Historians Writing History: Drafting the Past

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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Visit draftingthepast.com to subscribe to the newsletter. This fall, Drafting the Past is expanding, and we'll be publishing book reviews, news, interviews, and more, in addition to the podcast you know and love.

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

When historian of early modern Japan Dr. Amy Stanley came upon a letter written by a woman named Tsuneno while she was prepping a class lesson in primary sources, she knew she had found a great story. The challenge was how to tell it, even through gaps in the archive—not to mention the challenges of writing while raising two small boys The result, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World, is an extraordinary biography that went on to win multiple national awards and demonstrate that compelling trade history can be about something other than war or famous white men. Amy Stanley, professor of history at Northwestern University, joins Kate Carpenter to talk about her research and writing process and give some practical advice for revision, bringing lost places to life, and more.

To stay updated on new episodes and more from Drafting the Past (including reviews, craft essays, and author Q & As, sign up for the newsletter at draftingthepast.com).

Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Amy Stanley, Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Japanese Woman and Her World
• Amy Stanley, Selling Women: Prostitution, Markets, and the Household in Early Modern Japan
• Niigata Prefectural Archive
• Amy Stanley, “Revisiting the ‘Comfort Girls’ of Report 49,” American Historical Review 130, no. 4 (December 2025), 1459-1483

In this episode, Dr. Christopher Hodson and Dr. Brett Rushforth join Kate Carpenter to talk about their new book, Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution. It was a book two decades in the making, and when you read it, you’ll understand why. It’s absolutely packed with research and fascinating stories, and it makes a persuasive argument that, when you look beyond its official accounts, France played a much bigger role in the colonization of the Atlantic world than historians have assumed.

Chris is an associated professor of history at Brigham Young University, and Brett is editor in chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly. They bring a dry wit and a spirit of joyful curiosity to their work that comes through in the book and in this interview. You’ll hear about the varied ways they researched their new book, not just in written archives but with visual culture, artifacts preserved across the world, and even at archaeological sites in order to write a history of France’s influence in the Atlantic world that focuses not on the accounts and experiences of officials, but on the daily lives of sailors, indigenous peoples in both North America and West Africa, nuns, smugglers, and much more.

Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth, Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution
• Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History
• Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France
• Laurent DuBois
• Feathered Tupi-Guarani Cape, held by the Musée de Quai Branly
• Foldable ivory spork
• Brett and Chris’s newsletter, Beyond the Ocean
• Garamond Agency
• Huntington Library Quarterly

Dr. Dolly Jørgensen is professor of history at the University of Stavanger in Norway. As you'll hear in this episode, Dolly is one very busy historian. She is the author of three books, including her newest, Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums. She has also co-edited five books and written a truly impressive number of academic articles. She recently ended a term as the editor of the journal Environmental Humanities, and she co-directs the Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities, which is most known for its excellent series of online book talks.

As an environmental historian, I have been impressed not only by Dr. Dolly Jørgensen's work for years, but also by her warm and friendly presence at conferences and online. I was delighted when she said yes to coming on the show and talking with me about her writing process.

I was eager to hear from Dolly about how she juggles her projects, what draws her to a topic, and how working at a university in Scandinavia changes her approach to scholarship.

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Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. When you purchase books through these links, you support not only authors and indie bookstores but the podcast itself.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Dolly Jørgensen, Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums
• Dolly Jørgensen, The Medieval Pig
• Dolly Jørgensen, Recovering Lost Species in the Modern Age: Histories of Longing and Belonging
• Dolly Jørgensen's website
• Greenhouse Center for Environmental Humanities Book Talks Series
• Dolly Jørgensen on Bluesky
• Finn Arne Jørgensen
• Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait(and check out my Episode 3 interview with Bathsheba Demuth)

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In this episode, Kate welcomes Scott W. Stern and Dr. Charles O'Malley to the show.

Scott is a writer and lawyer who is the author of two previous books of narrative nonfiction and has written for many media outlets and scholarly journals. Charlie is a dramaturg and writer who has worked at theaters across the country.

Together, they teamed up to write a new book titled Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen. In it, they explore Shakespeare's character Margaret, a woman loosely based on a historical figure who is the only Shakespearean character, male or female, whose entire life appears on stage. They introduce readers to her historical model, her creation by Shakespeare, and her evolution across centuries of performances to show how the character of Margaret illuminates the world in which she is created and brought to life. As they put it, her story "shows how Shakespeare's plays have always been living collaborations among actors, directors, writers, critics, and history itself." It seems only fitting that the book itself was a close collaboration. Scott and Charlie are co-writers, but they also began working on the book together shortly after they got married. By the time they were in the final editing stages, their twin sons had been born. We talked about how they navigated intertwined domestic and writing lives, as well as the challenges of bringing different voices and backgrounds together on the page.

Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. When you purchase books through these links, you support not only authors and indie bookstores but the podcast itself.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Charles O'Malley and Scott Stern, Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen
• Scott Stern, The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison 'Promiscuous' Women
• Scott Stern, There is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou
• Charles O'Malley, Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance
• Scott and Charlie's LitHub piece on writing together: "What Co-Writing a Book on Shakespeare Taught Us About Marriage and Parenthood"
• The Internet Archive's blog posts about the Controlled Digital Lending Program
• Sam Quinones, The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work
• Daniel Hahn, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation

In this episode, Kate Carpenter interviews Dr. Anna O. Law, a political science who retrained herself in historical methods to write her new book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship. Anna is a professor of political science and Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights at CUNY Brooklyn College. In her new books, she takes a close look at which parts and levels of government in the United States have controlled people's ability to move around and across borders throughout the country's history. It's a history that is especially pertinent now, as we await the Supreme Court's forthcoming decision about the Trump administration's attempt to end the right to birthright citizenship protected under the 14th amendment of the constitution.

Anna and Kate talked about what it meant to think like a historian as well as a political scientist. She also divulged her decidedly analog research tools, the feedback she asks colleagues to give on her drafts, and her advice for any writer deciding on a press for publishing a book.

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Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you purchase books through these links, not only will you be supporting the author, but you will also help to keep Drafting the Past going. Thank you!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Anna O. Law's website
• Anna Law, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship
• Anna Law, The Immigration Battle in American Courts
• Metal page darts
• Sarasa gel pens
• Anna's favorite Clairefontaine notebooks
• Anna Law on BlueSky
• Anna's blog post about writing the second book
• Episode 102: Gautham Rao
• Megan Kate Nelson, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (and my first and second interviews with her)
• Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh As Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law and Under the Starry Flag: How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt and Sparked a Crisis Over Citizenship

It's not every day that I find myself so invested in the characters of a history book that I stay up way past my bed time to find out what happens next, but that's exactly what happened when I read the new book by today's guest, Dr. Charlotte Brooks.

Charlotte is a professor of history at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York, or CUNY, system. She is a scholar of race, immigration, and urban history, and is especially known for her work on Chinese American history. She is the author of four books. Her first three books were more aimed at an academic audience, but for her fourth book she wanted to try something a little different. The book that resulted is The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution. It's a group biography that tells the stories of six siblings, born to Chinese immigrant parents, and how they challenged the limitations and racism they faced in the United States, how many of them sought opportunities in China, and the ways they navigated the tumultuous world in which they lived in both countries in the first half of the 20th century.

They are fascinating characters, but Charlotte uses them to give us a window into the history of an entire generation of Chinese American families that many Americans know little about. I talked with Charlotte about what finally motivated her to write the book that she had been dreaming about, as well as what it was like to work with the Moy descendants, how her narrative makes the siblings so compelling, and why it was still a tough sell as a trade book.

Sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter for updates on the show and more.

Note: Bookshop.org links are affiliate links. When you buy books through these links, Drafting the Past receives a small percentage of the purchase price. Thanks for helping to support the show!

Mentioned in this episode:

• Charlotte Brooks, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution
• Charlotte Brooks, American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949
• Charlotte Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years
• Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California
• Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)
• Ellen Wu
• Mae Ngai
• Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
• Virtual Shanghai Project
• Historical Photographs of China
• Gwulo: Old Hong Kong

In this episode, Kate Carpenter is joined by a scholar who can never pass up a good archive, Dr. Gautham Rao.

Gautham is a historian of American law and politics and is an associate professor of history at American University in Washington. He's the author of two books: National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State, and his new book, White Power: Policing American Slavery. White Power is a history of the laws that enslavers used to police enslaved people from 1619 until the Civil War, and how the violent legacies of those laws and practices have reverberated throughout American history and life. In addition to his books and journal articles, Gautham has also written op-eds, contributions to Supreme Court cases, and a Substack newsletter called "The State of the State." I was especially interested to hear how Gautham grappled with organizing and using the evidence he collected from many locations over more than two decades. You'll also learn how he writes and rewrites to make himself clear, and how an offhanded remark from a well-known colleague set him on a new publishing path.

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Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you purchase books through these links, the show gets a small percentage of the price (at no extra cost to you). Thank you for supporting the podcast and our guest authors!

Mentioned in this episode:

• White Power: Policing American Slavery
• National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State
• Gautham's Substack
• reMarkable tablet
• Ibram X. Kendi
• Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction
• Jessica Pishko, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy
• Omohundro Institute book series in early American history
• Samantha Seeley, Race, Removal and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States
• Sarah Gronningsater, The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom
• Emily Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations
• Rebecca Brenner Graham, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (check out my interview with Rebecca in Episode 60: Rebecca Brenner Graham Gives Us the Publicity Behind-the-Scenes)
• Dani Segelbaum, Gautham's agent
• Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America and Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America
• Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics
• Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception
• Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, which includes his essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History
• Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas
• Michael Willrich, American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century

Today's guest, Dr. Tara Mulder, gets real about the challenges of writing while moving between temporary jobs, juggling a ton of teaching, and struggling to find a tenure track position. But also told me why that struggle brought a surprising amount of freedom and led to a much more creative and entertaining book.

These days, Tara is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, although she did not get that position until after her book was nearly published. She's a specialist in medicine, sex, and gender in antiquity, and her book is called A Womb of One's Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome. In it, she brings the experiences of pregnancy and childbirth of Roman women brilliantly to life, turning scraps of archival materials into richly detailed narratives. In addition to her teaching, Tara also previously worked as a managing editor of Eidolon, an online classics journal that brought classics scholarship to the public in a playful, easy to read voice. You'll hear more in our conversation about how that experience shaped Tara's writing. We also talked about how her lived experiences, especially as the daughter of a homebirth midwife, helped her read the archive, and how keeping her writing going means trusting in her future self.

Heads up: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you buy books from these links, the podcast gets a small percentage—it's an awesome way to support our guests and the show at the same time.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Tara Mulder, A Womb of One's Own: Lost Histories of Childbirth in Ancient Rome
• Eidolon archives
• Scrivener
• Anna Bonnell Friedin, Birthing Romans: Childbearing and Its Risks in Imperial Rome
• Anna Tatarkiewicz, The 'Cursus Laborum' of Roman Women: Social and Medical Aspects of the Transition from Puberty to Motherhood
• Saidiya Hartman, "Venus in Two Acts"
• Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812

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