Welcome back to Drafting the Past, a show about the craft of writing history. In this episode, Kate Carpenter interviews historian Dr. Seth Rockman. Seth is a historian at Brown University. His first book was called Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore, and he is also the co-editor of the volume Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development. He does a great deal of interesting interdisciplinary work on labor history, and he has even been called on to share his research findings on slavery and capitalism with the U.S. House Financial Services Committee. His new book, out now, is called Plantation Goods: A Material History of American Slavery. You’ll love Seth’s responses about how challenging the writing process can be, the joys of archives and the need for deadlines to drag us out of them, and why his dissertation adviser’s advice is always in his ear while he writes.
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