Drafting the Past

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 Europe (HarperCollins, 2021). Our conversation covered everything from how David uses a recorder to draft his work, how he and Matthew approached co-writing, how he came to love writing after first considering it an ordeal, and much more.

Kate talks with environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth about her book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (Norton, 2019), her essays, and how she helps readers to feel, see, and even smell the places she's writing about. Listen to learn how she organizes her many forms of research, the writers she's looking to for inspiration now, and what advice she would give to herself in grad school.

In this episode, Kate welcomes historian Dr. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Nathan is a professor history at the University of Southern California. His first book, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution, came out in 2015. His new book just came out this month, February 2024, from Basic Books. It’s called The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It, and it tells the history of the revolutionary era from 1760 to 1825 across multiple nations and many individual lives. Nathan and Kate talked about the merits of messy outlines, how historians could borrow the techniques of fiction writers, and why his new book was a bit like making cheese – you’ll just have to listen to find out what that’s all about.

For this episode Kate Carpenter interviews Dr. Margaret O’Mara. Margaret is a professor of modern American history at the University of Washington, and the author of multiple books, including Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley and Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century. Her most recent book is The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. I was a huge fan of this book and have recommended it to so many people, so I was thrilled to get to ask about what went into writing it. Margaret has also co-authored a history textbook, written many pieces for places including The New York Times, WIRED, and many more, and is an active public speaker. We talked about how she keeps track of so many different projects, the way her past work in the Clinton administration affects her writing, and much more.

Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a podcast where we talk all about the craft of writing history. I’m Kate Carpenter and for this episode, I’m delighted to be joined on the podcast by Dr. Emily Herring. As you’ll hear, I’ve been following Emily’s career for a while now, and I was eager to ask about her first book and her shift from academia to full-time writing. Her book is called Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People. It’s an intellectual biography of philosopher Henri Bergson, who achieved remarkable fame in the early 1900s, and it’s a genuinely fascinating and pleasurable read. Let’s dig into it. Here’s my interview with Dr. Emily Herring.

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