Drafting the Past

In this episode, I interviewed Dr. Sarah McNamara, assistant professor of history at Texas A&M University , about her new book, Ybor City: Crucible of the Latina Sout h (UNC Press, 2023). From her website: "McNamara is dedicated to sharing her scholarship with broad audiences through public history and community engagement. She developed the project, "Nuestra Historia," an historical memory and pr...

This episode features Dr. Samantha Muka, whose enthusiasm for her work is pretty much guaranteed to improve your day. Sam's first book is Oceans Under Glass: Tank Craft and the Sciences of the Sea , in which she investigates how a community of aquarium users have created and shared knowledge about how to take care of marine life in captivity. Sam is an assistant professor at the Stevens Institute...

In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Katrina Phillips. Katie Phillips is an associate professor of history at Macalester College. She is the author of Staging Indigeneity: Salvage Tourism and Performances of Native American History , which focuses on the past and present of three Western performances that purport to show Indigenous history, but do so from the perspective of white settlers. Katie is a...

Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter, and this is the 30 th episode of Drafting the Past! In this episode, I spoke with Dr. Lauren Lassabe Shepherd about the process of writing and revising her debut book, Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars (UNC Press, 2023). Lauren is a historian of higher educatio...

My guest this week is historian Dr. Anna Zeide . Anna is an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech , where she is also the founding director of the food studies program, as well as the author of two books. The first, Canned: The Rise and Fall of Consumer Confidence in the American Food Industry , won a James Beard award , and her most recent book, U.S. History in 15 Foods , was published...

In this episode, it was my pleasure to interview science journalist Melissa Sevigny about her new book, Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of the Colorado River . She is the science reporter for Arizona Public Radio as well as the author of two previous books, Mythical River: Chasing the Mirage of New Water in the American Southwest , and Under Desert Skies:...

For Episode 27 of Drafting the Past, I was delighted to be joined by historian Dr. Carly Goodman . Carly is a historian, a senior editor for the Made by History section at the Washington Post , and the Communications Coordinator for Nationalities Service Center, an immigration agency. Her first book, Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction , came out in May from the Unive...

In this episode, I was so excited to finally talk with writer and historian Dr. Aaron Sachs . Aaron researches and teaches environmental history at Cornell, and he is the author of four books and one edited collection. I've been eager to talk with Aaron for several years, ever since I first heard about the Historians are Writers! group that he led at Cornell (should out to Daegan Miller and Laura...

In this episode Kate Carpenter interviews writer and historian  Dr. Kidada Williams . Dr. Williams' most recent book is I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction , which came out with Bloomsbury this year. She is also one of the co-creators of #CharlestonSyllabus , which began as a collection of resources on Twitter in response to the racist massacre at...

In this episode, host Kate Carpenter is joined by Dr. Louis Moore . Lou is a sports historian and a professor of history at Grand Valley State University. He has published two books: We Will Win the Day: The Civil Rights Movement, the Black Athlete, and the Quest for Equality , and I Fight for a Living: Boxing and the Battle for Black Manhood, 1880-1915 . He also writes essays for many outlets and...

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 enjoy...

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 delighte...

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 profess...

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...

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 scienc...

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 t...

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 abo...

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 le...

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...

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...

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, speci...

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...

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 fantas...

For the tenth episode of Drafting the Past , Kate Carpenter interviews historian and journalist David M. Perry . David is the author of many, many essays ( find the whole list here ), as well as Sacred Plunder: Venice and the Aftermath of the Fourth Crusade (Penn State University Press, 2015). More recently, he is the co-author, with Matthew Gabriele, of The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval...

For the ninth episode of Drafting the Past , I interviewed historian and novelist Nishant Batsha about his debut novel, Mother Ocean Father Nation (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2022). We talked about the connections between his training as a historian and his work as a novelist, the bad habits he had to break from academia, and writing for character and story, whether in fiction or non-fiction.