Drafting the Past

Hey DTP listeners! I'm sharing an episode of Historians at the Movies, a podcast by Jason Herbert, in which I was the guest historian! If you like what Jason is doing, check out historiansatthemovies.com.

Historians At The Movies features historians from around the world talking about your favorite movies and the history behind them. This isn't rivet-counting; this is fun. Eventually, we'll steal the Declaration of Independence.

This week Kate Carpenter drops in to talk about the new film Twisters along with her research on the history of modern-day storm chasing. We get into what they got right, what liberties they took, the role of climate change in the spread of tornado alley, and exactly how crazy are tornado chasers anyway. If you feel it, ride it. About our guest: Kate Carpenter is a doctoral candidate in the History of Science at Princeton University. Before that, she earned a Bachelor of Journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a Master of Arts in History (with an emphasis in public history) from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. In between, she has been a writer, copy editor, designer, screenprinter, farmers’ market volunteer and communications officer, and occasional history consultant. When she’s not hosting and producing Drafting the Past, she is working on a dissertation about the history of tornado science and storm chasing in the second half of the twentieth century.

My guest in this episode is Dr. Tore Olsson, associate professor of history at the University of Tennessee.

Dr. Olsson’s first book, Agrarian Crossings: Reformers and the Remaking of the US and Mexican Countryside, is an award-winning scholarly book. But his new book does something quite different. Titled Red Dead’s History: A Video Game, an Obsession, and American’s Violent Past, the book opens a window on American history through the lens of Red Dead Redemption, the wildly popular video game franchise. I talked with Tore about how his pandemic video game habit changed the direction of his career, how teaching an undergraduate class on this topic shaped the book, and how working with his agent and editor made for a completely different publishing experience this time around.

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.

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.

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.