In this episode, Dr. Christopher Hodson and Dr. Brett Rushforth join Kate Carpenter to talk about their new book, Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution. It was a book two decades in the making, and when you read it, you’ll understand why. It’s absolutely packed with research and fascinating stories, and it makes a persuasive argument that, when you look beyond its official accounts, France played a much bigger role in the colonization of the Atlantic world than historians have assumed.
Chris is an associated professor of history at Brigham Young University, and Brett is editor in chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly. They bring a dry wit and a spirit of joyful curiosity to their work that comes through in the book and in this interview. You’ll hear about the varied ways they researched their new book, not just in written archives but with visual culture, artifacts preserved across the world, and even at archaeological sites in order to write a history of France’s influence in the Atlantic world that focuses not on the accounts and experiences of officials, but on the daily lives of sailors, indigenous peoples in both North America and West Africa, nuns, smugglers, and much more.
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Mentioned in this episode:
- Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth, Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution
- Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History
- Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France
- Laurent DuBois
- Feathered Tupi-Guarani Cape, held by the Musée de Quai Branly
- Foldable ivory spork
- Brett and Chris’s newsletter, Beyond the Ocean
- Garamond Agency
- Huntington Library Quarterly
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about how historians write history, and I'm Kate Carpenter. In this episode, I'm joined by not just one but two great historians, Dr. Christopher Hodson and Dr. Brett Rushforth.
Brett Rushforth 0:15
Thanks for having us.
Kate Carpenter 0:16
When Brett emailed to tell me about their new book, Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution, I was hooked right from the subject line. "Hodson and Rushforth sniff bear grease." That's a pretty solid introduction to their sense of humor and the spirit of joyful curiosity they bring to their research. But it also introduced me to the varied ways they research their new book, not just in written archives, but with visual culture, artifacts preserved across the world, and even at archeological sites where they sniffed the aforementioned bear grease. Together, they wrote a history of France's influence in the Atlantic world that focuses not on the accounts and experiences of officials and rulers, but on the daily lives of sailors, indigenous peoples in both North America and West Africa, nuns, smugglers, much more. It was a book two decades in the making, and when you read it, you'll understand why. It's absolutely packed with research and fascinating stories, and it makes a persuasive argument that when you look beyond official accounts, France played a much bigger role in the colonization of the Atlantic world than historians have assumed. Chris is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University, and Brett is editor in chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly. They talked to me about how they worked together over time and distance to tell this story, and some of the adventures they encountered along the way, from a West African spork to using Eminem, yes, that Eminem, as motivation, to switching presses after they had already signed a contract. Here's my conversation with Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth.
Kate Carpenter 1:52
I will just have you guys start by maybe each of you telling me a little bit about the trajectory of your career as a writer, and maybe Brett, you could you could go first.
Brett Rushforth 2:00
It's interesting. I don't really think of myself primarily as a writer, even though I am, of course, and now I'm an editor full time. But I think the, my path to writing was rocky, and it didn't come naturally for me. I love reading. I love poetry. I love fiction. But when I write myself, I'm tortured, and this it wasn't helped by I think what helped me the most actually was something that didn't help initially, is I got two early bodies of feedback, one from a professor in my master's degree and one in my PhD. The first was a draft of my master's thesis that I sent in, and I was proud of it. I felt just like this is one I've shown just how brilliant my writing is, and I get back a letter, printed letter that said, "In the future, please refrain from submitting work that is in such a preliminary state of preparation." It was devastating, of course. And I remember these words 25 years later. And then my first paper to my mentor advisor came back, and at the bottom of my first paper, it just says "platitudinous and lacking in substance." Of course, now as a grown-up editor, what I would do is I'd mark out "and lacking in substance" as being unnecessary and redundant, and I would have handed it back to him, but didn't have that option then. And so that was two moments where I had to learn that I didn't write as well as I thought, and that what felt natural to me had to be something that was much more conscious, had to be chosen, had to be learned, and they were both doing me a favor in their own cruel ways.
Kate Carpenter 3:39
yeah, they could perhaps learn a little diplomacy in in their good feedback.
Brett Rushforth 3:50
You're not wrong. You're not wrong.
Kate Carpenter 3:52
Chris, How about you?
Chris Hodson 3:53
Yeah, I had a a kind of similar experience when I was doing my bachelor's degree and ultimately my master's degree. I too didn't really have a sense of what being a writer meant. I didn't know what the practice was like. I was a first-generation college student, so I spent a lot of time in my early 20s being really pretty confused about most of what was going on. And I had a really excellent undergraduate mentor in Len Rosenband, who was a historian of of 18th century France and a historian of of labor, and he gave me really great feedback, very very encouraging. Like, look, you've you've actually got something. You're doing a good job. And then the next thing that he returned, he would just kind of smoke me for overwriting, for being overly precious, for sort of a variety of things, and as I got to know Len, I came to realize in part why he was doing that. And Len had done a PhD at Princeton with Robert Darnton. It was all very fancy. He probably deserved a better job than Utah State University where he was, but we were very glad that he was there. But when I knew him, which was in the mid 1990s, because I'm so so old now, he had congenital eye problems, and so in the period between his hiring at Utah State and when I started to know him, he had essentially gone blind, and I had to watch what he did to write, and the labor he had to do was so shocking, like his reading had to take place right in front of his face. It was incredibly laborious and time intensive. He took extensive notes on yellow legal pads and then drafted everything that he wrote by hand because his eyes couldn't process a screen. He couldn't get close enough to see the contrast and so on, and so the writing was incredibly laborious, and that's one of the things really taught me. Like, look, this is writing is many things, but one of the things that it is is a craft, and it demands attention. It demands, like Brett said, intentionality. It demands real commitment, and that lesson I think has kind of stuck with me in a lot of ways that have been really, really important.
Kate Carpenter 6:09
Before we get into the book itself, I want to know a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how you guys work. So, when and where do you like to do your writing?
Brett Rushforth 6:16
So, I write whenever and wherever I can find a spare moment and a quiet place. I have to have silence when I write, and I need to have a space where I can be ridiculous. I tend to talk to myself. I read my sentences back to myself out loud. I pace. I do frustrated gestures. I probably curse quite a lot more than ends up on the page. In practice, because I have four kids who are now adults, and when I began this project with Chris, the oldest was-I mean, well, the youngest was only four years old and is now 23. So during all those years, I just had to find whatever time I could, and I'd write a lot late at night. And somehow, when the world is tucked away and my obligations are quiet for the night, and I don't feel the pull of wondering: Is somebody needing me? Is there a is there an obligation I'm letting go? Is there something I'm forgetting to do? That's when I felt free to really lose myself in my thoughts, and so I did a lot of writing late at night for this project, but the other piece I think for me that's something I learned just in the last few years is I listen to my writing and I listen to Chris's writing and I listen to a lot of things through a screen reader, and I'll do that when I walk away from the computer. I'll go on a hike. I'll go on a walk. I'll you know even a drive, a commute, and hearing the things that I've written actually changes the way I see the structure, because I'm not so lost at the sentence level. I'm not so lost in this sort of clever turn of phrase, but I can actually sit with a larger piece of writing and see where the narrative works well, where it falls apart, and so it's really kind of a clumsy process of finding a minute, finding an hour, finding two hours, three hours, ideally, and then really taking the time to redo, redo, redo. And lately, that's taken a lot of listening.
Chris Hodson 8:17
I have to say, you know, Brett revealed to me that he was listening to our writing kind of late in the process, and I wish I had known earlier because that would have been some pretty good practical joke fodder. But in terms of thinking about writing, it's funny you ask. I'm a tennis fan, and there's a really good Netflix documentary that's just come on about Rafael Nadal, and Nadal famously has, let's be generous and call them routines, but they are very precise routines that he does physically when he plays tennis. His water bottles have to be arranged at his seat with the labels facing a particular way. There's all this stuff that he does, and in the documentary, the host asks him, "Well, did you ever try to just like stop doing those things? And he said, "Oh yeah, I I tried and did stop doing those things, but after I did that, I thought to myself, 'Well, I need these routines because they make me feel safe." And funnily, I'm not at home right now. I'm I'm in Providence, Rhode Island. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, but I'm in Providence, Rhode Island, on a fellowship right now, and so I'm not in the context, the physical context where I usually do my writing, and I'm very lucky to have a home office, and that's where I typically do my writing. And I've found myself kind of trying to write little things while I've been here-not nothing major like the work we did for the book-and kind of sitting down in a non-my office context and sort of panicking and getting sweaty for reasons I didn't quite understand, precisely because I wasn't in the kind of same almost ritualistic environment where I'm used to doing the writing. So I've come to appreciate maybe Rafa a little bit more now, but also. So the kind of the habits of engaging in the craft of writing that I guess I wasn't conscious I was really doing, but in their absence you realize that they're really pretty important and meaningful to me.
Brett Rushforth 10:14
So I do have to tell the story of when I finished my last book, I was on a tenure clock and I had to finish it by a certain date, and there was a lot more to do than I thought I could really do by that date. And I had a daughter who had a before school program that needed she needed to be dropped off at six a.m. So I'd drop her off. I'd go to my office at William and Mary, and I would sit down, and my version of Nadal was to put on my noise canceling headphones and listen to Eminem's "Lose Yourself," and I, I would. It was the same every morning, and I would, you know, blast that, and it's like this is going to pump me up. This is exciting. This is my chance. And then success is your only option, we'll say, for the radio-free version of that. And there was something about that that was both sort of comical, and I knew it at the time. It was comical. I knew it was absurd, but there was something about it that gave me some routine and also a bit of an adrenaline boost that I desperately needed at six a.m.
Kate Carpenter 11:15
I love that, and I also have to say that you were the first academic ever to tell me that Eminem plays a crucial role in their in their writing process.
Brett Rushforth 11:23
Well, you're welcome.
Kate Carpenter 11:25
Aside from that, what what systems do you have to keep yourself organized?
Brett Rushforth 11:29
You know, for me, I'm, organization is definitely my weak suit, and one of the things for our book together that helped us enormously, at least from my perspective, is that we figured out during a crucial fellowship year from the ACLS, we got a collaborative research fellowship in the very early stage of this project, and we were able to spend a year working together through a very detailed sort of book outline, chapter outline. We had great help from our agent Lisa Adams, who's just a remarkable human being, and that process allowed me to create a or allowed me to create sort of a filing system that was around the chapters. And then once we had that, I had a much easier time. But I still just use Word documents because I find the search function is almost sort of foolproof. If I know I've written something, I know there's some, you know, place that I'd written about this parrot who testified in court in the 1530s, for example, in the Basque country. I knew somewhere there was a note about that, and so I just search Basque parrot whatever, and I always find it. So there are people who have software they use. There are people who are much more sort of just intuitively organized than I am. But for me, the key thing was figuring out a structure, even though we knew it would evolve, but a structure that I could hang the organization of my files on. And then even to this day, I still go back, you know, and know where I can find something based on the fact that I was working on it for Chapter Three or was working on it for Chapter Seven.
Chris Hodson 13:07
Yeah, I do the same thing. I really am way more analog in that way than than maybe even I think I am. So I have the same system that Brett does. Basically, the the larger challenge in many respects has been the transition that that Brett and I have both kind of lived through in our careers, beginning as graduate students and then to to this point to digital photography as a way of capturing archival images. In a lot of respects, that's the more challenging kind of organizational problem. But Brett's right; we were very very lucky to kind of build out a framework for the book that, as we've been talking about it since you know the book's been completed and so on, the framework actually really held. And and the great thing about the overall framework holding was that within each chapter, within each specific topic of research, then once we had the framework in place, the research could kind of blow our ideas up in our face. But we still had this kind of operating system that could function for the whole of the book. So that kind of initial set of conversations and so on that really proved pretty enduring. It was really really critical to actually producing a what what we hope is a is a coherent book that covers in effect a millennium of of history.
Brett Rushforth 14:30
And it wouldn't have been possible had we not also each written our first books about topics that are covered in this broad chronology. You know, French colonialism, empire. You know the ways that non-elite people were both implicated in and affected by, and transformed through the process of empire building, and so the we knew enough about what we wish we had in a book like this. That it wasn't just that we came up with a set of ideas at the beginning and then stuck to it, as if we had sort of like decided beforehand this is going to be our structure and we're going to stick to it either way. It's that through the many years of writing the first book, we had developed these ideas, and then together over the course of a year, we did how many drafts of that proposal? Seven, 8, 10.
Chris Hodson 15:24
I've I've blocked all of that out.
Brett Rushforth 15:25
Yeah, I have too. My therapist tells me it's the best idea.
Chris Hodson 15:28
Yeah, smart.
Kate Carpenter 15:29
Tell me the story of how you decided to write this book together.
Brett Rushforth 15:32
Chris. Yeah, is this yours?
Chris Hodson 15:34
Yeah, sure. I can start, and then you can jump in when I tell an an outright lie. So interestingly, Brett and I are actually sort of from the same place. So Brett and I both come from from northern Utah, and we actually attended at least one of the same schools. We both attended Utah State University at slightly different times for our master's degrees. And when I was doing my PhD in the early 2000s at Northwestern, I began to hear kind of rumblings from the west of this guy at UC Davis who was working on this really incredible stuff about indigenous slavery. He's working on New France, really doing all this interesting work that I needed to engage and wanted to engage, and we finally wound up I think meeting for the first time I think at a a an interview where I was interviewing for a postdoctoral fellowship and Brett was on the committee because he he had had that postdoctoral fellowship and notwithstanding the fact that I got absolutely annihilated in that interview, Brett and I became, we started having conversations because you know we're sympatico. We're kind of from the same place. How weird it is that there are these two guys kind of working on these French colonial issues coming out of northern Utah of all places, and we just kind of figured out that the way that people talked about the French Empire in the early modern period, just did not match the dynamism and connectivity and kind of deep interest that we were sort of seeing in the archives and so on. And so the idea for the book actually emerged well, of course, before we finished our first books, out of a series of conversations that we had when we were pretty young people, kind of emerging into a field, French colonial history, that was just then, I think, picking up a fair amount of interest in the broader kind of discipline of history period and in early American history generally. Brett, what do you remember?
Brett Rushforth 17:38
No, that's exactly right, and you know, I do remember that interview, eviscerated, I think it's a little too strong, but maybe not entirely too strong. But it was not that you were eviscerated. It's that the there was one of the interviewers who had a style of engagement that was intentionally combative, and her style was to do that and see how people responded, and she ended up being my editor. And I, I did write a Substack post recently about our interactions, about our my introduction for the first book. So I had a chance to think about her a bit. But so it was really just out of pity, I think, that I just decided to wrap Chris in my arms and hold him for a bit after that interview. No, but the the thing is, is that part of that that interview was that I read the entire dissertation, and so very early on, I could see that this is someone who approaches sources in a way that I understand and find exciting. He also knew so much more than I did about things in France, about the political economy, about sort of ethnographies of the state-you know, this literature on early modern state building-it was just because I was coming at it from a Native Americanist standpoint. I just did not know that material at all, and I had not had any training in French history, and I was so impressed by the depths of not just Chris's sort of command of the field, but the way that it appeared in his analysis of the sources in his dissertation, which of course only became more complex in his first book. And so it was honestly admiration that led me to sort of seek Chris out and say, "Hey, I I'm frustrated by these things in the field." And he says, "Well, guess what? So am I." And then we had this naive idea that we could just knock out this synthetic. Let's see what this field is. Let's take a snapshot and just see what that snapshot looks like. So we're I don't know what are we? 14 and 15 years old, or something like that. And I mean, we were just we were young, we were naive, and we thought this was going to be a project that we could knock out fairly quickly, and but it came out of a shared process of research and writing our first books, where we felt the field was missing something really important. And in each individual region, there's really sophisticated work, and we talked about that, but when it came to the sort of broad level, what would happen is someone would do this incredibly sophisticated work on New France, you know, Canada, or on the French Caribbean, or on you know Senegal in the 18th century, or Haitian Revolution, which of course has become this incredibly rich field, even more so now. But even then, it was one of the leading areas of research, and you know Laurent Dubois' book had just come out. So we'd find this this really rich, sophisticated scholarship that was place based and time based. But anytime people kind of zoomed out, it would become so flat, and it would just revert to the easy narrative that was stitched together by elite administrators, by bureaucracy, by the stories of warfare and whatever people sort of used to tell histories in a very traditional way, and so we were both frustrated by this and thought, well, let's fix this real quick.
Kate Carpenter 20:58
And how many years ago did you real quick decide to write this?
Brett Rushforth 21:02
This was, I mean, this conversation was 2004, 2005.
Chris Hodson 21:07
I was gonna say like 1971, but I think--
Brett Rushforth 21:09
That's just what it felt like to work with me that long. You're learning something. This is hurtful, but no, I think it must have been early 2005, right? Early 2000.
Chris Hodson 21:20
That's right, early 2005, and then we drafted the first, we we wrote the first draft of the proposal for the book in a car as we drove between Salt Lake City and Denver, stopping in Moab to hike at Arches National Park, and you know that was that was in 2007. So it's it's been a lot of years.
Kate Carpenter 21:38
Aside from writing the first draft of the proposal in the car, what what's the practical process of writing a book together? Did you split things up? Did you were you just constantly collaborating?
Chris Hodson 21:48
Yeah. So we definitely split things up. So one of the things that was really attractive as we started to flesh out the proposal and so on is that we felt that our kind of interests and expertise were complementary in a nice way. There are things Brett can do and things Brett knows about Indigenous history, the history of slavery and enslavement that I simply don't know and can't can't replicate. And I have a certain amount of expertise, like Brett said, in kind of metropolitan French history and so on that I try to weave into my own thinking about colonial history, and so as a result, we sort of felt like we kind of covered the bases of the story we wanted to tell in hopefully what was a really productive way. And so yes, we did split up the writing of the chapters. However, we were really, really lucky, and early on in the process, to get a fellowship from the ACLS that enabled us to spend really a full year, kind of having conversations with each other and actually doing research together and visiting sites together. So, just as an example, we traveled together to the southern United States, went to all sorts of French colonial sites in the southeast, from Fort Toulouse in Alabama all the way over to New Orleans and Natchez, and actually just kind of being present in at least some of the places where the things we were writing about took place was really, really formative, and helped us think in new ways about material culture. So we actually got to handle objects and so on. So the splitting up kind of took place along what we thought of as pretty natural lines on the basis of what we wanted to do and and where our expertise lay. As far as kind of the process of writing and co-writing, I think that we were always pretty present in each other's minds, but things being what they were, there were points when we sort of had to cut each other loose, and the other had to allow, I had to allow Brett, of course, to do what he was expert at doing, and he had to do the same for me, and that required a certain amount of trust and a certain amount of a level of common sensibility about what writing was, knowledge about what the argument was as we went forward. So yes, we did do things individually, but I felt like on the basis of our early experience working together on the proposal and actually going to the archives together, visiting sites together, we were really sort of on the same wavelength the entire time as writers of the project.
Brett Rushforth 24:31
One of the earliest experiences, in addition to this trip through the southeastern United States, was a trip to France. The colonial archives in France are in Aix-en-Provence. It's really hard to do work there.
Kate Carpenter 24:45
So difficult.
Brett Rushforth 24:46
Tough sledding.
Chris Hodson 24:47
Yeah.
Brett Rushforth 24:47
But we were fortunate to have some grant money, both from BYU for Chris and from William and Mary for me, to bring some students with us, and we brought five students, and then there was a sixth student who was at the university. Florida, who had been an undergraduate student at BYU, and joined us there to do his research, and we we made a deal essentially where we would pay for their travel, pay for their lodging, their food, all of that. So the entire trip would be covered for about I guess it was about two weeks in France, and then they would divide their time in the archive between doing work for us, you know, photographing documents and things, and then doing their own work. Of course, with some mentoring from us, because you know they were they were students. We also chose the work to assign them that would be as close as possible to their own dissertation and book research. And as we went through that, it was it was also a process of discussing every evening, you know, as we wandered through the streets of Aix, or as we went at ridiculously early hours for dinner and got made fun of by the French for walking from the archive to dinner at 5p.m. But those conversations created a dialog that was at first physical and verbal, and then sort of lingering in our intellectual memory with echoes of. So I think even when we weren't aware that we were sort of writing to and with the other, we were because we had sort of had these formative experiences of being in the archive. And there's something about taking a text, let's say an archival document, that's really difficult to to decipher, and working together to think: Is that an S? Is that, what is this? You know, what is this little scratch that we see? Figuring out the context that really requires a depth of analysis. That had we been thinking incompatibly, it would have really come out early, and we would have found that this probably isn't a good idea. But in fact, it sort of reinforced our initial sense that things were, things were going to work both when we were physically present together, thinking and speaking together, and when we were cutting each other loose and sort of trusting each other.
Kate Carpenter 26:59
I'm struck that the book has a really consistent voice. I don't, I don't know that, except for knowing your areas of expertise, I don't know that I could guess who wrote what. And I have to imagine that part of that came out in sort of the editing and revision process, also smoothing out the seams. What was that process like of editing each other? I I can tell from this conversation that you have similar senses of humor, which I have to imagine helped in the process. But how did you approach that?
Chris Hodson 27:25
I many years ago, the musician Jack White did a song with Loretta Lynn, the great country singer, and someone asked him in an interview, "Well, like, how did you go about you know working with Loretta Lynn in the studio?" And he kind of looked at the interviewer and was like, "Well, I'm, I'm not going to tell Loretta Lynn how to sing a song. I'm just, I'm just not going to do that." And working with Brett was, it was a great experience for me, in part because of the relationship that we have, you know, personally. He and I are very good friends, and that you'd better be good friends if you're going to do something like this. At the same time, I am a huge fan of his scholarship and his intellect, and I knew that I could always count on Brett to produce incredibly clear thinking. So while I would never, and I think Brett would probably say the same about about me. I would never. I'm not going to tell Brett how to write, and I'm also not going to try to imitate Brett's writing if that makes sense. And the reason I think I can was able to do that during the process of writing the book is that we started from a relatively similar place. Just as far as writing goes, we are both big believers in the discipline and the hard work of archivally grounded history. We both believe that the thick description of kind of banal events, you know, that ordinary people engage in, is intrinsically important and was fundamental to the argument about the evolution of empire that we were trying to make, and so as a result, I found myself kind of thinking about Brett as I was writing, not not in the sense that I was trying to kind of match him or organize my thinking or my paragraph structures to align with his, but more in the sense that I wanted to emulate the the clarity, the the spareness of the prose that kind of drives home his arguments, and so I myself had very little interest in trying to edit Brett, and I don't think he had a ton of interest in trying to edit edit me. But at the same time, I think over the years we became so familiar with each other's writing that it was a pleasure and it was inspiring to kind of engage with the other people's kind of prose, the other person's prose discipline. So that's how I tended to think about that process as we were moving forward.
Brett Rushforth 30:08
For me, there was one moment early on in the process where my writing tends to be serious. I'm too serious, and I have a hard time being a little bit more relaxed or loose doesn't come naturally to me because I overthink everything and and I I overedit myself and I want to make sure it has just the right sound of gravitas. I don't actually, but there's there's a bit of that honestly, and I found Chris's writing very fluid and very engaging and fun in some ways. He's got a little smartassery in there, and there was a moment I remember very clearly early in the process when I'm writing and I'm trying to write like Chris. I I don't know if I ever mentioned this to you, Chris, but it was this sort of moment of insecurity where I'm like, man, I wish I could do that, and so I tried to do that, and I was bad at it, like really bad at it, because there's a reason that I gravitate towards seriousness, because like I just couldn't do the other. So I have this set of notes. It's in fact the text that gave us the title of the book. This Marc Lescarbot wrote the the first history of the French Atlantic. In 1609, he published this, and he had been in the territory that Chris had ultimately written about in Acadia, and he came back and he wanted to advocate for the expansion of the French Empire, and he wrote this book where he talked about the people out there are begging for the French crown to join them beyond the ocean, and so this is where the title came from. But I was writing a description of Lescarbot's book, and I was trying to do it in the clever Chris way, you know, things like, consider Marc Lescarbot. That phrase shows up, and then it's like these like fragments that are very intentionally interrupting the flow of long sentence, short sentence, long sentence, and I was just in my head about it, and it was awful. It was awful as an experience, but it was also awful in the result. And I found myself just getting tied up in knots, and I finally had to like really convince myself, okay, I'll never quite write as well as Chris. I'm going to bring something else to the project, and you know, in the end, that's really not the right way to think about it, of course, either. But I had to let go of that imitative attempt because it just I wasn't being myself, and in the end, without really honestly trying very hard, we ended up producing a book that you'd think that there had been a lot of editing required at the end to sort of meld the voice together. And there are times when I have to think: Did did I write that, or did Chris write that? But that was not as invasive or transformative a process at the end, as you might think, and nor was it as sort of intentional as we wrote it, except that one very failed experiment.
Chris Hodson 31:02
I understand the impulse to have a co-authored book possess one voice. I just talked myself into the idea that, given what we were doing, given the kind of geographical and chronological scope, 1.2 voices was probably okay. That's close enough, and and that actually was kind of a liberating way of thinking about things. Now that being said, you know Brett's, Brett's being self-effacing here. He's an incredible writer, and I myself, you know, I think my main kind of skill set is writing like slightly overly long anecdotal introductions to things. Like, if I could just do a sequence of those, that would really kind of align with my you know core talents. So it's true that occasionally I had to think like, okay, you told the fun story. Now, can you say something? And that's when I, you know, would kind of revert to like, okay, what would Brett do here? Let's maybe get. Let's have a point. So I think the kind of the conversations we've had over the years, you know, the time we'd spent reading each other's work and so on. I think that was really fruitful in kind of producing a book that has, let's call it, 1.2 voices, that actually didn't wind up requiring that much kind of major surgery at the end to kind of align the prose that we each wrote.
Kate Carpenter 34:33
Well, okay, I want to talk a little bit more specifically about how the book came together. Chris, you mentioned a little bit ago, you know, one of the one of the things that is most interesting about this book and part of your argument is that you are telling this story of sort of the French Atlantic world and exploration, not from these like official voyages, state-sponsored actions, but through kind of these more like everyday people, sailors, West Africans, Native Americans, traders, other people who aren't well known, which is fantastic. It's also challenging archivally. So, how did you go about trying to find and tell those stories?
Chris Hodson 35:08
I think number one, it became clear to us pretty quickly that our initial sense that maybe we could sort of pop this book out really quickly, that it might be you know somehow synthetic and kind of reliant on existing literature and so on. It became clear really quickly that if we were going to actually tell the story we wanted to tell and make the argument we wanted to make, the book had to be archivally based. And I think Brett did the counting because I'm not very good at that, but we did wind up visiting between us well over 100 different archives and repositories of all different kinds over the years we spent doing this this book, and I think those archival visits were really revealing for many many reasons. One of those is that there is this tendency among folks who have worked in the past on French colonial history to be really, really reliant on the language of the state and the information provided directly by the state to kind of frame the history of French colonialism, and the moment we got at any depth into the archives that we were starting to to use, we realized that that was simply a non non starter, and that what we were seeing was that the kind of workaday activities of a whole host of Atlantic peoples from West Africa to Brazil. Brett wrote incredible material about Brazil in the 16th century. That's really sort of field changing, I think, to the Caribbean to North America. These kind of everyday commercial, religious, sexual relationships that develop among the actors that are engaged in French colonial history-they drive the story forward, and they provide-and Brett used this phrase earlier-they provide us with a kind of ethnography of the development of the colonial state. So the archives helped us tell the story kind of inversely to the way it's traditionally been told, and I think that we mostly just allowed the archives to kind of tell the story for us. Like we we didn't impose our will or some kind of state sensibility on the archives. We just let the archives do what the archives were doing, and those really rich stories emerged directly out of that process.
Brett Rushforth 37:46
Yeah, and to that, I guess what I'll add is that you know when Chris says we let the archives tell the story, that includes the archival silences, right? It includes the archival violence that's done to colonized people, and that's also visible in the archive. It's visible through those silences. It's visible when we hear, for example, slave traders talking about the the process of human trafficking that was really so central to the development of the early modern French Empire. We hear how they talk about it. We see it, but then you have to make a conscious choice to realize that on that same ship there are many, many more people than share the view of that person who produced that source, and their experiences are echoed in those sources. But sometimes they're silenced. Sometimes they are distorted. They're often, maybe almost always distorted, and so one way I thought about this is maybe the most boring way, the most serious way. This is going to illustrate the difference here. I thought about this in terms of statistics, not really, but really, the statistical mode became my way of thinking about this, and that is that if you think about, you know, the various ways of figuring out the prevalence of a set, or the prevalence of a number in a set, or the prevalence of a set within a group of sets. There's the median, right, which is half above, half below. There's the mean, which is to take them all, add them all up, divide them by the number, and you get the average. Is what we think of it usually. But then there's the mode, and that's the one that appears most often. So if we were to think about the early modern French Atlantic, the early modern French Empire, even a little bit more broadly, the mode of historical experience was absolutely not French. The mode of that experience was West African. It was Indigenous American. It was Portuguese. It was you know Spanish. It was all of these other things, and so the the very most common experience of being within this world was absolutely not the experience of the person producing the sources. In very very few cases is it true that you have a source from people who would represent the mode of historical experience. So that became kind of a way of me reminding myself that when I'm in a group of sources, it's absolutely true that the archives don't support a reading of this history that is top down. It just doesn't support, even the archive produced by the administrative state itself. It just doesn't hold up because then they start explaining all their frustrations and they start explaining what people they're trying to control or profit from. They start explaining the people below them or aside from them that they can't even get a read on. They don't even know where they are or what language they speak or how to communicate with them. So even in those archives produced by these people, it doesn't support that story. But it does take a conscious willingness to look for those other experiences, and so I think that for me it began sort of as an ethical project in some ways of saying like we really need to tell stories of the people whose stories have not been told, and you know Chris has done this in the later chapters, especially for the Haitian Revolution, and of course the literature there is really rich, but even so, he has found you know these incredible new archival documents that people have not actually known about or or read, and then in those these incredibly rich revealing stories of West and West Central African people who are both leading the history by their actions and choices, and encapsulating the historical processes in their narrated stories, and so those are the kinds of things I think that we really were committed to. But then, what became absolutely clear was that that commitment was not just sort of a precious anti-colonial stance, which I mean, there was an anti-colonial stance. Let's be clear, but it was not this sort of imposed, forced reading. But you actually can understand how the big story works without understanding the mode of historical experience, and the just one one quick example.
Brett Rushforth 42:25
Maybe this is going on too long, but one example that I think of in in my own discoveries is looking at the establishment of the colony of New France, and it's generally thought of as this 17th century phenomenon. If you read books about Semu de Champlain, for example, he's this great genius who's going out in the middle of nowhere. No one knows what's out there, and he's just got this vision for humanity all getting along and singing "Kumbaya" in French, and you know, eating eels. He talks a lot about eels. That's a different story, but you know the the story of that. What you don't realize is that if you have attended to what happens in the 16th century, and you realize that there are all of these engagements in trade, in transatlantic travel, there's a slave trade that's already going on well before that anybody is really acknowledged in the French literature, and the people who are the first generation to establish the French colonies in New France-they're the third generation often of people involved in Atlantic commerce. You know this famous nun, Marie de l'Incarnation, who is an Ursuline, goes and establishes a school, teaches Native girls. She is brought to New France, a land she saw in a visionary dream as great wilderness that no one had seen before. She's brought there by a guy who's been there seven times, a guy who is a slave trader. He's been raiding English slaving ships in Senegal. He's been trading ivory and pepper and other things on the West African coast. He's been to Brazil. He has an invested interest in the island of Saint Christophe, where they're developing plantation slavery already. And this is the guy who brings her on his ship. And you start putting it into this context, and you don't understand what's happening in the big story if you don't understand the mode of historical experience.
Kate Carpenter 44:29
I also, you know, another way that you are able to tell these stories and get around some of those silences or get through some of the silences is that you also relied a lot on material culture, I know, on objects and visual culture. Talk to me a little bit about how how you use those things and how they translate then to text.
Chris Hodson 44:47
Yeah, that was a really fun part of the project for me. And most of what I did involved visual culture. I did some you know material culture stuff, especially in the 17th century. But I got really interested in visual culture, and specifically, kind of thinking through the ways in which Atlantic commerce, Atlantic commodities manifested themselves in, for example, France in the age of Louis the 14th. And one of my favorite visuals from the book is a series of engravings that commemorated this really weird event that took place in 1662 in Paris called the Head and Ring Race, which is a weird, goofy name for something. I understand that, but in any case, it was this sort of quasi-medieval knightly competition that was held in honor of Louis the 14th's beginning to rule personally, so he became the monarch. He said he was going to rule without a kind of primary minister, and so on. And he, so he becomes kind of the core of the government. And what the head and ring race involved was this bizarre competition where there are five teams that Louis the 14th and his ministers establish, each of them with a high, high, high French nobleman at their head, and then they they made like literal teams by assigning them a historical epoch. So Louis the 14th, obviously, he's in charge with his own team, and and they're the Romans, and so they wear these just deranged, like gaudy diamond encrusted Roman costumes and so on, and there's a team for the Indians from India, Persians, and there's a final team that's headed by this guy named the Duc de Guise, and they are the Americans. So the Duc de Guise marches into this purpose built arena to hold this head and ring race, dressed as the king of America, so there's this incredible engraving of what he looked like, and and obviously there's going to be some exaggeration in the engravings. I don't want to pitch that this is sort of true to life or whatever. It's not a photograph, but he's wearing this kind of like heron feather headdress that in the image is like about four feet above his head. He's got these kind of skull-shaped shoulders on his uniform, and they're vomiting out his sleeves. And he's being-he's marching into the arena. There's a Bengal tiger for reasons unknown right next to him. So it's great. There are, and this is more serious. There are men who are dressed as enslaved people of African descent who are also chained to monkeys and bears as they are marching into the arena, and all of these is all of this is depicted in this incredibly rich set of engravings. And what I loved about I love the head and ring race for many many reasons. It's such a Louis the 14th thing. He's projecting on the one hand his ability to domesticate the scary French nobility that had rebelled against him as a kid; those are the guys in the race, and he's making them do this. And he is also projecting himself as one-upping the Romans themselves. So he's saying, kind of like, well, yeah, I understand that the Romans gave civilization, etc. to the peoples of Europe, including the Gauls, who are now French people. But I'm going to do one better. I'm going to be the king of West Africa, of America, of this kind of broadening Atlantic world. So it's this incredible depiction of all of his ambitions, kind of rolled up into this one kind of weird spectacle passage, and what I loved about the images, and there are many, many of these associated with this event, is that they were so not static.
Chris Hodson 48:32
They were in; you could feel the motion of the images because they were depicting this process that involved movement and engagement and social relationships and tension and all this other kind of very absolutist politics being worked out on this stage, and so I kind of fell in love with sort of writing about kind of pictures in motion and the way that they revealed a set of relationships that I found totally fascinating, and that were sort of inaccessible in a funny way via just sort of textual descriptions. So those images, to me, engaging with those that particular set of images, that was a real kind of like moment of realization for me about what visual culture could do and how visual culture might be received by the people who are viewing it.
Brett Rushforth 49:30
Yeah, it's it's a wonderful set of descriptions, Chris. I really enjoy that. It's in chapter six. You know, for me, the I I did end up writing about some of the physical objects. One in particular that comes to mind is a feathered cape that is right now in the Musée de Quai Branly in Paris, and it's one of these objects that ideally will be repatriated at some point. It's produced by Tupi-Guarani people. We don't know exactly where it came from, but its provenance is you know messy and unknown. But what we do know is that it was a 16th century production, and it was made in Brazil. They have done enough analysis that they know what the fibers that constitute the underlying lattice structure to which the feathers were attached, and the feathers we know they came from scarlet ibis and the certain other kinds of birds, so we can get a pretty good analysis. So trying to narrate that actually is pretty difficult. But one of the things I want to do, and that we did throughout the book, was to try to show the ways that even at the merchant level, even though these were not state actors, their process of extraction of exchanging goods at a you know coastal exchange point, bringing them to France. It would intentionally strip these goods of their local context, of the context of their production, and especially of the people that are often silenced in French histories, as they are in all early modern histories, and I suppose history in general. And that is indigenous women, West African women, and they are the producers of these capes. And so it was important to try to narrate the structure of this cape rather than just describing it. Here is a cape. It has feathers. It has a lattice of these strings. It's narrating the process of making it, narrating what these women would have been doing. We know this from, you know, ethnographic literature. We know it from lots and lots of descriptions pieced together over years of how these things are made, but also then the sort of scientific analysis of where the birds came from and all of that, and then showing how that created a sort of political and metaphysical investment in this relationship with these visiting colonizers, and how when those relationships were betrayed, it was more than just a bad deal. It actually broke something that was much deeper and more important. And that when they're displayed in a very condescending, parady sort of way in a French port city by some dude, always a dude. It's not just insulting in the sense that it's you know taking something that was sacred in its original context and parading it in an unsacred way, but it's also an act of colonizing those objects and of portraying power, so that the process of this merchant colonialism was taking goods produced by indigenous and West African women, and often putting them through the lens of French women who maybe would be dyeing fibers with red dye from Brazilwood trees, or whatever. So describing those processes was as important, maybe even more important, than describing the objects themselves as sort of physical artifacts.
Chris Hodson 52:50
I have very good memories of Brett's research into, especially 16th and 17th century kind of material culture in West Africa and the Americas. I have this memory, and I'd have to scroll through my texts to see if it's accurate. But of getting a text one day while I was at work, and the text just said something like 16th century West African ivory spork, and that's all the text said. And I was like, oh, should I check on him? I mean, is this an autocorrect? What? And then the picture came through, and in fact there is a West African ivory spork that looks exactly like a KFC spork that was crafted in just the same way he's describing, and that kind of, it's one of these objects that again allows for this like much wider history of production and consumption and colonial relationships. That again, it's it's it's difficult to access by text, but by the object you can.
Kate Carpenter 53:51
There's a lot going on in this book. I mean, it's just absolutely packed. There are so many wonderful stories and details that are in it, but it it also has incredible analysis, a strong argument, and and it's a long timeline. You know, it's it's 400 years of history, and as we've we've talked about here, it's not just a synthesis. You know, there's a ton of original research in this book. Despite all that, it's it's not a short book, but it's you know it's not 1000 pages long. How did you think about organizing that, wrangling all of that?
Brett Rushforth 54:23
Yeah, the process of choosing to cut things was was really hard. You know, the "kill your darlings" sort of thing is such a trite thing to say, and there were so many darlings, just so many. I, just speaking for myself, the hardest chapter for me was chapter three in the Brazil material for the 16th century, and when I did the first draft of that chapter, it was 100 pages, I think. It was like 37,000 words or something like that, and you know it was as long as many two chapter sequences. But it had a coherence to it as well because many of the same people were involved, and they were going to, from these same places in Brazil and the Caribbean and Canada, so cutting out, I ended up having to cut out of that particular chapter something like 14,000 words. So the chapter three, as it exists now, is a still the longest chapter in the book, but it's it's also just feels so thin to me because there's all of these stories and all of these illustrations. Forgive me if I'm going to go on too long here, but this actually was one thing that shifted our book from being a sort of narrative history in the sort of standard sense. But you know, we were first offered a contract for this book by Basic Books' legendary editor Laura Heimert. We were so honored. She's a brilliant editor. She's a wonderful, thoughtful, and incredibly skilled editor. And she wanted us to write a book that was the kind of first book we had imagined, which was sort of a synthesis. It was narratively driven. It was argument driven, and it would focus on throughlines that could be pulled from A to B to C to D, and that's a completely fair thing to want for a Basic book. And in fact, it's what we had committed to writing. And then when we got into it, we realized we can't tell that story if what we want to do is highlight non-elite, non-white French people who weren't elite white French and mostly men, and we couldn't also tell a new story about, say, West Africa or Brazil without the inclusion of a bunch of these sort of short, self-contained stories that would then add up in sort of like a pointillist sort of way, where you step back and you see all these little points. You're like, wow, that's very different than we thought. That doesn't, it doesn't lend itself to the kind of dramatic narrative that you might want. And so in the end, it worked out that we parted ways with Basic. This is not in any way a critique of either the editor or the press because they had asked us to produce a certain thing, and we decided we couldn't produce that certain thing. And thank goodness that we had our agent Lisa Adams at the Garamond Agency, and that Susan Ferber at Oxford saw that this could be a useful book and a valuable contribution, even though it wouldn't have that sort of very clean, very artificially taught narrative. So it ended up being shifted where Oxford bought out the contract from Basic, and I tell that story only to illustrate the fact that it wasn't a shift from a book that was meant to be accessible to a book that was meant to be academic. It was from a book that was meant to be shorter and more narratively driven, to a book that was actually going to require this kind of density of storytelling, in order just to persuade people that we're not making things up. The fact that there are many, many, many, many French people in 16th century West Africa or 16th century Brazil, and that this is a really important part of this story of globalization that's told and told and told in every textbook. But when we want you to tell a different story now, we can't just say that in a narratively interesting way and expect people to say, "Oh, we've been wrong all along. We're persuaded." And so the kind of intervention that we ended up wanting to make wasn't possible.
Brett Rushforth 58:23
So I think that's a telling reality because it's, it tells us a little bit about what we learned as we did the research, and also how a book can evolve, not from one that we mean to be readable by anybody to read a book we want to be readable only by academics. We stayed committed, absolutely, I want my dad, who is 89 years old this year, but a reader and an engineer, so like doesn't know anything about the topic. I want him to be able to read this book and understand every bit of it. But at the same time, I thought it was really important, from my perspective, that we, and Chris, I know, agrees with this. You know, we tell the story that's going to be more persuasive and more transformative than the one we initially thought we were going to tell.
Chris Hodson 59:03
Yeah, I would just add that one of the sort of interesting organizational challenges that we wound up having to confront in the book is that there are really critical elements to the narrative and the argument, such as the one Brett just described, where he's done all this remarkable work to kind of demonstrate the a sort of massive French presence in West Africa and the Americas in the 16th century. That's been undervalued by scholarship forever and ever. There's that work where there really is no historiography. Like there's there's no historiography to kind of go on. And then, on the other hand, we had to sort of contain that in an argument that also encompassed, for example, the Crusades and the French Revolution. And it turns out there's been a lot written about the Crusades and the French Revolution, and so kind of navigating that that those set of that set of. Sort of building an argument that encompasses histories that haven't been told at all, and also encompasses things that people are really quite familiar with, like the the construction of the absolutist state, for example. We sort of told that story many times before. So thinking through, like, how do we navigate that set of historiographical kind of peaks and valleys was daunting, and I think in the end, kind of interesting as a as a part of the project.
Kate Carpenter 1:00:29
Perhaps related to to how much you are doing here, you you have also been writing a Substack, which Brett you alluded to earlier, which I've really been enjoying, and I I imagine that part of that was just trying to find a home for some of the stories that you could not include in the book, but I will link to it in the show notes because I think that listeners will really enjoy reading it also. But I wondered what what prompted you to want to share those stories in that format.
Brett Rushforth 1:00:53
I think the initial was sort of it was it was a lifeline for our darlings that we were drowning and we just we regretted immediately throwing them overboard, but no. The other piece of it for me, and Chris will have his own take on it. But the other piece for me was that this book exists on lots of levels. We've tried to make it accessible for my dad, who's a a reader, but not a historian, not even a really avid consumer of history, although he reads a fair amount of everything, and we wanted the super specialist to be able to pick this up and say, "Oh, everything I thought is different." And narrating that level, it's really, really difficult to sort of maintain accessibility, maintain argumentative innovation without getting bogged down, and that just meant there was a lot that was set aside. So one of the things we can do in the Substack is to take, say, an object or an event like the creation of the slave code, the Code Noir, which remarkably was just finally repudiated by the French government a couple of weeks ago, and talk about how this process can help us see bigger things and explain in some ways that there is an interpretive investment here, without having to say there is an interpretive investment here, and so that's part of it. Then also, I think that it's we think about students who I think are are going to be able to learn quite a lot about the process of writing, about some of the frustrations. You know, maybe even a graduate student who's finding writing hard, and then you know, if we've worked so hard to get this thing to be fluid, and then they read it and they're like, oh well, this is this this is hard. They need to understand that it's hard for us too. They need to understand that there are lots of failed drafts. They need to understand that what happens in those those discouraging moments when you have to kind of pick yourself up against those the I don't know. Those are some of the things I was thinking about.
Chris Hodson 1:02:54
Yeah, I I agree with all of that. I think too it's it's useful for people to kind of look a little bit under the hood and see how the process actually works. I mean, you know, for example, in doing the chapter I did on the 17th century, I got really into 17th century French cosmetics, which is, you know, it lines up with my personality, I suppose, on some level. But what I wound up doing, like I was just kind of thinking through ways, like how do I kind of map out the way that the Atlantic world registers in 17th century France, and just wound up reading a chemistry book that included a section on cosmetics, and it turns out that this was authored by authored by a really remarkable female chemist, a woman named Marie Murdrac, and it turns out that all of the cosmetics had colonial commodities in them, and so this really, actually, really critical element of the spectacle associated with absolutism and court culture, and so on, it was also this artifact of colonial modes of labor, of enslavement, of exploitation, and so on, and all of that, of course, gets washed out. The the people who use these cosmetics are thinking in those terms, but I think it's useful for people, especially students, to say like, okay, you know, you've got a problem you want to address. There are probably some straightforward ways into that problem. There's some benefit to taking like a sort of off kilter approach in some respects, and that's one of the things Substack allows us to kind of expose to people.
Kate Carpenter 1:04:28
We've covered a lot of ground, and I don't want to keep you too long, but I would like to know what is the most influential writing advice that you have each received.
Brett Rushforth 1:04:36
For me, the one that sticks out the most was one that I got from an editor on the Western Historical Quarterly at Utah State, where we both did master's degrees, but did not meet. And I was an editorial assistant on the journal, and I received two things from a woman named Ona Sapporin on on a day that was kind of a hard day for me. I was I was leaving to drive to my grandma's funeral, and Ona gave me a warm, fresh-made loaf of challah bread, and then she also gave me back a draft I'd been working on-not my writing, but for the journal-and she had circled every verb, and she said, "This is something I do with my own writing. It's something I do when I edit. Is I circle every verb, and I don't circle verbs with the intent of doing anything in particular. Just it's a step of identifying what the verbs are." So I started doing that with my early drafts. Is just I wouldn't try to think about it while I was writing, but when a draft was there, I would go and physically print it out, physically circle with blue ink every verb, and sometimes it was really revealing to see that I'd use the same verb many times. That I tended to use weak verbs, passive verbs, or that I tended to sort of revert to verbs that would favor a certain perspective, whatever it was. And so that, to me, was I think the best piece of advice. It just really got me thinking about how I could do a very small thing that anybody can do, and I would learn something immediately from doing it.
Chris Hodson 1:06:12
I did my PhD at Northwestern, and my advisor was the historian T. H. Breen, Tim Breen. One of the first, actually, the first quarter I was in graduate school. I took a methods seminar from Tim, and it was rough. Basically, he made us read primary documents from the foundation of Massachusetts Bay Colony, so just stuff from 1630 to 1642, and then each week we had to write a paper, no more hard limit of 500 words, and it was that each sentence mattered. It was all. It was all like the pressure was on, and I have this horrifying memory of he he dropped on us the Dorchester town records, and one week we were supposed to read them, and the assignment was to determine the system of land distribution in Dorchester between 1630 and 1642, and my memory is is as Tim was sort of walking out of seminar, and he said, "Oh, by the way, it's obviously the 500 word limit. You may not use adverbs or adjectives. We'll see you next week." And that was a bad. It was a bad week. That was a bad week. But the same thing to Brett's point about about Ona circling the verbs, that has stuck with me. I self traumatize every time I use an ly adverb. It feels transgressive and bad because of that experience, but it helped me think about kind of writing in a tight and spare fashion, which is always what I'm I'm aiming for.
Kate Carpenter 1:07:42
Those are both great. What's next for you both? Are you embarking on another project together? Do you have anything that you are are looking toward next?
Chris Hodson 1:07:50
We are not, as far as I know, writing another book together at this point.
Brett Rushforth 1:07:54
I think you'd know.
Chris Hodson 1:07:55
Yeah, I think I think I would know. Yeah, given our track record, we'd probably be be dead by the time we got anywhere near completing. So I'm working on a couple of projects. They're actually, you know, were born out of the process of doing the research for Beyond the Ocean, and that deal more specifically with the Haitian Revolution. During our archival research, once at the British Library and once at the Newberry Library, I was lucky enough to encounter two different, very long-form eyewitness accounts of the Haitian Revolution that are really unusual and really remarkable. And I'm publishing along with my-it's another co-authored project with my friend and colleague Manuel Kovo. He and I are publishing a translation and annotation of one of those for the Omohundro Institute. Should be next year, and then I'm working on a the early stages of working on a book about the other, which is the narrative of the Haitian Revolution written by a military surgeon. And so I'm just beginning. That's what I'm doing here in Providence, and I'm starting the archival research process on that project.
Brett Rushforth 1:08:58
And for me, I've kind of shifted a bit. I I also have things that are waiting for me if I get back to the the writing business. But right now I've shifted into publishing, and so I took a job a couple of years ago at the Huntington, where I had been a long term fellow, research fellow, as I was finishing my part of this book. And there is a journal, an early modern studies journal, the Huntington Library Quarterly, and an opening came to edit that journal and be part of the research division here. So I get to engage with the fellows, and I get to engage with other people's work. I get to be a support for other people's work. I find that really rewarding. It's a good stage for me to do that, and so I hope to be doing that for quite a long time, I really enjoy the breadth that I get to engage a bunch of topics I don't know especially well. I get to enjoy the sort of process of helping authors make their work the best thing they want to make it. So not making it what I want it to be, but trying to help them achieve what they really want out. And that is something that's really liberating quality to that for me. So that's what I'm invested in right now.
Kate Carpenter 1:10:06
Fantastic. Dr. Chris Hodson, Dr. Brett Rushforth. Thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past and be willing to talk about your writing process.
Brett Rushforth 1:10:13
Thank you so much for having us.
Chris Hodson 1:10:14
Thank you.
Kate Carpenter 1:10:15
Thanks again to Dr. Chris Hodson and Dr. Brett Rushforth for joining me for this episode. You can find their new book, Beyond the Ocean, in the show notes, along with links for everything else we mentioned in this episode. Thanks for being here and for listening. There are big, exciting announcements about Drafting the Past coming very soon, so stay tuned. And in the meantime, remember: friends don't let friends write boring history.
