Welcome back to Drafting the Past. I’m Kate Carpenter, and this is a podcast about the craft of writing history. In this episode, I’m joined by historian and writer Dr. Surekha Davies. Surekha is a former history professor who now writes full-time, and she can also be found speaking about history and consulting on monsters. In fact, monsters have played a major role in much of her research. Her first award-winning book was titled Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monsters. Her second book, which is aimed at a general audience, is out now; it’s called Humans: A Monstrous History. The book looks at, as she puts it, how people “have defined the human in relation to everything from apes to zombies, and how they invented race, gender, and nations along the way.” I spoke with Surekha about how she made the switch to full-time writing, her newsletter, Notes from an Everything Historian, and how she organized what could have been an unruly book. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Surekha Davies.

In this episode of Drafting the Past, host Kate Carpenter is joined by historian Dr. Lyndal Roper. Lyndal is a professor at the University of Oxford and the author of six books on gender, religion, witchcraft, and German history. Her newest book out this year is a history of the sixteenth-century German Peasants’ War titled Summer of Fire and Blood. The book follows the movement, beliefs, hopes, and actions of the peasants in this mass uprising. I loved the opportunity to talk with Lyndal about how she wrote about such a massive and relatively obscure event for a general audience, the way her own movement across the land shaped her work, why she prefers the screen to the handwritten page, and much more.

In this episode of Drafting the Past, host Kate Carpenter is joined by Dr. Judith Giesberg. Dr. Giesberg is a historian and professor at Villanova University. She is the author of six books focused on the U.S. Civil War and its aftermath. She is also an active digital and public historian, and her newest book is the culmination of these interests. Inspired by an ongoing digital project, Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families draws on advertisements placed by formerly enslaved people after the Civil War—in some cases, long after—attempting to find loved ones who had been stolen away from them when they were sold by enslavers. It’s a fascinating book, at turns heartbreaking and inspiring, and I was delighted to get to ask Judy more about the project and her research process.