Drafting the Past

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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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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Episode 100! I'm thrilled to welcome historian of science Dr. Jessica Riskin.

Jessica is the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History at Stanford University. She's the author of three books and has edited two additional collections. She has also written extensively for academic journals and has published some highly entertaining book reviews and essays for the New York Review of Books and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Her newest book, and her first with a trade press, is The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. It's a biography of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, whose early theories of evolution have been discredited and ignored. But in this book, Jessica traces his life, restores his thinking, and shows not only that we have Lamarck all wrong, but also what we lose when we turn away from his expansive approach to science. It's an interesting subject, but in Jessica's hands it transforms into a deeply engaging, witty, surprising, and fascinating read. I loved learning more about how her love of novels helps her bring the past to life, how transformative it has been to work with great editors, and how she manages to write a book that is both a delightful read and a persuasive argument.
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Mentioned in this episode:

Jessica Riskin's faculty website
Jessica Riskin, The Power of Life: The Invention of Biology and the Revolutionary Science of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Jessica Riskin, The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick
Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment
Riskin at the The New York Review of Books
Riskin at Los Angeles Review of Books
FriXion Erasable Markers
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre
Peter Elbow, Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process
Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey and Hidden Error That Transformed the World
Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms

Is it possible to write a new history of Lewis and Clark (and get anyone to read it)? If you're Craig Fehrman, the answer is a definite yes! In today's episode, Craig joins Kate Carpenter to talk about his new book, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark.
Craig is a journalist and historian who lives in Indiana, where he focuses on writing and occasional adjunct teaching at Indiana University. His first book was Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote. He has published articles and reviews in venues like Deadspin, the New York Times Book Review, and Boston Globe.
In his new book, This Vast Enterprise, Craig retells the story of the Lewis and Clark expedition through the rotating perspectives of several members of the expedition, as well as some of the people they encountered along the way. The result is a nuanced, fresh version of this history that decenters the expedition leaders and introduces some new sources and interpretations! In the interview, We get into how Craig came upon those sources and how what he found allowed him to reinterpret other sources, like Lewis and Clark's expedition diaries. We also talked about his interviews with contemporary Native sources, how a creative constraint actually led to new insights, his approach to writing history as a page-turner, and much more.
Sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter for updates on the show and more.
Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.
Mentioned in this episode:
Craig's website
Craig Fehrman, This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark
Craig Fehrman, Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote
Craig Fehrman, editor, The Best Presidential Writing: From 1789 to the Present
Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West
Ken Burns documentary Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery
Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History and Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West
Elizabeth Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People and Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82
We Proceeded On journal from the Lewis & Clark Trail Alliance
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Sons: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration
Megan Kate Nelson, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (Listen to Megan in DTP episode 1 and episode 94)
Claire Keegan
Carys Davies
Rachel Aviv
Lillian Ross
Jill Lepore
Louis Menand

David Perry returns to talk with Kate about his new book, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook. If you've ever been curious about writing essays or op-eds, but are unsure where to get started, David's book should answer pretty much any question you can dream up. I think this book is hugely helpful, and I was glad to hear more from David about why he wrote it—and to get answers to a few more burning questions about public scholarship (or, you know, just a pep talk).
When David first joined me on Drafting the Past during the show's first season in 2022, we talked about The Bright Ages: A New History of Europe that he had just published with co-writer Matthew Gabriele. I highly recommend that you go back and listen to that episode, Episode 10. It's especially inspiring for anyone interested in co-writing or who does not find writing to come to them naturally. Since that conversation, David and Matthew have co-authored a second book called Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe. And David has continued to write prolifically for the public. He has also been enthusiastic about giving other scholars the tools to do the same, and he started offering a workshop on public writing for university faculty and graduate students. Now, he's bringing that advice to all of us in a short, essential book called The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook.
Note that bookshop.org links are affiliate links that generate a small commission to support the show if you purchase books using these links.
Sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter for updates on the show and more. 
Mentioned in this episode:
David's website
David M. Perry, The Public Scholar: A Practical Handbook
Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, Oathbreakers: The War of Brothers That Shattered an Empire and Made Medieval Europe
Matthew Gabriele and David M. Perry, The Bright Ages: A New History of Europe
Matthew and David's newsletter, Modern Medieval
Drafting the Past Episode 10: David M. Perry Writes Out Loud
David's Star Tribune column about Irish music: "This St. Patrick's Day, don't forget Irish music's anti-fascist roots"
The Instagram reel promoting his column that we talked about at the start of the episode
Tressie McMillan Cottom
Irina Dumitrescu