Mistakes I Have Made

Emily Callaci
And you’ll edit out all our mistakes.

Daniel Story
That’s right. Every single, every last mistake will be…

I’m Daniel Story, and this is History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. What if historians could own up to their mistakes? Or learn to see mistakes not as weaknesses to be hidden but a necessary part of the process of growth and discovery? That is what a very special edition of the History Unclassified section of the journal poses in the September 2025 issue of the AHR. Titled “Mistakes I Have Made,” it includes the reflections of nine contributors and the thoughtful framing of History Unclassified editors Kate Brown and Emily Callaci. I spoke with Kate and Emily about this special issue, and about the origins of History Unclassified. Along the way, we also hear from the issue’s contributors on the pieces they crafted around their own stories of mistakes. I’m very excited about this one, and I think you will be too. So let’s get to it.

So Kate, Emily, thank you so much for talking with me. I’m really excited about this History Unclassified special issue, and it’s great to dive into it with you. But I wanted to start with History Unclassified itself. And you write about History Unclassified in the introduction, where it came from and how it set up this special issue on mistakes. And Kate, I wondered if you wanna let readers and listeners into the origin story of History Unclassified.

Kate Brown
Yeah. I guess it’s fitting that History Unclassified’s first special issue is one about mistakes, because this sort of pullout section of the American Historical Review came about out of failure, out of kind of almost a mistake I made, or somebody made——we can decide whose mistake it was, when I sent play to the AHR and said, I’ve always wondered why history has to be in this one particular format. You have an introduction, you talk about your sources, you describe the historiography, and then you have this heavily footnoted, from primary sources, essay that follows that’s long and dense and takes years to publish. But I said, here I have this play, and it’s fully footnoted, and it comes from fresh archival material. I was working on a book about the Chernobyl disaster. And I think it works better, this material works better, on stage than it does in that classic format. And the reason I thought it worked well is that you could take the stage, and you could have asynchronous actions happening at the same time with the stage being the sort of thing that brings together these two points in time and helps people have a dialogue across decades over this accident. So I sent it. And Alex Lichtenstein was the AHR‘s editor at the time, and he kindly sent it to several members of the board. And so there were about five reviews. Almost all of them hated it. And with a great passion, they hated it. And I pointed out to Alex, I said, look how passionate they are about this. What does that tell you? And perhaps just to get to not have to deal with my play, Alex said like maybe you should start a section. He was on his mission at that time to decolonize the AHR, and to get more people in it who didn’t have the time, the research funds, to do the longform AHR essays. So why don’t we form a section where people can write short, maybe less heavily footnoted essays about, experimenting with narrative voice in history, or about their archive stories, or about some aspect of their research that didn’t make it into their books. And so that’s what we set out to do in 2018. And we put out the call, and not knowing what to expect, and our first essay that came in, almost perfect, we really didn’t have to edit it at all, was by Taymiya Zaman “Cities, Time, and the Backward Glance.” It’s a beautifully written piece. Zaman also publishes historical fiction. This came in about a month after our call. There were people out there who had essays either in their minds, or already written, that they’re dying to find a place to publish them. And to me that spoke to the need for this kind of section of the AHR.

The other thing I thought is that we’ve really been writing almost the same kind of prose since the 19th century. And other fields have had big, revolutions, modernist revolutions in formats, if you look at film or novels or even other even look at anthropology. But we’ve kind of stuck pretty close to form. And I thought if in the AHR people have room to experiment, if historians are given a longer leash, that might have an impact on publishers, on dissertation committees, on tenure committees, in all kinds of places so that people don’t have to wait until they are full professors when they can finally write the stories that they’ve been wanting to write in the way they want to write them.

Daniel Story
And Emily, this approach was compelling to you as well?

Emily Callaci
It was, yeah, I largely became an historian because I love writing, and reading, I think that for me, when I was deciding to come to graduate school, it was what do I want to write about? What is the kind of discipline that lends itself to writing, you know. So for me, writing was always very connected to the kind of project of historical inquiry. So I first stumbled upon History Unclassified when I was, thinking about a piece. Basically I was noticing my own tendency to be really curious about the acknowledgements of history books, which is not supposedly the scholarship part of things, so at first it’s oh, is this just some kind of gossipy I wanna know which. Historians used to be married and are now divorced or if they have dogs or cats or who they thank, what famous person are they connected to because they thank them. But I started to, you think about actually, this isn’t just gossipy kind of fluff. It tells you a bit about our discipline, you know, and about the networks we make, and how we claim legitimacy. And also by association like. What kinds of exclusions there might be. So I just became interested in what we do with that information we have. What if we don’t pretend that, we haven’t read the acknowledgements? What if we actually embrace them as part of the book and see what we can learn from them? And what kind of stories might we tell? What kind of truth might we glean about our discipline and who is included and excluded and what invisible forms of cultural capital shape our field. So I wrote about that. and that is how I got connected to History Unclassified. There was no other place for me to publish a piece like that, you know. It wouldn’t have fit the format of the conventional historiographic essay, right. But it was clearly of interest to historians, you know? So History Unclassified of gave me a place to think about that and to write about that. And that’s how I became involved. Yeah. And since joining on the editorial team with Kate, I’ve been really delighted by how many people I’ve spoken to who kind of, like you say, Kate, have things that they want to write. And sometimes not even after tenure, but like they’re waiting for like retirement, right? To give themselves permission to do this. It’s seen as something that’s not part of what we do as professional academic historians, and that seems to me like a shame. So I really share this idea that we need to throw the doors open a little bit and allow more experimentation for this kind of writing.

Kate Brown
I think, part of the thing that stymies us is that we’re supposed to be this voice of legitimacy, this authority, whether we’re standing in front of a podium or sending something in for print, the narrative goes is we went to this source. We got the real story, and this is my considered interpretation, and I’ve done this too. I’ve consulted x many archives to bring this story to you. You know that. Here we go. But of course, we make mistakes along the way. We do it all the time. The first time in one of my histories, I tried to write about the mistakes I made. I had this editor who was scribbling those parts out and I was like. For putting them back in because we’re not supposed to delegitimize our voices, especially now, right? When we’re in this post-truth scenario where everybody seems to be doing their own research, that we have to all the maybe double down on this. No, this is really the story. This is really the truth. And I think that’s a mistake. I think maybe for a long time now, had we been more honest about our doubts, our uncertainties, our guesses, our. Assumptions how we got there. If we bring people along with our research quest, then they can decide whether they wanna believe us or not. But we don’t have to make these absolute statements about truth. And that’s where we’ve gotten ourselves tripped up is not that we’re in a post-truth world, but that we ever had a world where there was a truth world.

When we started this “Mistakes I’ve Made,” we were not thinking about people saying, oh, I made this huge mistake and I wanna retract it. We were thinking about, as I think Emily, you put it so well, mistakes as a mode of inquiry. Why did I do that? Why did I make that assumption? What did my assumptions tell me about this story and where I maybe should go as an alternative route.

Emily Callaci
When you get a rejection that feels like you made a mistake, right? That feels like a mistake, and I think that whether it comes from the privilege of being more established in your career, whether you’ve already gone through tenure, how you react to that mistake, how you might actually dwell on it, and question whether it’s a mistake that is an ending rather than a beginning or vice versa. I think that’s maybe one of the questions I was thinking about, like, how do we give ourselves permission or embolden ourselves to dwell in that kind of mode, as a mode of exploration and discovery rather than as a kind of end point. And one of the pieces in the issue that I was thinking about in relation to this is this beautiful piece by Marius Kothor, where she writes about what seems like a basic historiographic decision at first, right? Is the chronology of the piece. Every monograph in history has a title like, history of such and such, year X to year Y. And we just think of that as a very kind of basic part of the mechanics of writing an historical piece of scholarship, right? And part of what she comes to realize in the course of researching this is some other, perhaps hidden, motivations for that chronological marker. In her case, it has to do with family trauma that awakens after a year X, right? And so that kind of marker with the chronological endpoint of the study was not just a kind of mundane matter of the mechanics of history writing, but also a deeper kind of personal story.

Marius Kothor
My name is Marius Kothor. I am a historian of women in West Africa. I’m currently an Assistant Professor in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Harvard University. So this piece is looking at what it means for me as a person who grew up in exile as a refugee as a result of the political turmoil in Togo in the 1990s, to then go back to Togo as an adult and as an American, and as a historian to write Togo’s history given the ongoing political instability in the country. So it’s a way of thinking about the ethical as well as the methodological implications of doing this kind of historical analysis in a political context that is still very much shaped by the legacies of the histories that I’m writing about. So I use primarily one oral historical interview that I did with one of the women I write about in my upcoming book to look at the ways that the questions I pose to my interlocutors are answered in ways that are very cognizant of the history of Togo’s political instability, and also the contemporary political unrest that is going on in Togo. What I’m trying to really theorize in this piece is the ways that fear is what I describe as an epistemic orientation, in the sense that fear shapes the ways that people in Togo narrate the country’s political past to different audiences. And I look at the ways in which people’s fears in Togo are related to my own fears about writing about Togo’s past, and the ways that implicates me in the ways that I analyze Togo’s history, but also shapes the ways that I can interact with people in the country. So I’m really thinking about how, as a Togolese person who grew up in exile, how going back to Togo, for me, is always a contentious process, because I have this history that I carry within me about having been displaced from Togo as a young person. And then going to Togo, I’m also afraid of asking people certain questions, because I don’t want to implicate them, but I also wanna protect my own family and protect myself while I’m in the country. So the piece is really looking at how my own personal history of displacement and exile shapes the way I interact with people and also shapes the ways that people interact with me. And so the piece is looking at what do we gain as historians when we forefront our own personal experiences and our own positionalities as a way of excavating the past.

Kate Brown
Yes, I guess that’s what we learned with this special issue is that mistakes come in all shapes and sizes. And one of the mistakes that a number of our authors talk about is the mistake of a mission. Connor Heffernan wrote a history of bodybuilding and he said, after my book came out, I realized I left out a really important part of this whole story. I left out the body and what it means to be a bodybuilder. And he knew that intimately because one of the reasons he wrote a history of bodybuilder is he had been a bodybuilder himself. And so in this piece, he brings us into the gym and describes the punishment that bodybuilders go through.

Conor Heffernan
My name is Connor Heffernan. I’m a lecturer in the Sociology of Sport at Ulster University. My article asks a very simple question: Are there different ways of learning and becoming? At a broader level, what this means is what happens when we lift a weight? What happens when someone, man or woman, goes into a gym, struggles with a dumbbell, barbell, kettlebell for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, whatever the case may be. Does that change them? In my article, I argue, yes, lifting a dumbbell or a barbell, getting physically stronger, physically larger, has a profound impact on many people’s sense of self and identity. And as a historian of strength and fitness, I’ve often neglected that impact. The reason America had an economic crash in 1929 was not about banks, or Wall Street, or poor investments. It was because American men had gotten physically weaker and lax and lazy. That was at least the purported argument for the person that I was studying. J.C. Hise and his mentor of sorts. Mark Berry and J.C. Hise were two well-known strength figures in 1930s America. They pushed forward a new system of training the body called the 20-rep Squat Method. Contemporary trainer, Mark Rippetoe compares it to a “meet Jesus” moment. He says, after 15 reps you begin to see Jesus. After 20 reps, he’ll take the bar from your back. This is an incredibly difficult way to train: You take a weight that you can sit up and down, or squat up and down 10 times, and through prolonged breathing methods you do 20 times. It’s horrible. I’ve done it myself, and it’s not a fun time. They argued though that this is a mass builder. This would build husky men, and building big, physically powerful, and dominant men was what America needed. Building these type of bodies would make you a stronger man, a better man, oftentimes coded as a better white man. I’ve studied and worked on Mark Berry and Hise and the 20-rep squat method, but I’ve often looked at the words only; deeds, not words. I looked at words, not deeds. In this article I looked at what happens when someone puts themselves under this quite grueling training system. They deliberately force feed themselves. They deliberately make their bodies larger and get uncomfortable, and then comfortable with how large their bodies were becoming. And how does that help them understand the world around them? This is the closest thing I’ll do to ethnographic research as a historian, because I’ve done the 20-rep squat method. I’ve built my body up. I’ve tore my body down through bodybuilding, power lifting, and stone lifting events. In the piece itself, I look at what happened to Hise when he underwent an incredible, dozens and dozens of pounds in weight gain transformation. What I found is this sort of knowledge that he gained in the gym, that hard work and pain and pushing yourself and discipline led to results, went on to inform his own worldview. He linked his embodied knowledge about what happens at this muscle meritocracy that I’ve built. How can that explain the world around me? The people who aren’t successful aren’t willing to undergo pain. They’re not willing to make the sacrifices that I know in my very muscle cells to be the root to success. I look at that through both Hise’s eyes and Barry’s eyes, and the hundreds of American men, and staggering how many American men tried this in the 1930s and still try it in the 2020s, how they ascribe to that idea as well, while simultaneously looking at my own relationship with fitness in a different age, in an age of online social media influencers and fitness forms and clickbait. And all of these things that oftentimes regress around the same set of problematic, uncritical, dangerous messages around masculinity within strength spaces that relate to race and sexuality and gender in very narrow ways that we tend to often comment on as academics but not fully address or understand at that embodied level.

Kate Brown
He thinks about that deeply in terms of the period in which his history plays out, but also the period in which, during the 2008-2009 financial crisis in Ireland, when all these men are out of jobs and this question of men and breadwinners and masculinity rises to the fore. And he, as a young, easily-influenced young man dives into this and punishes his body as a way to prove that he somehow belongs in this competitive world. Another person who left something out was Claire Clarke, who wrote a history of Synanon, which is addictive treatment centers that sort of veered into the form of a cult. And she leaves out this moment when this institution really starts to fail when they planted a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a crusading lawyer who was out to expose this Synanon group as a cult. And she left it out on purpose, because she felt like it was too much, that that’s only what people knew about Synanon was this one moment. And she wanted to go into a deeper story about this group that had more nuance and human features. But the crusading lawyer just went after her and wouldn’t let it go and wrote the chair of the department and the president of university and did his best to try to unseat this assistant professor.

Claire Clark
My name is Claire Clark. I’m an Associate Professor at the University of Kentucky. My primary appointment is in the Department of Behavioral Science in the College of Medicine, and I have a secondary courtesy appointment in the history department in the College of Arts and Sciences. My academic career came to identify as a historian of medicine. I really decided to pursue the history of addiction, treatment and recovery because I had some struggles in my early twenties and came to think of myself as a person in recovery and looked at what was out there in the scholarly world and thought this is a. Place where I could contribute. So I guess a lot of the essay is about my identity, right? My identity as a person in recovery, and my identity as a historian and how. Those things have evolved over the years and how they all broke down and had to be reconstituted. My dissertation, and then my first book was looking at this controversial California commune slash cult called Synanon when I started grad school in 2008. There was a history of sociological scholarship and journalism on it. You could Google it and all the sensational stuff popped up and there was a Wikipedia page and the sort of public narrative was Synanon was a. Promising miraculous organization that fabulously imploded, turned violent. And then the kind of climax of this rise and fall story is when some of the central members put a rattlesnake in the mailbox of a lawyer named Paul Morantz, who was dedicated to fighting the organization. I was interested in recovery and cultures of recovery. And my second semester in graduate school, there was a big interdisciplinary conference that my advisor organized and I got to meet all these wonderful scholars in the field. And so it was my second semester in graduate school that I really learned about Synanon for the first time. If you were to go on the internet in 2008, you would find Palmer’s website and pages of this version of the story. It was a rise and fall story and very sensationable about the implosion of it. And I was talking to other scholars of alcohol and drugs that I met at this conference, and they were like, there’s not a lot of serious academic scholarship. This is definitely something that is worth pursuing and could be a dissertation topic. And they said the story of Synanon. Itself like its rise, its fall, its disappearance has been told and in some ways is like over documented in the sense that the foundation’s records are at the University of California Los Angeles, hundreds and hundreds of boxes. Paul Morantz had all of his own records that he kept in his. Garage and he wanted people who were studying Synanon to come to him personally, and he wanted control over the narrative. When the book came out, I say Synanon had a spectacular decline and I didn’t mention Palm Morans by name and I didn’t mention the rattlesnake, and I swiftly and efficiently moved on to. Then here are some of the patterns that were established in Synanon that were taken up or can be observed in these other organizations That came later. And Paul Morantz, when the book came out, he read it and he was absolutely livid. I think he was angry not to be included, and he saw the gloss over the attack on him. As like a coverup as I was telling a history that was trying to promote this treatment model. He had already made the evils of Synanon communicating that his mission in life, but he targeted me. Directly and called and emailed people at the university where I was employed, called the Archivists. ’cause we had started collecting some of that archival material from the other treatment centers, calling the archives and screaming at them, emailing everyone he could think of in CCing me when that happened, I just had a total mental breakdown. And it has taken me a number of years to even look at the subject matter. Again, addiction, treatment recovery, figure out how to move forward, be able to take the aspects of the criticism that I think are fair and valid, and. Address them without totally identifying with them and writing the essay was like, I could not go on as an academic and a historian if I did not find a way to move through this and write about it and make it part of my career and professional identity. And the more time goes by, the more I do feel that, it’s impossible to write a history that doesn’t. Harm somebody in some way, but those of us who are invested in the slow process and in the long haul of history making, like the more you write and the more material you gather and the more perspectives of people you involve and the work, the more stories you allow to be told. I don’t think like Paul Morantz, that there is a one single correct truth, but I think. The multiplicity of approaches and perspectives and the possibility for writing through different lenses brings us closer to maybe the truths like lowercase. So yeah.

Kate Brown
So I think we’re seeing t hat part of what happens is that people follow their own biographies, and as they do that, there are perhaps blinders that are placed, or things that you just assume everybody knows, like what the physical feeling of bodybuilding is for Connor Heffernan, or that this rattlesnake story was such a huge part. Anyways, both of them are beautiful essays.

Emily Callaci
Yeah, and I liked your description as the mistake of mission. We think we know what historians do, and, that’s true in researching, in archives, and in oral history, and also as professors, as teachers. And one of the pieces in the special issue was written by three professors at community colleges where a lot of the students have non-conventional paths toward college. Three professors, Julie Rancilio and Kelli Nakamura and Michael Kugler, all first generation academics teaching at community colleges. And they go in with this idea of what a professor looks like, what a professor does, how a professor carries themselves, right? This idea of a certain kind of professional status, and you stand behind the lecture and you wear a suit, and you lecture to students, and then finding that just doesn’t resonate with their students. Like that’s not the way that they learn. That’s not what makes history meaningful to them. And then, for all three professors, reflecting on why did I think that was what history professors do. I’m not someone who grew up in this. I’m also a first generation student. This is something that I can actually understand from my own experience, and when they do turn to their own experience, they’re able to break down some of those assumptions, to get from behind the lectern, and to figure out why does history matter to these students.

Kelli Nakamura
Aloha, everyone. My name is  Kelli Nakamura . I’m a Professor of History and Ethnic Studies here at Kapi’olani Community College in Honolulu, Hawaii, which is located right at the very bottom of the very famous landmark of Diamondhead. I’ve been teaching for about 19 years in higher education. My focus or research interests are Japanese / Japanese American history, Asian history, world history, Hawaiian history, and general modern world War II history.

Julie Rancilio
Hi, I’m Julie Rancilio. I am also a Professor of History at Kapi’olani Community College. I have actually been teaching there for 21 years. I teach a range of courses, just as all of us do in this modern era, but my specialty is modern Korea.

Mike Kugler
I’m Mike Kugler. I teach at Northwestern College, a small college in the northwest corner of Iowa. It’s affiliated with the Reform Church in America. I just finished my 30th year. I teach primarily modern European history. My field of research is primarily Enlightenment Scotland, but I end up writing and doing research on a lot of stuff, including history and comic books, historical narrative and pop culture.

Kelli Nakamura
The entre to this was the idea of the mistakes that I have made and to provide a kind of diverse perspective of the experiences that we’ve had in our, honestly, nearly 60 collective years of teaching at very diverse institutions, to be perfectly honest, teaching an underrepresented population often in higher education as far as their voice, which is essentially the community college student. I had seen the advertisement in the AHA Perspectives magazine, and I approached my colleague, Julie Rancilio, and we put together a proposal to share our own kind of insights. It went through a vetting process, and in doing so I think the editors found our piece very interesting but also our colleague Mike’s perspective also very interesting. They said, we like both of your proposals, so let’s try to combine them and provide a uniform article.

Mike Kugler
I was attracted to submit a proposal for this because I pretty much walk out of every class pretty unsatisfied with my teaching that day. So the idea of, so what mistakes have you made? Oh, just sit down for a while. I can give you a long list.

Julie Rancilio
So we had a lot of really great Zoom conversations. We just started talking about our teaching, and we started talking about the challenges that we faced, and we really got on the topic of when we first became teaches. And I think what we realized is we all had, in varying ways, some sort of imposter syndrome. We didn’t quite call it that, but like we all had this idea of what we were supposed to do on the first day, right? How we were supposed to dress and where we were supposed to stand, and the kind of like tools that we were supposed to use.

Mike Kugler
It was so enjoyable to find out all of the places in which we have similar challenges with our students and trying to cover that space between at some point imitating the teachers we liked the best when we first started our careers, and then realizing with our students, and even for ourselves, we weren’t doing justice to their needs or to the classroom. So we had to figure out how to learn how to teach.

Julie Rancilio
We all agreed we had to be our authentic selves. That you have to be you, and if that means that you’re a little more traditional in how you, you know, present the information. If you’re a little less traditional, I think we’d all say probably the number one thing is we had to be ourselves.

Kelli Nakamura
I think the big secret that we also discuss is that it came to a point also that we realized we’re not necessarily teaching them history, which is something terrible to say in the AHA podcast. We wanna teach them—I’m so sorry to say that—transferable skills, like critical thinking, the ability to read text, the willingness to approach a professor and ask questions. The willingness to work on multi revisions and do writing as a process rather than a singular activity.

Julie Rancilio
And we try to tell the best stories that we can, and those stories help to teach those lifelong skills that students are going to use. But yeah, just be a great storyteller. Tell the best story you can.

Mike Kugler
It was really gratifying and encouraging to hear two other really articulate, committed academics in the classroom explain their experiences in ways that resonated with mine.

Kate Brown
And then we have Lisa Covert’s essay, which she’s puzzling over the way we frame or describe using like a shorthand, different kinds of historical actors. So she opens this essay describing how she’d been in a cab in a Mexican town. The cab driver asked, what are you doing here? And she says I’m interested in revolutionaries in the Mexican revolution. He goes I know one. And she thinks, that’s strange. This person would be a very old, over a hundred. but he’s like you want me to take you there? And she said, great. And off they go. And she arrives at this little house of a man who makes religious figurines. And she’s like, what kind of revolutionary? It’s a secularizing revolution. But it turns out this was somebody who she would’ve characterized as a counter-revolutionary. Somebody who was trying to uphold the church and all the rights, and the traditionalism of the Catholic church in Mexico. But she learned as she gradually came around to changing the whole focus of her book to focus on these people who are alternative revolutionaries, that they had a vision of where the revolution should go, and that it should help and protect small artisans and working class people in a way that the Mexican revolution, they felt, wasn’t doing that for them.

Lisa Covert
I’m Lisa Covert. I am a Professor at the College of Charleston, and my specialty is Latin American history. This piece was really inspired by an interaction that I had with a man, his name was Genaro Almanza Ríos, people just referred to him as Don Almanza, who I was told lived through the Mexican Revolution. And even though that seemed a little bit improbable to me chronologically, I thought I had to take an opportunity to talk to him and meet him. And what I wrote about was what I came to learn through when I first met him and through our conversations was what I had understood as the Mexican Revolution was actually not what he understood to be the Mexican Revolution, that he was thinking of a very different conflict that is more commonly known as the Cristero War. His house was an interesting experience in its own right. I didn’t know at the time when I first met him that he was a santero, that he made these saint statues. And so his living room was filled with these almost life-sized saints and statues of Jesus, and most of them were bloodied and just…it was definitely not what I expected. When you think about a Mexican revolutionary, you’re thinking about people who were fighting to not be taken advantage of by the church. You’re not really thinking of really religious people. His family’s objections to the Mexican Revolution were certainly they were very affected by the anti-clerical policies on a spiritual level, but also on an economic level. This was threatening their livelihood, and that really affected why they felt like they needed to fight for a different vision in politics. And so I wrote about it, because it was a really important moment for me to come to understand that assumptions I was making about what the revolution was in Mexico, and what it meant historically, was not exactly how people in Mexico more generally, but especially in the town that I was studying, people in this town had a different type of memory and recollection of what revolution meant in their town’s history. It was a really important reminder——it seems very basic–—but just to really listen to what the sources have to say and try to understand categories, labels, terms on their own terms rather than the kind of ways that we think about them and talk about them in scholarly literature sometimes.

Emily Callaci
And then we received another contribution from, actually from a mother-daughter team, Claire Schen, who’s a historian, and her daughter Maddy Cherr, who’s an illustrator. And they created this graphic essay together called “Embracing the Untamed Garden.” And it really got to the question of perfectionism and the idea that, you know, at some stage in your career, you have, you attained some kind of level of perfection and some kind of level of order. And I think we know from experience that order is always elusive, right? So how can we dwell in the kind of disorder, and the kind of untamed nature of our lives, our professional lives, our creative lives? This graphic essay really perfectly captures that kind of journey of learning to live with that messiness as part of the work.

Claire Schen
So I’m Claire Schen. I’m an Associate Professor of History here at University of Buffalo. In July I’ll be starting a new job as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Research and Scholarship as well. And my field is 16th and 17th century British History.

Maddy Cherr
My name is  Maddy Cherr. The woman that just spoke is my mother. It’s how we found each other to work together for this project. It was an accident of birth. I graduated with a degree in illustration, but I just finished coursework in organic chemistry. I’m interested in going into art conservation because I love art just as much as I love history and science. It’s always nice to have an opportunity to put ’em all together. We ended up calling it “Embracing the Untamed Garden.” The overarching idea is that the words maybe are literal. We’re saying exactly what we mean. We’re trying to pair it with an image that’s a metaphor to make you think through the different angles and think more deeply about the emotional side as well as the intellectual side.

Claire Schen
I think one of the things that I would say is the pandemic is so much in the background of this piece, this feeling of having had a sense of derailment, of being forced out of expectations or tracks that we had set for ourselves and trying to recast those in our own thinking and in my own thinking as instead a worthwhile detour, an interesting detour, not just a derailment, not just a mistake or a problem, but trying to find the fruitfulness of that, even if it was something that I would rather it had not happened to any of us, but it did.

Maddy Cherr
I also think it feels really isolating to feel as though you’re failing to meet metrics, and I think probably everybody thinks that they’re taking the wrong turn. And I hope it conveys a feeling of how normal it is to mess up. Makes me feel better to know that someone like my mom, who’s by all accounts extremely successful in her field, feels the same way I do. ‘Cause I haven’t even started. I’m really at the very beginning. I guess we were trying to explain that it’s not a moral, failing to fail doesn’t make you a bad person. It’s neutral. It’s neither good nor bad. It’s just inevitable.

Claire Schen
I think an another element of that, if I could build a bit on what Maddie said, and thinking about my own students, not just Maddie, not just me, I began to notice, and we used this in the beginning of the essay, I began to notice that students often would say things to me like what do you want? What? I didn’t know what you wanted on this. And I realized that they were very anxious about not having gone through an experience yet, and were very worried that they would make some kind of a mistake that would not turn into a learning experience, but would just be a personal disaster and that maybe I would judge them as well for not having somehow read my mind or figured out what I wanted, even if I was trying to assure them that we could think really broadly about things. So we were also, I think, in working on this, trying to have that sense. Second what Maddie said about trying to remove the moral judgment, that sense of having an experience and accepting the experience and still learning and growing from it, which I guess is how we got to the Tangled Garden as well.

Daniel Story
Am I right that a version of that original play that you submitted, Kate, is included in this special issue?

Kate Brown
It is. This play that I originally submitted is there as a submission in “Mistakes I Have Made.” And the editor of AHR, Mark Bradley, he encouraged us to include this play. And I don’t know, it might be a mistake to have done so, because I think it probably needed more work. It needed more development. But it’s an experiment and maybe so therefore it belongs in history and classified, that’s for sure.

Daniel Story
I, for one, as one of your readers appreciate you including it and I think many other people will too.

Kate Brown
Thanks. Thanks a lot, Dan.

Emily Callaci
One of the things that I think I felt while writing it is that sense I’ve had since being a graduate student that like someone’s looking over my shoulder, like checking all my footnotes, and that’s where I’m gonna get caught out as the imposter that I am. And that’s what’s gonna bring it all crashing down. And it’s such a stultifying way to think about scholarship, that you’re just on this defensive against somebody who’s gonna pick out the little mistakes, or the empirical little missteps. And it’s really wonderful to feel that there’s room to just think in more broad terms about what it is we’re doing as historians, as writers, as thinkers, and that history can be something other than that kind of annoying fact checker voice that’s gonna call you out for getting the date wrong or something.

Kate Brown
And so I hope that, it’s a little bit of a manifesto for how we might wanna think about history in the future.

Daniel Story
I think that’s great. Yeah. In the context in which I work in digital humanities, digital scholarship, one of our mantras here locally, but I think it translates to lots of other places, is that making mistakes is not only acceptable, it’s a necessary part of the process. Because, if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying, you’re not doing anything.

Emily Callaci
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly.

Kate Brown
You’re in a comfort zone.

Daniel Story
Thank you Kate, Emily for talking with me and for editing this terrific special issue.

Emily Callaci
Thanks so much, Daniel.

Kate Brown
Thanks, Dan, for having us.