carpenter interviews author Lyndsie Bourgon. Lyndsie is a journalist and oral historian, and her first book, Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America's Woods, was published by Little, Brown Spark in 2022 and examines the past and present of tree poaching. More broadly, Lyndsie writes about the environment and its entanglement with history, culture, and identity. I was delighted to have the chance to ask Lyndsie about her approach to oral histories in this book, bringing empathy to a complex topic, and how she her background as a journalist and training as an oral historian come together.

Host Kate Carpenter interviews historian and writer Dr. Andrew Simon, who studies media, popular culture, and the modern Middle East and teaches at Dartmouth University. His first book, Media of the Masses: Cassette Culture in Modern Egypt, was published in 2022 by Stanford University Press. Andrew also holds the distinction of being the first Drafting the Past guest who hoped to become a professional baseball player before his career as a historian. We had a great conversation about how to write about sound in history and translate it to the page, the challenges and thrills of creating archives outside of official channels, and how a candid remark from Andrew's grandmother impacted his writing.

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.