Drafting the Past

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In this episode, Kate welcomes Scott W. Stern and Dr. Charles O'Malley to the show.
Scott is a writer and lawyer who is the author of two previous books of narrative nonfiction and has written for many media outlets and scholarly journals. Charlie is a dramaturg and writer who has worked at theaters across the country.
Together, they teamed up to write a new book titled Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen. In it, they explore Shakespeare's character Margaret, a woman loosely based on a historical figure who is the only Shakespearean character, male or female, whose entire life appears on stage. They introduce readers to her historical model, her creation by Shakespeare, and her evolution across centuries of performances to show how the character of Margaret illuminates the world in which she is created and brought to life. As they put it, her story "shows how Shakespeare's plays have always been living collaborations among actors, directors, writers, critics, and history itself." It seems only fitting that the book itself was a close collaboration. Scott and Charlie are co-writers, but they also began working on the book together shortly after they got married. By the time they were in the final editing stages, their twin sons had been born. We talked about how they navigated intertwined domestic and writing lives, as well as the challenges of bringing different voices and backgrounds together on the page.
Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. When you purchase books through these links, you support not only authors and indie bookstores but the podcast itself.
Mentioned in this episode:
Charles O'Malley and Scott Stern, Shakespeare's Margaret: The Dramatic Life of a Warrior Queen
Scott Stern, The Trials of Nina McCall: Sex, Surveillance, and the Decades-Long Government Plan to Imprison 'Promiscuous' Women
Scott Stern, There is a Deep Brooding in Arkansas: The Rape Trials That Sustained Jim Crow, and the People Who Fought It, from Thurgood Marshall to Maya Angelou
Charles O'Malley, Toward a Just Pedagogy of Performance
Scott and Charlie's LitHub piece on writing together: "What Co-Writing a Book on Shakespeare Taught Us About Marriage and Parenthood"
The Internet Archive's blog posts about the Controlled Digital Lending Program
Sam Quinones, The Perfect Tuba: Forging Fulfillment from the Bass Horn, Band, and Hard Work
Daniel Hahn, If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation

In this episode, Kate Carpenter interviews Dr. Anna O. Law, a political science who retrained herself in historical methods to write her new book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship. Anna is a professor of political science and Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights at CUNY Brooklyn College. In her new books, she takes a close look at which parts and levels of government in the United States have controlled people's ability to move around and across borders throughout the country's history. It's a history that is especially pertinent now, as we await the Supreme Court's forthcoming decision about the Trump administration's attempt to end the right to birthright citizenship protected under the 14th amendment of the constitution.

Anna and Kate talked about what it meant to think like a historian as well as a political scientist. She also divulged her decidedly analog research tools, the feedback she asks colleagues to give on her drafts, and her advice for any writer deciding on a press for publishing a book.
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Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you purchase books through these links, not only will you be supporting the author, but you will also help to keep Drafting the Past going. Thank you!

Mentioned in this episode:

Anna O. Law's website
Anna Law, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship
Anna Law, The Immigration Battle in American Courts
Metal page darts
Sarasa gel pens
Anna's favorite Clairefontaine notebooks
Anna Law on BlueSky
Anna's blog post about writing the second book
Episode 102: Gautham Rao
Megan Kate Nelson, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (and my first and second interviews with her)
Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh As Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law and Under the Starry Flag: How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt and Sparked a Crisis Over Citizenship

It's not every day that I find myself so invested in the characters of a history book that I stay up way past my bed time to find out what happens next, but that's exactly what happened when I read the new book by today's guest, Dr. Charlotte Brooks.

Charlotte is a professor of history at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York, or CUNY, system. She is a scholar of race, immigration, and urban history, and is especially known for her work on Chinese American history. She is the author of four books. Her first three books were more aimed at an academic audience, but for her fourth book she wanted to try something a little different. The book that resulted is The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution. It's a group biography that tells the stories of six siblings, born to Chinese immigrant parents, and how they challenged the limitations and racism they faced in the United States, how many of them sought opportunities in China, and the ways they navigated the tumultuous world in which they lived in both countries in the first half of the 20th century.

They are fascinating characters, but Charlotte uses them to give us a window into the history of an entire generation of Chinese American families that many Americans know little about. I talked with Charlotte about what finally motivated her to write the book that she had been dreaming about, as well as what it was like to work with the Moy descendants, how her narrative makes the siblings so compelling, and why it was still a tough sell as a trade book.
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Note: Bookshop.org links are affiliate links. When you buy books through these links, Drafting the Past receives a small percentage of the purchase price. Thanks for helping to support the show!

Mentioned in this episode:

Charlotte Brooks, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution
Charlotte Brooks, American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949
Charlotte Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years
Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California
Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)
Ellen Wu
Mae Ngai
Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
Virtual Shanghai Project
Historical Photographs of China
Gwulo: Old Hong Kong

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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Sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter for updates on the show and more.
Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you purchase books through these links, the show gets a small percentage of the price (at no extra cost to you). Thank you for supporting the podcast and our guest authors!
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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