Hello there, this is Drafting the Past, and I’m Kate Carpenter. In each episode, I interview a historian about their writing process, and today I’m joined by Duke University historian James Chappel. James is the author of two books. His first book is titled Catholic Modern: The Challenge of Totalitarianism and the Remaking of the Church, and it focuses on the transformation of the Catholic church in twentieth century Europe. But for his second book, which is out now, he has gone in a bit of a different direction. The new book is called Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age. We’ll get into how he moved between subjects, why he says he’s always writing, and how he took a mountain of fascinating research on the history of old age and retirement and turned it into one interesting and easy to read book.

Find show notes, subscribe to the newsletter, and more at draftingthepast.com. You can also support the show at patreon.com/draftingthepast

Episode 55 features Dr. Robin Bernstein. Robin is a cultural historian who specializes in race and racism from the nineteenth century to the present, and is the Dillon Professor of American History at Harvard University. Her first, award-winning book was Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, and she has written essays and articles on a wide range of subjects. Her new book is called Freeman’s Challenge: The Murder that Shook America’s Original Prison for Profit, and it’s truly remarkable. I had a hard time putting it down, so I was especially delighted to find out more about how Robin researched, wrote, and revised to reach the finished product.

In this episode I’m so happy to welcome historian Prithi Kanakamedala to talk about writing with me. Prithi is a professor of history at Bronx Community College CUNY, and is also a faculty member at CUNY Graduate Center. She is an active public historian, who has worked with a wide range of cultural organizations. One of the projects she worked on as a historian and curator for a wide-ranging public history project called In Pursuit of Freedom, which included an exhibit at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Out of this project emerged Prithi’s new book Brooklynites: The Remarkable Story of the Free Black Communities that Shaped a Borough. I was so excited to talk with Prithi about the relationship between her writing and her public history work, and how she sees her role as a historian in relationship to the communities she studies. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Prithi Kanakamedala.

Drafting the Past is created, hosted, and produced by Kate Carpenter. The podcast is free for everyone, but you can help keep it going by making a contribution at patreon.com/draftingthepast.

Welcome to Drafting the Past, a podcast all about the craft of writing history. I’m Kate Carpenter, and in each episode I talk with a historian about the practices, archival frustrations and joys, drafts and revisions and more that go into writing history. In this episode, I’m delighted to be joined by Dr. Andrew Kahrl. Andrew is a professor of history and African American Studies at the University of Virginia. His third book was published by the University of Chicago Press earlier this year, titled The Black Tax: 150 Years of Theft, Exploitation, and Dispossession in America. Andrew is especially interested in issues of housing and real estate, land use and ownership, and local tax systems. He is the author of two additional books, The Land Was Ours: African American Beaches from Jim Crow to the Sunbelt South, and Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll and the Battle for America’s Most Exclusive Shoreline. In addition to his books, Andrew regularly writes for public outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, and more. In our conversation, we talked about how Andrew wrestled the research for his latest book into a compelling narrative argument, and why he firmly believes in the importance of history that speaks to present-day issues. He also shared some unexpected writing advice from his dad that I think you’ll enjoy hearing about. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Andrew Kahrl.

Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. In this episode, host Kate Carpenter welcomes someone a little bit different to the podcast: writer and writing coach Helen Betya Rubinstein.

Helen is neither a historian nor a writer or history herself, but she has been working as a writing coach for the past six years, often with historians and other academics. If you remember my conversation with Anna Zeide in episode 29 last year, Helen was the writing coach that Anna and her co-editors brought in to a workshop to help book contributors work on writing essays aimed at wider audiences. I’m delighted to have the chance to talk more with Helen about what exactly a writing coach does and the kinds of conversations she finds herself having with historians. In addition to her work as a coach and teacher, Helen is a writer with MFA degrees from Brooklyn College and the University of Iowa, and her essays and fiction have appeared in publications including The Kenyon Review, The Paris Review Daily, and Literary Hub. She is the author of a book of lyric fictions and also has a forthcoming book about writing, teaching, and publishing.

In this episode, Kate Carpenter interviews Dr. Lindsay Chervinsky, a historian of the presidency, political culture, and the government, and the executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. Her first book, which came out in 2020, was The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution. She’s also the co-editor of the book Mourning the Presidents: Loss and Legacy in American Culture, and she writes regularly for the public and appears on podcasts and news coverage as an expert on presidential history. Her new book is out now. It’s called Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents that Forged the Republic. Listen now to learn about Lindsay’s approach to writing and revising narrative history, why she’s an evangelist for writing groups, and how her revision process was inspired by Taylor Swift.

Drafting the Past is a podcast about the craft of writing history hosted by Kate Carpenter. If you’ve been listening for a while, you know that oral histories have come up pretty frequently on the show, and that I also work with oral histories in my own current research project. So I was delighted when the opportunity came up to talk with today’s guest, Clara Bingham. Clara is a journalist, and her two most recent books have been works of oral history that let the subjects speak for themselves. Her most recent book is The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America, 1963-1973. It is a follow-up to her previous book Witness to the Revolution: Radicals, Resisters, Vets, Hippies, and the Year America Lost its Mind and Found Its Soul. Clara has had a fascinating career as a political reporter, writer, documentarian, and more. I’ll let her tell you about it all. I know historians are occasionally a little skeptical about journalists who write history, but I think we have a lot to learn from each other. That was definitely the case in this interview, and I loved hearing from Clara about how she tracked down people to interview, the ways she wove their accounts together, and why she thinks of herself as more of a historian than a journalist these days. Enjoy my interview with Clara Bingham.

In this episode Kate interviewed not one, but three authors: Robert Alpert, Merle Eisenberg, and Lee Mordechai. Together, Robert, Merle, and Lee are the co-authors of a new book, Diseased Cinema: Plagues, Pandemics, and Zombies in American Movies. Robert Alpert is a lawyer and film scholar who teaches at Fordham University and has written extensively about film following his career as a practicing attorney. Merle Eisenberg is a historian of late antiquity and the early middle ages and a professor at Oklahoma State University. Lee Mordechai is a historian of the eastern Roman Empire and a professor at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Together, Merle and Lee also host a podcast called Infectious Historians, all about the history of disease, pandemics, and medicine. Kate talked with all three about what it was like to write a book together, which comes with one more wrinkle: Robert and Lee are also father and son!