Editor’s note: This is the thirtieth entry in a series on how historians—especially contingent historians and those employed outside of tenure-track academia—do the work of history. If you know of someone we should interview, or would like to be interviewed yourself, send an email with the subject line HOW I DO HISTORY to pitches@contingentmag.org.
At the 2022 Western History Association conference in San Antonio. Photo by John Legg.
Kate Carpenter (@katebcarp on Twitter/X and @katecarp.bsky.social on Bluesky) is a historian, writer, and host of the Drafting the Past podcast. Here’s how she does history.
What is your current position and where are you working?
I am a doctoral candidate in the History of Science program at Princeton University as well as the host and producer of Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I am also a freelance writer and public historian based in Kansas City, Missouri.
My new research assistant sports his custom Drafting the Past onesie. He is very cute, but not especially helpful for the podcast. This and all subsequent photos provided by the profile.
What’s a typical work day or work week look like for you?
A lot of my schedule right now is set up to accommodate my 8-month-old baby. I realized about five months after he was born that the only way I was going to keep making steady progress on my dissertation was to start getting up much earlier, so I start every day around 5:30 a.m. My husband is on kid duty from whenever the baby wakes up until 7:30 when we swap so that he can get ready for work, so 5:30-7:30 a.m. is my writing time. I make a pot of coffee, feed the dog, Tilly, so she’ll curl up on the chair in our office, and get to work. My promise to myself is that this time is exclusively for my writing – not the podcast, not freelance public history projects, and definitely not emails. I avoid social media until this time is over because it’s too easy to get distracted and have a lot of other voices in my head. I’ve been finding that, regardless of how smoothly the writing goes that morning, I feel a lot more human if I’ve spent time with my project to start the day.
Three days a week my mom generously takes the baby for five hours to give me some concentrated work time without the hefty price tag of daycare. Those hours are when most of my work gets done: I edit the podcast, try to schedule upcoming episode interviews during these hours, research future guests, and market the show (something I always wish I did more of). If I’m working on freelance projects, most of that happens in this time, too, as does pitching other writing. During other times, I squeeze in chunks of work during naps (which is how I am writing this response right now).
I find that I’m an easily distracted person—even more so these days, thanks to the small human who regularly interrupts my days—so I set a short list of goals for each week that I tape to my computer monitor to keep me on task. In episode 29 of the show, Anna Zeide mentioned that she used the pomodoro method to get things done in small spaces of her day, and that was a revelation to me while I was trying to figure out how to work with a baby. A nap might not be much time, but it’s good for a pomodoro session or two. Thinking in chunks of time like this helps me stay focused and be realistic about how much time I have.
The rest of my day is taken up by entertaining the baby and trying to survive until my husband comes home from work and is back on primary baby duty. To be honest, we just barely stay ahead of household chores and we’re mostly okay with that, but I also think this schedule is a temporary one that will continue to evolve as our baby grows. Day care is always on the table, too, but for now it’s nice to avoid that extra expense.
Your undergraduate degree is in journalism. Please tell us about your life as a journalist before being a historian.
My life as a journalist was short-lived, but it was the source of some key experiences and skills. I went to journalism school at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where my focus was on magazines. My deepest goal always, though, was to be a feature writer, someone who wrote longform pieces. I interned at a small newspaper in Auburn, California, while I was an undergrad. My most challenging experience there was having to conduct weekly “man on the street” interviews. I’m pretty shy, so having to approach random people with a question was torturous for me. After college, my now-husband and I moved to Pocatello, Idaho, so that he could attend graduate school (he has a PhD in clinical psychology), and I got a job at the newspaper there, the Idaho State Journal. I mostly worked as a copy editor and page designer, although I loved reporting so much that I did some writing in my free time, including an investigative piece that I’m still proud of.1 I also like to brag that I was also an award-winning headline writer—my masterpiece was “Pumpkin chuck squashed” about a canceled post-Halloween event. Eventually, I edited and designed a local magazine, Family Living, that the newspaper published.
In many ways, my experience at the newspaper was pretty terrible thanks to some noxious leadership although I did have a wonderful set of colleagues, many of whom I’m still in touch with. I was stuck in Pocatello for a few years, though, and there weren’t many other employment opportunities in journalism in such a small city. Instead, a little scarred by my newspaper experience and watching the local news industry collapse across the country, I spent a long time trying to figure out what else to do while my husband finished grad school and we moved for his clinical internship and then post-doc. I did some freelance writing, editing, and design. By the time we got to Kansas City in 2012, I was feeling stuck and like I’d run aground, career-wise.
I also started writing some fiction for fun. I found myself drawn to stories with a historical component, and pretty soon I realized that I was spending more time doing the research for the historical aspects than writing the books themselves. This was not terribly surprising—I had always loved history—but I had never really stopped to think about whether I should do something involving history as a career. I still didn’t have a plan, but I decided to go to grad school to get an MA in public history, vaguely thinking that I might work in a museum part-time and write about historical subjects the rest of the time.
Was there a particular moment that made you want to study history or become a historian?
Like many people, I think, before I knew much about history as a discipline I sort of thought much of history was settled, and that it was only when new information was “discovered” or found in someone’s attic that there was really anything to write about. The book that upended the way I saw history—and made me realize that being a historian might be great, actually—was Susan Lee Johnson’s Roaring Camp, because it took a history I thought I knew well and completely changed the way I saw it.
At my graduation from the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC) in 2019, where I earned an MA in History with an emphasis in Public History.
Tell us about your undergraduate and graduate experiences. Where did you complete your B.A. and M.A.? Where are you undertaking your Ph.D. and in what field?
I went to the University of Missouri-Columbia (MU) for its tremendous journalism program, and I earned my Bachelor of Journalism degree there in 2007. One thing I appreciated about the Mizzou journalism program is its emphasis on producing well-rounded students with broad educational experiences, so I took classes in a variety of subjects. I also took several fiction writing classes to work on my writing in different ways. In 2016, I went back to school at the University of Missouri-Kansas City (UMKC), where I earned an MA in history with an emphasis in public history. I had some wonderful mentors in that program—including Brian Frehner, Sandra Enriquez, Chris Cantwell, John Herron, and Rebecca Davis—who encouraged and challenged me. Through that program, I also was able to get hands-on experience in public humanities work.
After a year in that program, it became clear to me that I wasn’t ready to be done studying history in an academic setting. With the support of those mentors, I decided to apply for PhD programs. Because I both knew the realities of the job market and was unwilling to go into debt, I resolved to only get a PhD if I had funding to do so. Fortunately, I was accepted to programs that offered funding, and now I’m working on a PhD in the History of Science at Princeton University.
VHS tapes of storm chases, like these at the National Weather Center library in Norman, Oklahoma, are a significant source of archival material for my dissertation.
Tell us about your dissertation. What’s it about?
I’m writing a history of storm chasing—or the practice of attempting to forecast where a tornado might emerge and then intercept it by vehicle—as both scientific fieldwork and a social phenomenon.
The project follows storm chasing from its beginnings in a few intrepid men who wanted to learn more about tornadoes, through its growth into a tight-knit community of enthusiasts, and eventually into the conflicts that arose as more and more chasers took to the road, especially in the wake of the film Twister (1996) and the growth of social media. Readers will meet some of the community’s key figures and understand why storm chasing allows for a lot of blurring between categories like amateur and professional, scientist and hobbyist. I argue that the environment of the chase and the storm itself was key to creating the chase community and keeping together, and that the tools and technologies that made chasing easier over time—some of which the chasers themselves helped to create—also posed the greatest threats to that community.
I wish that I had some sort of brilliant story about why I chose this subject, but the honest answer is simple. I’m not originally from the Midwest and I find tornadoes terrifying, so I’m the sort of person who heads straight for the basement when the sirens go off. I wanted to find out more about the people who headed toward the storms. I was just looking for a book about the history of storm chasing, but I was amazed to find that the book I wanted to read didn’t exist yet. It’s exactly the sort of project I love most—about a group of enthusiastic, almost obsessive people, at the intersection of science and the environment—and the more I started to learn the more I loved it. I still get a little giddy with excitement as I’m working on this project after so much time has passed, which is a pretty fortunate way to feel while writing a dissertation. I can’t wait to turn it into a book that others can read.
Four of the graduate students who worked on the Making History: Kansas City and the Rise of Gay Rights exhibit presenting their work at the National Council on Public History Conference in Las Vegas in 2018 after the exhibit won the NCPH graduate student project award. From left, Kate Carpenter, Samantha Hollingsworth, Taylor Bye, and Leah Palmer.
Tell us about your public history and digital humanities work. What have you worked on and where can we see it?
My introduction to public history work came through a course I took from Chris Cantwell at UMKC. In the course, using the resources of the Gay and Lesbian Archives of Mid-America (GLAMA), we researched and drafted a pop-up traveling exhibit on the history of early gay rights activism in Kansas City. After the course was completed, Dr. Cantwell secured a grant to support the exhibit and hired me to work with him and GLAMA founder Stuart Hinds to produce the final exhibit, Making History: Kansas City and the Rise of Gay Rights. In addition to revising and editing the panels as well as designing the exhibit and its online version, I also was managing the exhibit’s traveling schedule for the first months. The exhibit won multiple awards; Cantwell, Hinds, and I wrote an article for The Public Historian on the experience; and it traveled around the region. Then, in 2021, it made national news when the exhibit was removed from the Missouri State Capitol after a complaint by an aide to a conservative state legislator. The whole experience has been an unexpected and fascinating one.
With Austin Williams, I created a public history installation called The Ordinance Project: Voices Raised in a local art gallery. The exhibit complemented Williams’ documentary The Ordinance Project.
I’ve been fortunate to work on a range of projects, from local oral history initiatives to digitization projects. Among my favorites was working with my friend Austin Williams to create what we called a “public history installation” in a local art gallery to complement his documentary, The Ordinance Project, which told the story of the early-1990s effort to pass an ordinance in Kansas City, Missouri, that would have officially outlawed discrimination against people with HIV/AIDS, gay men, lesbians, and bisexuals in the areas of housing, employment, and public accommodations. With the local chapter of Habitat for Humanity, I got to lead a team of volunteers in digitizing historical materials ahead of the chapter’s 40th anniversary. And this past summer, I was hired to research, write, and curate an exhibit telling the history of a local school of nursing in honor of the 50th anniversary of its closing. The exhibit was displayed at the Kansas City Public Library (a few shots of the exhibit can be seen in the video at this web site).
And of course, these days, the public humanities work that I spend the most time on is my podcast, Drafting the Past.
The homepage of Drafting the Past, featuring three recent interviews.
Tell us about your podcast, Drafting the Past. How long has it been around and how did it start? How do you decide whom to interview?
Drafting the Past is a podcast about the craft of writing history. In each episode, I interview a historian about how they write, from how they organize sources to where they turn for inspiration.
I was lucky enough to have two opportunities to learn how to podcast, first in a class taught by Chris Cantell at UMKC, and second in a week-long podcasting boot camp hosted by the National Humanities Center. As a result, I was eager to start a podcast, but I also knew how long it would take, so I wanted to wait until I settled on the right idea. I’ve long been fascinated—and frustrated—by how little time most of us spend talking about the craft of writing in history graduate programs, despite how central writing is to our work. Some of my favorite podcasts to listen to are interviews with writers about how they work, but these shows rarely feature historians. It occurred to me that I might be able to bring these things together by creating a show that interviewed historians about how they write. In December 2021, I asked on Twitter whether this was something people might be interested in—and the reaction was more enthusiastic than I had hoped. I got to work right away.
Drafting the Past launched in February 2022, and I just wrapped up the second year of the show. To date, I’ve done interviews with 37 writers, and the show has been downloaded more than 57,000 times. I’ve been delighted by how often I hear from listeners about how helpful the show is, and professors are using it in undergraduate and graduate classes across the country.
The choice of guests is a non-scientific combination of my own interests, writers who are recommended to me, guests who pitch themselves for the show, and my own searching for new books that look interesting and have great writing. I try to choose a blend of newer and established scholars from a variety of backgrounds, and I work to ensure there are a variety of presses represented. I’m always trying to improve the diversity of guests on the show; I’m especially eager to have more guests who write non-U.S. history. The guest list certainly reflects the biases of my research interests, but I’m striving to expand. I also think there’s something to be learned from every interview, regardless of whether the guest works in the same field as the listener.
In 2024, in addition to continuing to produce episodes of the show, I’m launching a newsletter that will offer additional resources. I’m planning interviews with editors, close reads of book passages, and even peeks into my own work. Anyone who’s interested can sign up here.
What don’t people know or appreciate about producing a podcast?
The sheer amount of time it takes. Between reaching out to and interviewing guests, prepping interviews, editing episodes, and getting everything online, I’ve estimated that it takes at least 10 hours per episode—and that doesn’t include the time I spend reading my guests’ books! I also do an interview show, which is the “easiest” type to create. A researched narrative podcast takes even longer.
I’ve also had people ask me how much money I make off the podcast. This makes me laugh, because the answer is negative many dollars. I have not yet figured out how to break even on the show, and I’m open to ideas.
You have had many great scholars on Drafting the Past, but do you have a “white whale” or guest (maybe guests) that have eluded you or that you badly want to have on the show?
My wish list of scholars is long, and I find more people I want to interview all the time. A few people that I never dreamed would say yes have already appeared on the show, so I don’t want to be greedy. And there are a couple of others that I would love to have on who have turned me down because of busy schedules, which is totally understandable. I think it would be interesting to have a bestselling popular historian on the show, like David Grann, Erik Larson, or Candace Millard, because I would be interested to know how (or if) their approaches differ, and I think Imani Perry is completely brilliant and would love to have her on. But I haven’t worked up the nerve to ask any of them, yet – who knows, they might say yes. One thing I’ve learned is that you just don’t know until you ask.
The National Weather Center building in Norman, Oklahoma, where I spent time poring over the archives in the library. The NWC also houses several of the organizations that are featured in my dissertation.
You are a historian of the environment and technology. What are some works, books or articles, that have informed your research? Who are some scholars that have inspired you and your work?
This is always such a tough question, because I would happily go on and on about books forever. In addition to Roaring Camp, mentioned earlier, another influential book I read very early in graduate school was Ari Kelman’s A Misplaced Massacre. It’s a fascinating book, of course, but also so well-written, and the way it blends present-day reporting with a historical account made me feel like there might be space for someone like me in the historical field.
My dissertation project’s intellectual godparents are probably Robert E. Kohler’s Lords of the Fly and Kristen Haring’s Ham Radio’s Technical Culture. Nicole Seymour’s Bad Environmentalism has also been shaping the way I think about storm chasers’ interactions with the environment.
Bathsheba Demuth and Megan Kate Nelson were two of my earliest podcast guests for a reason; their books are both models for me of writing works that are contributing to the historical conversation while also reaching audiences outside of the academy. Plus, they write gorgeous narratives. Likewise, Marcia Chatelain is an inspiration to me as a historian trained first as a journalist, and I loved how she brings that reporting experience to her work. In reality, every podcast guest I’ve had could go on this list; they’ve each shared ideas and approaches to writing history that have inspired me. I’ve also been fortunate to have wonderful mentors within the academy; both my MA advisor, Brian Frehner, and my PhD advisor, Erika Milam, have been sources of gentle nudges toward improvement and constant encouragement.
Honestly, my list of influences as a historian of both environment and science is so long that I started to get embarrassed just typing it out, but I’m always happy to share reading suggestions for anyone who wants them. And I also read a lot of nonfiction by journalists. Some of my favorite longtime influences are Susan Orlean, John McPhee, and Mary Roach. I also read magazines, including Orion, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Wired, and The Believer, which are always excellent sources of fresh writing inspiration. And of course, I listen to podcasts. Some of my favorites are Longform, Gastropod, Song Exploder, and the now-concluded but still great Undiscovered.
What’s the best advice you have received or tell people about conducting research?
Lately, the best advice I’ve been learning about research—I feel like I’ve been hearing it a lot, from my wonderful adviser Erika Milam to Catherine McNeur on the podcast—is that sometimes the inefficiencies are where the good stuff is. I think we tend to over-value the idea of working faster or streamlining our process, but in reality going slowly, revisiting sources, following our curiosity wherever it leads is where the best work emerges. For me, it’s also where all the fun is.
What’s the best advice you have received or tell people about writing?
There’s so much—I’m kind of a junkie for writing advice—but one of my favorites comes from Wyatt Townley, a poet whom I was lucky to meet through a writing group. She liked to say “the page is a playground,” as a reminder to have fun with writing and to see our work as an opportunity to explore and delight, rather than a drudgery. I have this phrase pinned up by my desk.
Tilly sits in her armchair each morning, watching me work before the rest of the house gets up.
You ask this question on your show but now it is your turn to answer: where do you do your writing?
I mostly do my writing from 5:30 to 7:30 a.m. at a big Ikea desk in the room that is our office/library/gym/supply closet. I like to be able to spread out and see things in front of me when I work, so I like a big desk and an extra monitor. There’s a ratty teal velvet chair that we bought at a thrift store for $10 twelve years ago next to me, which is where my dog, Tilly, sleeps while I write.
What do you think is the biggest misconception people have about what historians do and how they work?
I often encounter people who seem to think all historians know a lot of specific details about past events like war battles, for some reason. I am a walking representation of the fact that historians are not necessarily great at memorizing dates. More seriously, though, I think many people believe that history is mostly a matter of repeating settled facts, rather than realizing that all the information we have about the past requires careful interpretation—and that the interpretation can change as more context comes to light or we ask different questions of the archival information we have. I wish more of the process of doing history was taught in the K-12 years. I think those research and contextualization skills are valuable throughout life.
You and Contingent editor Marc Reyes both share a special place: Kansas City, Missouri. Where do you take out-of-town guests to show them the city and why? What’s a special place in the city to you?
I often take people to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, because I always enjoy a visit there and I think people can be surprised that Kansas City has such a world-class art museum. Plus, I like any excuse to eat key lime pie in the Rozzelle Court Restaurant. Lately I have been taking visitors to the Kansas City Zoo; the brand-new aquarium recently opened, and our 8-month-old is in awe of the bright colors in the huge tanks.
One of my favorite overlooked gems in Kansas City is the Kauffman Memorial Garden, a small two-acre walled (but free and open to the public) jewel box of a garden in the city. It is meticulously maintained, beautiful in every season, and an excellent place to walk around, sit and write, or visit with a friend. In the winter I especially like ducking into the Orangery to smell the citrus trees and visit the resident cat. The garden is also right near another gem, the Anita B. Gorman Conservation Discovery Center, which has an outdoor natural area with trails that will let you forget you’re in the middle of the city.
What’s something people would be surprised to learn about you?
I really love working with my hands and creating something tangible, even though I’m a writer and researcher. I have many (too many) hobbies that let me do this, including quilting and embroidery, gardening, home renovation, baking and woodworking. In a past life I made screen-printed stationery and art prints.
If money, time, and distance were not issues, what’s a dream project you’d love to tackle? Or what’s a class you have always wanted to teach, but just haven’t had the opportunity to?
For a long time, I’ve dreamed of writing about my great-great-great aunt Esther Birdsall Darling. I’d like to write a book that not only tells her story but follows my own efforts to reconstruct her life, to understand the role that she and others like her played in constructing the mythology of the American West and especially Alaska for other white Americans, and to grapple with how her story has shaped my own sense of self. I imagine it as a book in the vein of Maud Newton’s Ancestor Trouble meets Erika Bolstad’s Windfall, with a little Joan Didion thrown in for good measure.
If you weren’t a scholar, what other kind of work do you think you’d be doing?
I have often wished that I were a biologist or a botanist—no surprise, I suppose, that I ended up studying the history of science—so probably something along those lines. AP Biology was one of my favorite classes ever, and I’m not sure why it never occurred to me to explore that more as a potential career. Who knows? Maybe life will take another turn in that direction. For now, though, I’m enjoying getting to live vicariously through the scientists I write about.
On the Princeton University campus during the first semester of my PhD program, in fall 2019.
- The primary article was called “The Brink of Change,” published in the Idaho State Journal on February 8 2008. It drew attention to plans to build a massive four-season resort on quiet Bear Lake in southern Idaho. The construction was flying under the radar, despite serious concerns about the developers’ lack of water rights, potential environmental impacts, and financial solvency. On the other hand, many people in the area were eager for the new jobs they thought the resort would bring. The news coverage resulted in more attention from state officials about the question of water rights on the resort. The Idaho Department of Water Resources ultimately denied the resort’s request to use groundwater, but the Great Recession was what really put an end to the project for the time being.