The Craft of Writing History with Drafting the Past’s Kate Carpenter

Daniel Story
Welcome to History in Focus, a podcast by the American Historical Review. I’m Daniel Story. This is the final episode of this third season of the podcast, and I could not be happier to share the air space with a fellow history podcaster. Kate Carpenter is creator and host of the podcast Drafting the Past, which tackles head on the craft of writing history in a variety of different guises and contexts. Kate is also currently finishing a dissertation at Princeton University on the history of storming chasing in the US. We get to all of that in what, to me, was an enjoyable and fascinating conversation. In case you don’t get to hear me say it at the end, I want to thank you for tuning in this season. It has been such a pleasure to engage the scholars and projects that we have this year. And certainly a big shout out to my co-producer Syrus Jin who has made terrific contributions both behind the scenes and on mic. As usual, we’ll be taking the summer off and look forward to seeing you again come September. But enough with all that. Let’s get to my conversation with Kate Carpenter.

Kate Carpenter
I’m Kate Carpenter. I’m a doctoral candidate at Princeton University in the History of Science where I’m working on a dissertation about the history of storm chasing. And I am also the host and producer of Drafting the Past where I interview historians about the craft of writing history.

Daniel Story
Thanks, Kate, for joining me today. Really nice to talk to you.

Kate Carpenter
Thanks for having me, Daniel. It’s great to talk with you.

Daniel Story
I thought we could start with your journey, Kate. I’m really fascinated by the little bit that I know of your background, because you haven’t only been in academia, right? You had other kinds of careers and ventures along the way that brought you to this point. So, would you mind taking us along a little bit of that road that led you into the research you’re doing and into the work of Drafting the Past?

Kate Carpenter
Sure. So in what feels like a lifetime ago now, I got my undergraduate degree in journalism at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and I worked for a little while as a newspaper reporter and copy editor, primarily for a small town newspaper in Pocatello, Idaho. And then I left that, for a variety of reasons, and did a bunch of random things while I was following my husband around while he finished his PhD, internship, and postdoc, which I’m sure is a story familiar to many academics in academic partnerships. And then, I decided to go back to school to get a master’s degree in history, and specifically public history, at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, because I was living, and still live, in Kansas City, and the program seemed really great. I really enjoyed my experience there and felt like I wasn’t really done with grad school by the end of my master’s program. My research there focused on environmental history, and I knew that what I wrote my thesis on wasn’t going to be my dissertation. So I was looking around for something that would fit my interests in environment and technology. And at the same time, I was actually just looking for a book on the history of storm chasing. I’m not from the Midwest originally, and I am the person that when the sirens go off, I go right for the basement. So I just wanted to understand the people.

Daniel Story
So you wanted a book to read about it?

Kate Carpenter
Exactly, and I couldn’t find one. There are a lot of great books out there by storm chasers themselves recounting their experience and a couple of journalistic pieces on specific storms or specific events, but nothing about how [storm chasing] got started. And so that was the inspiration for a dissertation. And so that ended up taking me to Princeton, where I am now. And then the podcast side of it kind of came in that master’s program. I took a great class from Chris Cantwell, who’s now at Loyola, on podcasting history. He walked us through each step of how you create a podcast. It was an awesome experience. I didn’t have a chance to do anything with it for a while, and then while I was at Princeton, I got to take the National Humanities Center’s podcasting bootcamp, which was a really wonderful experience. And that was the jumpstart to get me back into it. But as you know, podcasting takes a lot of time and energy. And so I didn’t want to just podcast for the sake of podcasting. I wanted to make sure there was an audience. So I spent some time thinking about it and then realized that I have often complained that historians don’t talk about writing that much, even though it’s really at the heart of what we do. In journalism school, we talked writing constantly. And I was always the weirdo in [history] seminars who would say but wait, how do you organize your notes? How do you convert that into research? And so it seemed like that might be a good fit for a podcast. And I did the very scientific process of listener research by asking on Twitter if people were interested in such a thing, and it got a much bigger response than I expected. So that was how I launched it.

Daniel Story
And when was that?

Kate Carpenter
February, I think, of 2022. So I’m in the third year of the podcast now.

Daniel Story
And how frequently do you release episodes?

Kate Carpenter
I try to release episodes every two weeks. I have periodically had to take some breaks as I work on my own dissertation and I had a baby, but otherwise every two weeks.

Daniel Story
So thinking about your work with Drafting the Past, thinking about people who maybe haven’t heard an episode yet, or maybe have just barely dipped in, can you paint us a picture of what kind of things you explore in these interviews? And do you interview exclusively historians? The focus is on writing history, right?

Kate Carpenter
Yeah, exactly. So I do focus on writing history. I don’t interview exclusively historians, although primarily historians. I have occasionally interviewed journalists, people who are sort of historian adjacent, and in a couple of instances even people trained as historians who primarily write fiction. So in each episode I just try to dig into the writing process. I always think of the episodes in a kind of three act structure: In the first part, I like to ask practical questions, nosy questions, the kind of stuff that I think a lot of writing people eat up about where people do their writing, what kind of tools they use, if they have a routine, that sort of thing. Then in the second part, I ask them to read an excerpt from their work, often whatever they’ve had come out recently. I have them read it, and then we talk about that passage to try to really talk concretely about writing and not just in kind of vague terms. And then finally, I try to ask about inspiration, what other people they like to read, what kind of good writing advice they’ve gotten, and open it up that way.

Daniel Story
As you think back about those, what are some of the commonalities that you’ve observed in people’s writing processes, or things that are a little bit out of the ordinary that you found surprising or thought provoking in terms of the practicalities of how people approach their writing?

Kate Carpenter
My favorite commonality is that almost every time I ask people how they organize themselves, they laugh and are embarrassed and tell me that they wish they organized themselves better. And I love that almost everyone says this, because it is just a universal. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how the mess of our process is, I think, often where the good stuff happens. So I don’t know that we should be so embarrassed. But that’s a big commonality. Otherwise, kind of everyone is different. I’ve said in the past that if my show has a thesis, it’s that there’s no one right way to be a writer of history. Some people have very regimented schedules, and that’s what works for them. Others kind of write when they can. Some people have extremely detailed organizational processes and workflows that they’ve thought out and refined over the years. And some people just have notebooks that have scribbled notes, which I think is awesome too.

Daniel Story
Yeah, and I do love that idea that we all think that we should be better than we are. At a sort of human level, it’s knowing that we’re not alone, that the experience that we’re having is actually quite similar to what our colleagues are having. So for me as a writer, it took me a while to realize that there’s an interesting synergy between writing and editing, or going back to the things that I’ve written. And I wonder what kinds of things have jumped out at you about the way people approach their editing process.

Kate Carpenter
So there are the people who edit a lot as they go—they can’t move on until they’ve gotten it right. Then there are other people who try to write really fast for the first draft and then go back and do a lot of editing later. I’ve also heard that for many historians, getting feedback is an essentially part of the editing process. It’s not until they show it to someone else and say, “is this doing what I wanted it to,” do they really get in there and go back and fix it, or at least try to get it closer to what they were trying to communicate. And then it’s always really interesting to me that somewhat frequently people will tell me that the kind of final structure, the thing, often, that I admire most about the book, didn’t really come about until the very end of the editing process, and that it just kind of clicked at one point, which goes back, I think, to the idea that writing is thinking, and often we don’t know what we’re trying to say until we’ve tried to say it for a while. I am really interested in that, because I am in the midst of editing a dissertation. I’ve asked a lot of questions about editing, and it has been, I think, the hardest thing to really pin down concretely in interviews.

Daniel Story
Oh, really?

Kate Carpenter
Yeah. A few people—usually the people who edit most concretely who can tell me—have been able to tell me exactly how it happens. But for a lot of people, I think it’s a lot of staring, typing, frustration, and reorganizing, and it’s hard to articulate how it all comes together.

Daniel Story
This is maybe going backwards in the writing process, but, I wonder what you found people say about the relationship of their writing to their pile of research, or the writing’s relationship to their primary source material that they’re digging through.

Kate Carpenter
Yeah, I mean, again, there’s not a universal. I do find that it seems like most people, especially if they’ve been writing for a while, find it really helpful to start writing as they’re researching, often knowing that that is writing that probably won’t even make it into the final product. But doing that kind of thinking, trying to synthesize sources as they’re going, is helpful, either because it helps them think, or others have said that they’re often not even sure what kind of research they need to do to finish the book until they’ve started writing. And so for them, it’s most efficient to start writing so that the writing and the researching can be in tandem and play off of each other. Occasionally, though, there are people who say they have to get all of the research done before they really feel like they can kind of wrap their heads around it and start writing.

Daniel Story
Are there particular interviews that you think are especially representative of the conversations you’ve had or of the landscape of history writing?

Kate Carpenter
Everyone asks me this question—which are my favorite interviews—which I always joke, you know, it’s the one that I most recently did, which is usually true. You know, some of the ones that really jump out at me are the ones that are a little out of the ordinary. So I mentioned that I’ve interviewed a couple of people who are actually fiction writers trained as historians. I think those are really interesting because how those skills translate to fiction fascinates me. I just recently published an interview with a writing coach, Helen Betya Rubinstein, which I thought was really interesting, but I wasn’t sure how people would react. But I’ve gotten so much [positive] feedback on that episode, so clearly I was not the only person out there who wanted to know more about what writing coaches do. Honestly, some of my favorite interviews are the very earliest ones  I did, which is a real shame, because I don’t like to listen to the early episodes because so much has changed since then. But, uh, you know, there’s a lot that we covered in those. It’s those early episodes that

Daniel Story
What is it about the early episodes, do you think, that sticks out in your mind so much?

Kate Carpenter
I think, for one, I hadn’t done a lot of interviews at that point. And so it all still felt extremely new. And I think it felt really new to the people I was interviewing too. I still interview people who say this is the first time anyone’s ever asked them about their writing process instead of just the subject matter. But now a lot more people are familiar with the show, and so it’s a little more expected, whereas in those early ones, it felt like a really new way to talk about writing history.

Daniel Story
You were breaking new ground.

Kate Carpenter
I guess so. I mean, obviously people have been talking about writing history for a very long time. My interview with Aaron Sachs was about how he and others have focused on this for a long time. But talking about it in this format felt kind of new.

Daniel Story
I wonder if you’ve had any thoughts on the relationship between writing and interviewing. Is there an interaction between those two, activities for you?

Kate Carpenter
You know, to some degree. I do a lot of oral history interviews in my research, in the sense that those interviewing skills definitely transfer. I also find that when people ask me about how to interview, I talk about sort of following my curiosity, that I often have questions planned ahead, but also people just say things that intrigue me and I like to follow up. And because I assume that readers are curious about things also, that’s something I try to keep front of mind as I’m writing too. So, you know, following what interests me, even if it ends up being cut later. I think it’s valuable for enlivening both an interview and the writing process.

Daniel Story
That’s cool that you mentioned curiosity, because that’s the exact word that I often think of when I think about interviewing, and in oral history work too. I feel like there’s no substitute for genuine curiosity. It gets you to different places.

Kate Carpenter
Yeah. I don’t know if you’ve ever had the experience of listening to an oral history interview someone else has done with a subject that you’re researching and thought, “Why did you not ask a follow up question about that? There’s so much more.” I fear people probably say that about my show all the time, but I try to think about what will intrigue people.

Daniel Story
For sure. There can be a little bit of a—and I’ll speak for myself at least—safety aspect in having a set list of questions so you always you know what to say next. It can be a little scary to go off script and start following what’s interesting or raising your curiosity, but I think it’s very much worthwhile. So I wonder, too, what different kinds of writing you have covered. Certainly you must’ve talked to a lot of people about books they’ve written, articles too. You mentioned fiction earlier. Through your observation with Drafting the Past, where are historians going with their writing? Where is history writing taking place?

Kate Carpenter
Well, they’re certainly writing books, and that’s probably the primary focus. But I talk a lot to people about the writing they do for the public, sometimes when their books are more focused on a general audience, but a lot of historians are also writing op eds or articles based on their research. So we talk a lot about that. I have talked to a couple of podcasters about writing and communicating history in that format, which I find really interesting too. I’ve talked to people who have done those great courses, or similar things, for Amazon, where they present history in that sort of written but spoken way. Oh, and I did enjoy, though I guess this wasn’t history writing, talking to Margaret O’Mara about her experience doing political writing, writing speeches for Al Gore when she worked in the White House. That was a really interesting way to think about other forms of writing and how they, in that case, shaped the way she would come to write history.

Daniel Story
That’s really cool. So, how do you tend to prepare for your interviews?

Kate Carpenter
Well, I read a lot of books. I try to look at people’s previous work too. There’s only so much reading time in my life, but if they write shorter stuff for the public too, I especially will go and check out some of that to get a sense of their writing style there. And then I try to do a lot of research. If they’ve ever talked about writing before, I try to either watch or listen, or watch or read depending on where it is. A lot of people haven’t, but I will sort of scan interviews that they’ve done with other people and see if I can find anything there. It used to be I would sort of troll their Twitter accounts too, to see if they’d said anything interesting recently about writing or their work as a historian. That is now a little bit lost to me. And then, you know, like I said, I read the books and take a lot of notes. Often it’s as I’m reading that I become curious about specific aspects of how the book came to be, or how they think about things. And my real secret is that I read acknowledgments super closely, because I find that there are a lot of gems in there about how a book came together. I can find out often if they have a writing group that’s really important to them, or if they ran into some sort of road block in the process, and those give me clues to ask questions. And then a big, sort of the highest pressure, part is picking out what passage I’m going to have people read in their episode, and that often is driven by what kinds of questions I want to ask about the book. I’ll try to find a passage that, you know, if I want to ask about sources, that exemplifies the kind of sourcing challenges they might’ve had, or that sort of thing.

Daniel Story
I love that note about acknowledgments. That’s a part of a book that most often probably gets skipped over, but it’s an interesting story being told in the acknowledgments.

Kate Carpenter
I had a professor I will credit  for that, because he taught us to read the acknowledgements closest, although in his case he was teaching us that that’s where all the good drama can be read between the lines. But I have found it useful for knowing how people are working.

Daniel Story
That reminds me of another thing that I noticed in listening to a number of your episodes, that talking about history writing kind of shines a light on a number of different aspects of life as a historian in a broader, holistic sense. Part of that is the creative angles of research and writing, or the community aspect of writing, but also, I think, the labor of being a historian.

Kate Carpenter
That’s absolutely true. And with respect to the labor it takes, and the conditions it’s being done under, there’s a real difference in how tenured professors have time and space to write versus people still working on tenure or people who are contingent faculty who are not working in the academy at all. And that’s where you really see those kinds of differences come through, especially in wedging writing in at different times. People will often mention children or, you know, writing before and after children, and how that looked different in their lives. We don’t always think about the families of the people writing our books, but it definitely shapes the way that they approach their work. I also always really appreciate finding out how long a project has been going, you know, how long they’ve been working on it, because when books come out, they’re so shiny and finished and sort of seem like magic. So to learn that someone has been digging into this topic for a dozen years, you know, prior to the book you’re holding in your hand, I think it helps underscore how much labor goes into the production of knowledge.

Daniel Story
Are there any particularly salient challenges or, dare I say, problems in the profession of history that talking about writing has exposed for you?

Kate Carpenter
I mean, I don’t know if it has exposed them, because I don’t know if you can be a graduate student in history without knowing about many of these things, but the thing we all know, that the job market is terrible and that we’re losing a lot of people with PhDs in history to academia every year, some people because they don’t want to work in academia, and that’s great. But there are a lot of people out there who would like to be professors who don’t have that opportunity. I’m certainly not the first to speak about this—Erin Bartram has written really cogently on it—that there are a lot of people whose potential books we are losing, because there’s just no space and support to write those books if they’re not in a tenure or tenure track position. Some people make it work, and that’s amazing, but I think that a lot of people can’t figure it out and to some degree ask themselves why they should. Shockingly, there’s not a whole lot of money in writing a history of book, and if you don’t have an institution supporting you, it’s kind of hard to make that make sense in your life. But I think the thing I’ve been most surprised about are the real challenges of publishing that people have sometimes brought up in interviews, whether that’s losing an editor who leaves your publishing house in the middle of a project, or just the challenges of selling a book at a specific moment in the market. I’ve occasionally talked to authors whose books I thought were slam dunks. Any press would have been lucky to publish them. And they’ve said, just at that moment, no one was buying this type of book. And to our detriment we don’t always think about that sort of business aspect of publishing, but it poses real challenges.

Daniel Story
I think you’re right that these are things that you’d be hard pressed to not be aware of if you’re in academic history, but I think this is another important contribution of Drafting the Past, taking this clear-eyed look at the totality of what this kind of work means for the discipline.

Kate Carpenter
Thanks.

Daniel Story
Are there any other meta kinds of questions about the historical profession that you have found talking about writing does a good job of surfacing?

Kate Carpenter
Yeah, I mean, the question of audience definitely comes up, both in terms of how people write, but then in the question of who are we doing this work for? And a lot of my guests have said, I didn’t want to write a book that only a hundred people were going to read. I wanted to write a book that I could give to my parents and they would actually read and not just display on the shelf but never crack the spine. And as I often say, and my guests tend to say too, it’s not that writing aimed at your fellow academics is bad, or that there’s not an important place for that, but I think there’s also a lot of room for reaching out to more people. And we all like reading engaging writing, even if the work is aimed at your fellow academics. I find that a lot of our most cited works are also really pleasant to read, and I think there’s a reason for that. So yeah, the question of who we’re writing for comes up over and over again, and I think that’s a question that every writer has to ask themselves. It speaks to the writing process, but it also speaks to bigger questions in the historical profession right now of our place in this moment in history and what the humanities have to offer.

Daniel Story
Yeah, I like that you have a tagline on Drafting the Past‘s website, front and center, that says, “Don’t Write Boring History.”

Kate Carpenter
Yeah, I often end episodes, too, by saying “friends don’t let friends write boring history.” And when I first started doing that, it was kind of cheeky. I think I was in a bit of a mood when I said it the first time, but I have kind of embraced it since. And I worried that people would, I don’t know, be insulted by it, but even if they are, I think that’s kind of the place I stake out, that there’s no reason to be boring if you don’t have to be. And I think there are a lot of reasons to try to not be boring. I think we shy away from talking about boredom. One of my favorite moments in an interview on the show was when Dan Bouk was talking about how, when he gives drafts of his work to people to read, he asked them to mark where they got bored and wanted to stop reading, and I’ve never heard a historian say that before. Imagine if we all asked for that feedback. In fact, I got some horrified responses from people on that episode, not taking issue with it but saying that they would be too afraid to ask people to give that kind of feedback. And I think that’s a shame. I think we should talk about boredom more.

Daniel Story
So I wonder what doing this sort of work with Drafting the Past has taught you, or how it has influenced you in your own PhD research and writing process.

Kate Carpenter
You know, I went into a PhD program thinking that I might want to focus on more trade writing—that journalism background doesn’t really die. And doing the podcast has in many ways affirmed that for me and given me a lot more insight into how that process works and what the differences are. Sometimes the show can be a huge source of inspiration for me in my writing. When I’m sort of bogged down, it can give me the boost I need to get back to it. I confess that sometimes it feels like too much advice. And so I always invite listeners, if they feel that way, to step away from the podcast, because, like I said, there’s no one right way to write. And I think that sometimes we turn to learning about how other people work, because we’re hoping that one of them one day will lean into the microphone and say, “Look, here’s the secret to how you do this.” And the truth is that there is no secret, except the work and the slog. So it can go both ways in my work, but I definitely find a lot of inspiration, and even just practical tools, that I can take back to my own drafting and try to figure out how to make a scene come to life and how to turn those archival sources into something more than just a dry recounting, especially in my case, when I’m talking about publishing scientific papers, how I can make that something that readers want to engage.

Daniel Story
Do you mind saying a little bit more about where you’re at in your research and writing? And this is not the question of how long until you’re finished, but more me being curious about what kind of story you think that you might be telling about the history of storm chasing. And am I wrong to have my mind immediately go to the film Twister when you bring this topic up?

Kate Carpenter
You’re not wrong. I am pretty deep into the dissertation. I have come to terms with the fact that the dissertation will end earlier in time than the eventual book will, just so that I can finish the dissertation at some point. So the dissertation is sort of like storm chasing before Twister, but in the future book, Twister will play a pivotal role in how storm chasing comes to be perceived. So I’m about four chapters into a dissertation and hopefully looking at the bright light of the end pretty soon. But, you know, for me, there’s been a big wrestling with the fact that I really want to tell a narrative history, and that’s not how dissertations are usually written. And so there’s been some push and pull and having to make concessions to the grad school and dissertation process, knowing that I will go back and write it the way that I hope to publish it afterwards, which I think is true of all dissertations that become books eventually.

Daniel Story
What aspects of American culture and society, particularly maybe there in the Midwest, does this story reveal?

Kate Carpenter
So many things. Honestly, one of my problems has been trying to decide how to pare it down, because it touches on so much. There’s a huge amount on Cold War America going into Reagan America and sort of the switch from a real techno optimism, and tinkerers, and a culture of middle class people with great jobs, into a more entrepreneurial, individualistic spirit, that is a story of America. I think from the 1970s through the 90s, that is paralleled in storm chasing. There’s also a really interesting look at car culture and use of fossil fuels and how those things come together. There’s some interesting themes of nostalgia and idealization of the plains and the role of white middle class Americans on the plains and how they see themselves in history. There’s the really interesting story, especially as I get toward the end of the dissertation, of how technology, and the internet especially, change what a community looks like and how it interacts—we’re talking early 1990s, but it resonates with many of the conversations happening today about the role of social media and community and division. We see that in storm chasing too. And speaking of themes of social media, there was the rise of the handheld camcorder and the desire to film storms and then sell the footage and get notoriety that has comparisons to today with YouTube and TikTok sensations. So many themes.

Daniel Story
It does seem really fascinating that it would touch on so many things, including what we’re experiencing now, the very tumultuous changes in weather related to climate change. I don’t know if that comes into the story during those decades or not.

Kate Carpenter
Not so much. As we know, scientists have known about climate change for a long time, and that goes for atmospheric scientists, of course, too. In large part, tornado researchers, severe storms researchers, didn’t necessarily see that as a primary focus. These days it’s hard to avoid how much climate change impacts even down at the meso scale level. But then, it was a less immediate subject. But I think we still see some of the same ideas that permeate discussion today, about what our relationship is to the atmosphere and an optimism that we will be able to figure it out or have all the answers, and an increasing awareness that the answers are a lot more complicated than we thought that they were. So some of those things that aren’t just “is the climate changing or not,” but the ways that we think about weather and atmosphere have clear ties to earlier decades.

Daniel Story
Do you think that the medium of podcasting itself has influenced the way that you write? I realize you also have a background in journalism, so that surely influences you as well. But as someone who works in the medium of audio and podcasting, I do think about how that bleeds into my writing in other kinds of venues.

Kate Carpenter
In journalism we talked all the time about, and I’m dating myself here, readers not “making the jump,” meaning not going from the front page start of the article to wherever the article continued, and that you needed to really grab them in order to get them to make the jump. And that comes up all the time in podcasting with people talking about how you have to re-engage your listener every three minutes in order to keep them listening actively. So I think having that almost ticking clock in mind as you’re writing is a good reminder that, you know, people don’t have to read you. I think we forget that sometimes. We owe it to the readers, and we owe it to our subjects, to make sure that we are giving them reasons to keep listening, to keep reading.

Daniel Story
What kind of work do you hope to do in the future, and is more podcasting part of what you envision for yourself? Will there be a storm chaser podcast, perhaps?

Kate Carpenter
I’ll answer that question first, which is that I wish there were a storm chaser podcast. There’s so much good stuff there, and if someone would like to fund such a thing, or to support me in that, I would definitely be interested in talking about it. I feel like one storm chaser project at a time is probably enough. But as I’ve been doing oral history interviews for the dissertation, I have thought all the time about what a great show this could be. I’ll note that there are a couple of existing storm chasing podcasts aimed at the storm chasing community. There’s one at least that actually has had guests on to talk about past storm chases and kind of recount them. So there is a little bit in that niche already. To answer your broader question, when I’m being honest, the thing I most want to do is write and to write in a way that reaches a wide audience, to tell really engaging stories about the past that help people think about how we live in the present. For me, I’m not sure that that’s going to be in academia, and working in a tenure track role, even if I could get a job. So we’ll see how feasible that is. We’ll start with the storm chasing book and go from there. I would love for podcasting to be a part of that. I host an interview podcast right now, both because that’s what makes sense for the show, but also because that’s what I have time for. I mean, we know, and hopefully listeners know, that scripted podcasts that weave together audio and interviews and history and journalism take a lot of time. Those are the podcasts I love most, so I’d love to get to do some narrative podcast work eventually. I’m always looking for the right subject in the hope that I might have something to pursue there. So we’ll see. I think when it comes to creative pursuits, going back to following your curiosity, seeing what comes next is often the way to go.

Daniel Story
Ending with curiosity seems like a great place to be. Kate, thanks for talking to me, and thank you for the great work you’re doing with Drafting the Past.

Kate Carpenter
Thanks so much for having me on.

Daniel Story
That was my conversation with historian Kate Carpenter, host and producer of the podcast Drafting the Past and researcher of the history of storm chasing. You’ll find a lightly edited print version of this conversation in the pages of the June 2025 issue of the AHR. And, of course, you can check out Drafting the Past wherever you get your podcasts. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review, in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story. It also happens to be the final episode of season 3 of History in Focus. A big thanks to my co-producer Syrus Jin. Also to the many AHA and AHR staff who help us get this podcast out each month. And thank you for tuning in and spreading the word about what we’re doing here. We hope it’s been interesting and useful to you in your own context of doing the work of history. We’ll be taking July and August off and be back with you again in September to kick of season 4. In the meantime, take care, stand strong, support each other, and I’ll see you next time.