Drafting the Past is a multi-platform publication (website, newsletter, and podcast) devoted to nonfiction history books, owned and edited by historians Megan Kate Nelson and Kate Carpenter.
Our mission is to help readers to find (and historians to write) history worth reading.
Drafting the Past was born as an independent podcast in 2022, focused on conversations with historians about how they research and write history. For a long time, Kate dreamed of growing Drafting the Past into something more than a podcast, something that does even more to celebrate and highlight great history writing.
About a year ago, Megan and Kate started talking about what it would look like to build something together.
We agreed that there weren’t enough really good, engaging reviews of history books out there in newspapers and magazines. And then, over the last year, many of these publications began to reduce or eliminate their book review sections, making the problem even worse.
The time seemed right to create a new outlet, a place where readers can find history books and talk about them together.
Where people writing history can turn for inspiration and ideas.
And where scholars and critics can talk about new books (and maybe even some classics) and take them seriously.
This new iteration of Drafting the Past is dedicated to the idea that compelling history writing matters, especially now.
We hope you are as excited as we are about this new direction that Drafting the Past is taking. And that you will join us in this new community centered around history worth reading.
Founders
Kate Carpenter
Kate Carpenter is a writer and historian. She is finishing up a PhD in the history of science at Princeton University, and she earned a bachelor of journalism degree from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a master of arts in public history from the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Before becoming a historian, she worked variously as a copy editor, reporter, freelance editor and designer, exhibit consultant, and screenprinter. She launched the Drafting the Past podcast in 2022 because she wanted to know more about how historians write, not just what they write. She lives in Kansas City with her family, her unruly garden, and one poorly behaved mutt.
Megan Kate Nelson
Born and raised in Colorado, Megan Kate Nelson is a historian and writer with a BA from Harvard and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Iowa. She is the author of five books, including The Westerners (Scribner 2026); Saving Yellowstone (Scribner 2022; winner of the 2023 Spur Award for Historical Non-Fiction); and The Three-Cornered War (Scribner 2020; 2021 Pulitzer Prize finalist in History). Megan also writes about the Civil War, the U.S. West, and American culture for The New York Times, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Slate, and Time, and she shows up in a History Channel documentary every now and then. She lives in Boston with her husband and her two destructive but adorable cats.