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!

In this episode, host Kate Carpenter is joined by historian, writer, and podcaster Dr. Neil J. Young. Neil has been a prolific writer in venues like The Atlantic, Slate, the Los Angeles Times, and many more, a contributing columnist to the HuffPost and The Week, and he is also one of the co-hosts of the terrific history podcast Past Present. He also helped to create and produce the podcast Welcome to Your Fantasy, with historian Natalia Petrzela, who joined me on a previous episode of the show. Neil is the author of two books. His first was We Gather Together: The Religious Right and the Problem of Interfaith Politics, and his new book this year is Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right. I was excited to have the chance to talk with Neil about how his oral history interviews changed the project, what differed between his first and second books, and how he wrote a history that was driven by characters.

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.

I’m delighted to introduce you to my guest today, historian of science Dr. Kathleen Sheppard. Kate is a professor at Missouri S & T University, and the author of three books, as well as the editor of two books of correspondence. Kate is a historian of Egyptology, and her first book was a biography of Margaret Alice Murray, the first woman to become a university-trained Egyptologist in Britain. The second was Tea on the Terrace: Hotels and Egyptologists’ Social Networks, which was released in paperback this summer. And her newest book is out right now. It’s called Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age. I was excited to talk with Kate about the difference in writing a book for a trade press, how she has found each of her book subjects, her old school research methods, and how her agent coached her in writing for a public audience. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Kate Sheppard.

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. This is a show about the craft of writing history. In this episode, host Kate Carpenter interviewed historian and web developer Dr. Jason Heppler. Kate has been following Jason’s work and career path for some time now and was so excited to talk with him about his new book, Silicon Valley and the Environmental Inequalities of High-Tech Urbanism, which came out earlier this year. Jason is a developer-scholar at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He has worked on a whole bunch of cool digital projects, which you can explore more on his website, as well as the co-editor of the book Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy. We talked about the evolution of his work alongside his career, the digital tools he uses in his own projects, the relationship between coding and writing, and much more. 

In this episode, host Kate Carpenter speaks with the brilliant and delightful Dr. Kellie Carter Jackson. Dr. Carter Jackson is a professor of Africana Studies at Wellesley College, and a prolific speaker and writer, with essays everywhere from The New York Times to the Atlantic and Los Angeles Times, and appearances in documentaries and countless podcasts and news programs. She is executive producer and host of the podcast You Get a Podcast: The Study of the Queen of Talk, and a co-host of the podcast This Day in Esoteric Political History. Her resume is extensive, so we're just hitting the highlights here!  Dr. Carter Jackson’s first book was the award-winning Force and Freedom: Black Abolitionists and the Politics of Violence. Her newest book is We Refuse: A Forceful History of Black Resistance. It’s out now, it’s incredible, and it’s going to have a lot of people talking.

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.

In this episode, I was thrilled to welcome historian—and fellow Missourian—Kimberly Harper to the show. I am especially delighted by this episode because I get many requests to feature guests who have written history books while off of the tenure track or outside of academia, and Kim is a great example of that. I find guests for the show in a lot different ways – sometimes they are people I am a longtime fan of, other times I see books getting some press, or they pitch themselves for the show or other people suggest them. But I also scan catalogs of upcoming books to make sure I’m catching things that might otherwise get overlooked, and that’s how I first learned about Kimberly Harper. I spotted her new book, Men of No Reputation: Robert Boatright, the Buckfoot Gang, and the Fleecing of Middle America in the University of Arkansas Press catalog, and got to read an early copy. I was so impressed by the research and storytelling that I knew I had to reach out right away, and lucky for us, Kim agreed to come on the show. Kimberly Harper earned a master’s degree in history from the University of Arkansas, and she is an editor for the Missouri Historical Review. Her first book, White Man’s Heaven: The Lynching and Expulsion of Blacks in the Southern Ozarks, 1894-1909, came out in 2010, and it received the Missouri Humanities Council’s Distinguished Achievement in Literature award. Kim and I spoke about how some key mentors helped her find her way as a historian and writer, how she is learning to balance her day job, writing, and family life, and how you deal with sources for a book in which everyone is lying. Enjoy my conversation with Kimberly Harper.

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.