In this episode, Kate Carpenter is joined by a scholar who can never pass up a good archive, Dr. Gautham Rao.
Gautham is a historian of American law and politics and is an associate professor of history at American University in Washington. He’s the author of two books: National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State, and his new book, White Power: Policing American Slavery. White Power is a history of the laws that enslavers used to police enslaved people from 1619 until the Civil War, and how the violent legacies of those laws and practices have reverberated throughout American history and life. In addition to his books and journal articles, Gautham has also written op-eds, contributions to Supreme Court cases, and a Substack newsletter called “The State of the State.” I was especially interested to hear how Gautham grappled with organizing and using the evidence he collected from many locations over more than two decades. You’ll also learn how he writes and rewrites to make himself clear, and how an offhanded remark from a well-known colleague set him on a new publishing path.
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Mentioned in this episode:
- White Power: Policing American Slavery
- National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State
- Gautham’s Substack
- reMarkable tablet
- Ibram X. Kendi
- Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America’s First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction
- Jessica Pishko, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy
- Omohundro Institute book series in early American history
- Samantha Seeley, Race, Removal and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States
- Sarah Gronningsater, The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom
- Emily Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations
- Rebecca Brenner Graham, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins’s Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (check out my interview with Rebecca in Episode 60: Rebecca Brenner Graham Gives Us the Publicity Behind-the-Scenes)
- Dani Segelbaum, Gautham’s agent
- Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America and Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America
- Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics
- Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception
- Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, which includes his essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History
- Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas
- Michael Willrich, American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Welcome back to Drafting the Past. I'm Kate Carpenter. In this episode, I'm joined by a scholar who can never pass up a good archive, Dr. Gautham Rao.
Gautham Rao 0:10
Thank you for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:11
Gautham is a historian of American law and politics, and is an associate professor of history at American University in Washington, DC. He's the author of two books. The first was National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State, and his new book is White Power: Policing American Slavery. White Power is a history of the laws that enslavers used to police enslaved people from 1619 until the Civil War, and how the violent legacies of those laws and practices have reverberated throughout American history and life. In addition to his books and journal articles, Gautham has written op-eds, contributions to Supreme Court cases, and a Substack newsletter called The State of the State. I was especially interested to hear how Gautham grappled with organizing and using the evidence he collected from many locations over more than two decades, and you will perhaps not be surprised to hear him confess that he tends to pick research projects that seem, as his colleagues sometimes say, quote, not doable. He is nonetheless determined to do them, and you'll hear about how he writes and rewrites to make himself clear, and how an offhanded remark from a well-known colleague set him on a new publishing path. Here is my conversation with Dr. Gautham Rao.
Gautham Rao 1:30
So, I have to admit up front that, as a fanboy of this podcast, I'm going to say what many people have said, which is that I didn't really think of myself as a writer, until fairly recently, and I think that's partly the effect of being an academic historian, to some extent. The craft of the research is elevated over the craft of writing. It was only really in the last couple of years where I consciously wanted to write for a broader public that I started to think about myself as a writer. Even now, I think there's a great deal of imposter syndrome for me, walking around a bookstore, looking at incredible people I admire and their books, thinking, wow, these are great writers, but not thinking of myself in the same terms. So, you know, prelude aside, there, I think the the answer to your question is that I have always deeply admired good historical writing, and always aspired to want to be able to do it. I think it's, it's, it was very tough for me early on to do so, because I was coming out of a graduate program at the University of Chicago, where the writing was emphasized, and it was, it was important to have good historical writing, but really it was about the ideas, and it was about the big picture, and the sweeping arguments, and so it really wasn't until I was working on my first book, and I had an editor, Robert Devins at the University of Chicago Press, who pushed me a bit, Stephen Minh, as well was another one to say, you know, what, do you want to rethink the prose here? It's a bit workmanlike, you know, give it some of your authorial voice. So that's where I started thinking about it, and it really was working on this, this book, and over a long period of time, where I ended up starting to think of myself more as a writer, self-consciously. The other part that plays a key role here is that I started taking on more public-facing kind of projects, and whether that was, you know, amicus briefs for Supreme Court cases, or blog, or Substack things, or other other venues where certainly the majority of people reading it would not be historians and would not know the conventions of how academic historians write, and so that really pulled me pretty quickly into rethinking my general approach to language and how I wanted to present myself on the page, so I guess here we are, you know, based on on that trajectory, but it's been, it's been a pretty dramatic shift, I'd say, over time.
Kate Carpenter 4:10
Let's talk about how you like to do your writing. When and where do you write?
Gautham Rao 4:14
I am a creature of habit in many, many ways, I'm very structured about things, and I like to have color-coded calendars for pretty much everything, and reminders, blah blah blah. It's all quite, quite dull, but when it comes to writing, that is what I call structured chaos, because I really can't account for what my day is going to look like very often, even days when I'm not teaching, I couldn't tell you which days are going to be available, really, for me to be able to sit down for a sustained amount of time to write, and I think unfortunately for me, I've never developed the ability to write in little little bits here and there. Never developed the ability to be part of a 500 word club and say I'm going to do a consistent amount every day. That's partly a byproduct of my own family situation with kids and partly a byproduct of my many administrative and other duties editing a journal. It's just kind of unpredictable, so I like to have good stretches of time, good chunks of time, at least a couple hours. It takes me an hour to just get into it. It takes me about an hour to get out of it. When I've written what I want to write, my head is in that space, and I'll be kind of a zombie for anyone who tries to talk to me for a little while. So I really like to kind of get a chunk of time, which is probably why it took me 20 years to get this book done, so I need to find a way to reform myself, but in terms of where, there I'm a little more flexible, so my dissertation was written almost entirely on Amtrak, going between Washington, DC, and New York City. I was a fellow, a Samuel Goldie Fellow at NYU Law School, and I was having to go up at least twice a week between DC and New York, and I could only afford the super cheap Amtrak tickets, which are like early in the morning, late at night, but it meant that the train was always quiet, and the internet was terrible back then. This is about 2007 so you couldn't screw around and you know, look at fun stuff on the internet. I was left with only one thing to do, and it ended up being - I'm not exaggerating when I say it was written majority on that Amtrak, so I called it the informal, the unpaid Amtrak fellowship. But otherwise I've, I love my office at work. I've spent some time there, it's quite lovely. American University campus is beautiful, and you know, I'm blessed with a with a lovely corner office that gets lots of sun and great views. We had to do some renovations in our house a couple years back, and I finally got my own space of an office in the basement, where I work, oftentimes interrupted by two cats, but it is otherwise quiet, and I do enjoy that a great deal. My vision has never been superb, and so I tend to need a pretty big screen if I'm going to be doing serious writing and editing, that's a more recent development.
Kate Carpenter 7:24
Now, an unintended side effect of this podcast is that I have come to have great envy of people who have an Amtrak commute on the East Coast. What tools and systems do you use to organize your research and writing?
Gautham Rao 7:36
So, again, compared to many of your guests, I'm going to sound like a dinosaur here. I go from small little notes to myself that are pretty disorganized, oftentimes on index cards that are always nearby. I started using a Remarkable tablet a couple years ago, and that's been incredible for organizing. I couldn't tell you how many index cards I've lost over the years with the ideas thereon, but the Remarkable is a great tool for being able to ensure that stuff is not getting lost. So I've started using that more, more significantly in the last couple years to keep notes. So I go from there. The next step is a research log, which is kind of updated daily, even if I do nothing, I'm very dedicated to writing, "I did nothing today," but just to know where I am in the process for what I'm thinking about, and to be able to remember, frankly, what I've done, what I haven't done, what I've meant to do. And then we really get into the archaic approach, so I use Microsoft Word documents to collect notes. I just write notes on them, so that could be cut and paste from PDFs, that can be transcriptions from archival sources, and I'll have a bunch of these, based on, roughly speaking, I'll save them in a kind of like folder that I'll say chapter one, maybe chapter two, maybe, who knows, but I just want everything in one place that might be connected to to the idea I'm thinking about. And then the next thing I do is I cut and paste all the text into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, and here the thing that I've come up with is that for everything I put in there I have two columns, one is called Code One and Code Two, and I use a keyword in those codes, so that later on I can just sort based on the code, and I'll have roughly speaking stuff I need for if the code is introduction or chapter five, then the stuff will kind of just appear when I sort it, so that's that's my approach. I've tried to reform myself over the years using different kinds of things like Zotero, and there was a brief moment where I was using this sort of all in one note taking word processing and I just could, could never wrest myself away from what I knew. So my students make fun of me relentlessly when, when I tell them this and say, "Professor, you're wasting so much time, which is probably true, but again I mentioned a creature of habit, so it's tough for me to get away from that method. Then, when it comes to research, to writing, again I use Word documents and go at it in a, in a pretty orthodox manner. I think of just trying to get quotes on a page, structuring the quotes based on how I think it might work as an argument, and then writing out around those quotes.
Kate Carpenter 10:45
I want to go back and get in the weeds on something completely selfishly, because I have a Remarkable tablet, but I have not figured out how to, like, make it work in my process. How, how do you use it?
Gautham Rao 10:56
So, you know, again, this is, this is my weird. the way my brain works is that I tend to be hyper focused on things, but then occasionally I'll just come up with, you know, a thought that I'm like, oh my goodness, I really should follow up on that, that could be central to, you know, this chapter, this part, and so I found Remarkable is great for that kind of thing, where I'll just have it next to my desk, and, as I would a note card or notepad, or whatever, and I made it a habit that by the end of the week, usually at least once, I'll review what I call it the scrawl page on my Remarkable. You can label each page, so I just call it scrawl, and I'll just go through it, and then if there are ideas that I think, oh, that was a good one, you know, I should have, that was a shockingly good idea. So then I'll take that one and try to, you know, work on it in the other formats that I mentioned. It's great for also like library research. I've found, you know, going, when you're in an archive or library, it's easy to take a lot of photos in an archive, right? It's much easier to remember why you took those photos, you know. Oftentimes in the past I just have 150 photos, and why in the world did I take that one, what's going on there? So I've found that the, I can use the Remarkable for those archives that'll let you bring it in, which isn't all of them, but those that will, that can be a really helpful thing, you know. Say photo 7050 on my phone, that was for this idea. That's another use that I find useful, interesting at least. And then you can upload PDFs as well onto it and mark those up, so that's been very helpful, because then my marked up PDFs show up on the desktop app as well, so that's that's kind of how I use it, beyond, you know, department meetings or for my journal, those meetings, that's all my notes go to that.
Kate Carpenter 12:53
It sounds like you're kind of writing all the way along when you're doing your research. Is that true, or is there a point where you're like, okay, now I'm writing the project?
Gautham Rao 13:01
I do write in weird spurts, I think, when it comes to personalities, in particular. If I find a compelling personality or place… right now I'm working on this project about the Confederacy, and I'm really interested in the earliest days that they were seizing federal forts and arsenals and armories, and so I'm trying to set scenes and writing, writing places, if you will. If I find it compelling, I'll write it. If I don't find it compelling, I'll wait, and then try to piece it together later. But I am always sort of thinking much more so now than I was ever in the past. I am thinking about prose connected to certain things that I'm researching, so, but when it comes to writing chapters, just for to be clear on this, when it comes to writing chapters or parts of essays or things that I'm doing more often than not in those big chunks of time that I love to have and rarely get to have.
Kate Carpenter 14:01
What does revision look like for you?
Gautham Rao 14:03
Oh, ugly, ugly, ugly stuff. This is, you know, my, my wife understands my method, and so when I tell her I drafted the chapter, she, she does not give me the real kind of "yay, you did it, good job, you know, talk, she's like, okay, because she knows what's next, which is the next day I say, I hate that chapter, that's a terrible thing, I cannot believe I spent time on this, it needs to be redone entirely, and then I do this all the time, I will rewrite the entire thing. So for this book, White Power: Policing American Slavery, there's a story here about about revision, because I had initially written it kind of traditionally for an academic press to be marketed for academics, and it was about 200,000 words when I, when I wrote it, which is not the length that publishers tend to like, but I said, you know. It's got to be that long, the ideas are there, and then I rewrote it twice, and still 200,000 words, and you know it was fine, it was good. But then when I decided I wanted to try to do something different with it, then then it became so much rewriting and editing and revising, because I had to take very complicated, sometimes jargony prose and strip it all out for, to make it something that would appeal to the non experts, and so this was a real labor of love when it came to revision. I was doing nothing other than that for quite a while.
Kate Carpenter 15:37
Like on a practical level, how do you approach revision? I mean, at first, it sounds like you often rewrite, do you print out and scribble all over it?
Gautham Rao 15:45
This is my advisor when I was in graduate school, William Novak told me a line that has stuck with me ever since then, really, and which is that he said, you know, you'll know what's, you'll know you're done with a dissertation when you can pinpoint what's wrong with it, and you're going to try to fix that when you write the book version of this. That was definitely true of me at that point, but that's kind of how I think about chapters now, is that I'll write the chapter out, and by the time I do it, I'm like, oh my goodness, it's missing all these things, I didn't do this properly. So that would mean you know, in the super practical sense, what I, what I have is two documents side by side, I have the draft and I have the thing I'm trying to turn the draft into, and I just go back and forth, left to right, left is the draft, right is the version that I want to be better, and I'll go word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Obviously, the structure will change, but it's a real, it's a real chore. I would say it's not my favorite part of the process, but I will say that it is an essential of my process, because it's just the way it really helps me to see something on paper or on screen in order to be able to transform it to what I want it to be.
Kate Carpenter 17:06
So White Power, you deliberately wanted to write for sort of a broader audience, and it was published with a brand new trade imprint of UNC Press. What motivated you to want to write this book that way?
Gautham Rao 17:19
This was a book that I had been working on for a while as a concept, and I'd been collecting evidence over the years. You know, whenever I go to an archive, it's, 'Oh, I have that other thing I'm working on, let's collect this document that I've been interested in.' I would present it at conferences, and people would always ask me, 'What, have you thought about the kind of contemporary relevance of what you're working on?' and the answer would be no. I hadn't, frankly, thought about the contemporary relevance. I was very much a kind of creature of archives, and I love the sources, and I love to be doing the research, but I had not spent much time thinking about it beyond that, I still kind of, what kind of people might like to read it. It was the most transformative moment to me. It was just a moment in passing, in when I presented a chapter at my, in my department. We have these kind of works in progress lunches, and my then colleague, Ibram Kendi, read it and said, Yeah, it's really good, it's really good, you know. And then he said, "You know, have you thought about publishing this book, you know, for the general public instead of experts?" and I said nope, had not, and he said, well, you know, might be something to think about, and then, you know, we had lunch, a big bunch of us, and that was that. I don't think Ibram thought of the moment anymore, but for me it was immediately burned in my head. I was like, "Oh goodness, this could be, you know, he could be right." And so it was that point, this is about 10 years ago, where I started to think, Ah, this could be something else. I started reading a great deal more of these books that were written by academic historians but being marketed to broader public, they were trying to do pretty complicated things, many of them very successfully. Scholars like Kate Masur, who you know, just remarkable ability to translate complicated legal history topics into incredible prose. Ibram's own work, also very influential, and then you know, political scientists as well, who were doing kind of law-centric work, but doing it in public spaces, think of people like Jessica Pishko, for instance, writing about sheriffs and things of that nature, so as I was reading more, I started to think of the plausibility of this. You know, it was a turning point. I would say heading into 2020 I had already made that decision. This is a path I wanted to follow. And then the pandemic happens, and it was, it was brutal for me, because I basically stopped, I had to stop any kind of productive research or writing for about a year and a half at least, and just getting back to it was tough. Felt like a lot of time was lost, the kind of mental toll of being away from it for a while, of course, with other things thrown in in those years, you know. The decision was was one that occurred over time, I'd say, but it was that decisive really talk with Ibram that I think turned me, turned my head, and I have not looked back since.
Kate Carpenter 20:27
What did you feel like you took away from all that reading you did?
Gautham Rao 20:31
That, first of all, it's possible. That's one of the myths that historians tell themselves about just what it is we do and why it looks the way it looks, you know, that it does have to be technical, jargony, and that historiography has to be dealt with in a certain way. I'm guilty of this as much as anyone else. I think when, in terms of when I'm putting my journal editor hat on, and I have a manuscript that gets, you know, good reviews, and the, but the reviewers say it's missing this. The argument needs to be stated more clearly. The historiographical claim needs to be situated better. You know, these are the kind of central ideas that we, we think about as historians in terms of communication, words on a page, but what people like Kate Masur and others were demonstrating is that that's not it, does not need to be that way. There are other ways to do things. It's inevitable that some manner of the kind of traditional approach to writing history will be lost if you do choose a different path, but it doesn't mean that everything is, and so you have to choose, you know, make your choices and sort of be at peace with that. That was above all like the key, the key takeaway for me was that it was in fact possible, and that I was not locked into doing things one way as I thought I had been really for quite a long time. And then I'll just add to that, that it's been, it's been really heartening to know that other people have been on this journey as well. I think in the last five to 10 years that reading books that have come out published by the most rarefied air of scholarly publishing, I'm thinking of the Omohundro Institutes series in early American history, that's just remarkably good, probably the gold standard for early American history monographs, and just seeing works come out of that, that I, you know, can't put down, I always have by my side. So Samantha Seeley's book, which came out a couple years back, is just, it's just incredible writing, you know, truly stellar stuff. And then just in the past couple of years, Sarah Gronningsater's work is just beauty on a page, really. Emily Conroy-Kutz's book came out last year, outstanding prose, you know, sparkling at times prose. Just to know that other people who are, you know, kind of roughly in my stage of career and age and stuff have made this same turn, I think, is kind of quite confidence inspiring as well.
Kate Carpenter 23:08
Aiming for a broader audience also meant getting an agent. What was that process like?
Gautham Rao 23:13
So this is a part of the story, which, like so,, so much, is very much dependent on the goodwill of others. So I was joking around that with a great person at the University of North Carolina Press, who handles copy editing and production. His name is Matthew Somoroff, and I told him, Matthew, it takes most people a village. It took me a metropolis to get this book done, and he was mayor of the metropolis in many ways. This was an area where I ended up being totally in debt to my student, former student Rebecca Brenner Graham, who had, you know, completed her dissertation at the university, American University, a couple years back, and, you know, Rebecca is just an incredible scholar and mind, and decided that she was going to be an independent scholarship. At the time she was teaching in a private school, and she started writing a book about Frances Perkins, and she got an agent, and she published the book. It was wildly successful. She's working on another one, another one. I have no doubt it will be equally successful, but she's the one who got in touch initially with an agent named Dani Segelbaum. Dani now is part of Arc Literary, and when I met her, she was, she was working in a different agency, but I had tried to contact other agents, and I quickly realized that, you know, nonfiction is not exactly a market which is an agent's favorite, number one; number two, a lot of them have client lists already that are pretty deep, and people who, whatever they write, is going to be successful to some extent, and so their incentive to pick up a kind of new name who doesn't really have a track record in that space is not ideal. But Dani, more, you know, I got, so I got turned down by a bunch of people I approached. Dani and I had a series of conversations, and it was clear that I was not yet any kind of sure bet for her, but what I loved about just the conversations with her was that she was incredibly attentive to detail, she'd done all the reading, she'd looked into me, and she had thoughts, and it was, she wasn't going to sugarcoat stuff, but she wasn't going to tell me that I was terrible, and it was, I found, like, immediately a very comfortable relationship that I was like, "Oh, I need advice, I can ask Dani." And I think a lot of people end up in a less than ideal relationship with the agent, but from the start it's been incredible. I call her the Agent Extraordinaire, because she has incredible vision, and she kind of matches what I can do to what's possible, and just did so much for me, who is not learned in matters of publishing and presses and all that stuff. She is incredible. So, in a lot of ways, it was luck. I, you know, I owe Rebecca huge amounts of thanks for putting us together, but you know, Dani is a truly, truly remarkable agent and person and friend.
Kate Carpenter 26:12
I want to talk a little bit about putting this book together, White Power. It covers a pretty broad expanse of time. It also, you worked on it for a really long time. You know, in various ways, you've been working on this project for two decades. What was it like to assemble all of the evidence that went into this book?
Gautham Rao 26:31
The story of the of the evidence of the book is kind of tragedy comedy, but you know, I was working on this in graduate school, while writing a dissertation about something else, and so that was also a, I tend to choose projects that are really implausible and unwieldy, and you know, I really need to find something easier to work on at some point, but just as research projects, right, that people will tell me that does not sound doable, and they're, you know, they have a point to some extent. So that meant that in this case I was interested in the legal idea. This all started with the concept of a posse, and the idea that in early American law you could be forced to serve in a posse. It had nothing to do with slavery initially, it was just I was interested in when the federal government could demand that someone do what it says, and I was working in the kind of shadows of 9/11 at that point, and the Patriot Act, and other things, which, you know, in that time seemed like wild government overreaches of power. I think today we would, you know, not look upon those fondly, but things have moved drastically further in that direction. So, I was just interested in the idea of compulsion in the government being able to force people to do things, enforcement actions. That's where it starts, but I started noticing that a lot of the examples of this in American history that I was finding were slavery related. So, I was anytime I was going to an archive, I was seeing if there's stuff there about this, and there usually was in a lot of places, so you know, I'd go to Kentucky to give a paper and say I'll spend a couple hours doing this, went to Berkeley to give a paper, and the Bancroft, they had some nice stuff, and so I would end up with these folders of photos built up over 15, 20 years, so that's the good part. The bad part is when I finally decided to write, write this up again as a more, something friendlier to a bigger public audience, I went to check, recheck every source, and noted that let's say 60% of the photos I'd taken were irretrievably corrupted. And so this is 1000s of photos spread across multiple archives. There was a solid week where I was ready to throw in the towel on this project and find something new to do, or do a drastically scaled down version. But ultimately, you know, this is where being a member of a university history department, having tenure and having resources proved to be helpful in ways that I never envisioned. It was that, you know, we have small research budgets at my university, and I was able to use every penny of those to hire researchers, and look, I had kept logs of what I'd taken photos of, recreate as much as I could, what what I had been working with. You know, rereading evidence over that you'd done, you'd read years ago, you're going to find new things as well, so in a way it was better, but also emotionally it was not better, it was bad, it was very bad. But that's partly why I ended up being able to rethink big chunks of the project was that very unhappy accident, but it's my habit now, where I do always try to work in an archives trip when I'm doing something else, and the joke in my family is that that includes vacations where we'll find ourselves in Virginia, and we were in Richmond for a couple days, and I said, I'm just gonna go off to the Virginia Museum for a few hours, and my family has learned to tolerate that little tick of my personality, so very much a collector in that regard, and then I'll try to piece together.
Kate Carpenter 30:23
That results in a pretty massive pile of evidence, I imagine. How do you sift through that and come up with something book-shaped?
Gautham Rao 30:32
This process is the sifting through of evidence process for me is where I find the joy. This is one of my real things I love, is going through the documents, and the moment of discovery really is, it's just what I really look forward to, and so I have a pretty, you know, just well, just to go back to the collection of documents stuff, and the collection of photo stuff, so I become quite neurotic about backing up materials, and even this is true, even before I had this catastrophic loss of sources, but you know, this is a nuts and bolts thing, but I'll mention it, is that what I do now is I, when I'm in the archive itself, I'll create folders in a Google Drive page, and I am sure, while I'm in the archive, to upload everything into the folders, and then when I get home, I'll upload everything into my university OneDrive account, and then I'll upload everything into a Dropbox, so all in all, I'm probably spending like $300 a year in paying for these fees, but I don't know how else to do it to ensure that the stuff I want to be there will be there, and I've become, become even more neurotic than I was about it. But to go back to your original question about, about sifting, you know, I'll just go through document by document very slowly, and I transcribe the quotes into that Microsoft Excel document that I mentioned, and the key part is the coding, because a lot of these, without the context, you have to be very careful not to be quoting stuff totally out of context, so I have to be very careful about dates, about names, because otherwise, when you sort that spreadsheet, who knows what you come up with, but that's basically it. I'll have the spreadsheet open, and I'll have the PDF open, or the JPEG, and I'll literally transcribe word for word into that spreadsheet, and so that can be for me more time consuming than the writing process, but sometimes when you're doing it as well, you know that's the other thing, is that when you, the quotes are so good, sometimes you say, oh gosh, I should write that up, quick paragraph, I'll take a break, and I'll just try to write up a quick paragraph, and it's never what will end up in the article or book, but I find it useful if it's something that I find fun or interesting, then I'll, I'll run with it.
Kate Carpenter 32:58
You tell this history by sort of highlighting key moments in citizen policing of slavery and race in the US. How did you think about the structure of this book?
Gautham Rao 33:10
I came to the structure pretty early. I knew I wanted it to be, I wanted it to be a history of the United States and early America that would follow the same trajectory as a textbook in some ways, so chronological, that would have the same big turning points and very recognizable moments of transformation, the Civil War, the founding era, but I wanted the story to be different from what people knew. That meant so I was kind of locked into a traditional chronological narrative that would follow the basic structure of what you might see in a, in an AP history course or US History 101 survey class, but recognizable and key signposts, key turning points, beginning in the recognizable place, ending in one as well, and then changing what people are going to find, that's not going to be the traditional kind of wiggish narrative of, let's say, the founding era, instead it's all going to be about enslaver power leading to the future of slave clause. Or, you know, the Civil War is not going to be chiefly about battlefields, but rather about the panic of a vacuum of enslaver power in the Confederacy. So, yeah, I was sort of being a little playful there, or trying to be, with the familiarity of basic things, but then shifting around the narratives.
Kate Carpenter 34:40
You're a legal historian, and I was very impressed that you were able to-- it is, in many ways, a history of law and how law changes in the country, but you really focus on individual accounts, you narrate events, so that as a reader, you can connect to the narrative. It's not just sort of a dry legal account. How did you weave those parts together?
Gautham Rao 35:02
In part, I really benefited from a bigger shift in the field of legal history, and here, you know, had this big advantage of being the Law and History Review editor, now in my ninth and final year of doing so, but there, I've been privy to seeing a big shift that's been underway for a while, but really kind of upfront, you know, front row seats here, which is that legal history used to be the domain of kind of stodgy old dudes writing about judges, and you know, partly reverential, but but also kind of about the courts being the center of the action, and that has changed over time. You know, we're just a couple examples here. Scholars like Margot Canaday and Mai Ngai, I mentioned Kate Masur before, and Sarah Gronningsater. These are all examples of scholars who are legal historians, and they're doing like cutting-edge legal history work, but you know they're stories about people chiefly, and they're stories about power and place and structure as well, but less so about technical legal doctrine, or when those things happen through technical legal doctrine again, it's translated through lives and events, so having seen this, and we talked a little bit about having done a ton of reading period while I was working on this, I knew it was really important to be able to tell the story that may be about writs, ultimately legal writs, you know, but the story will will work much better as a story if I can tell it through the people, through the lives of the people who found themselves subject to those writs or whatnot. That's one thing to say that, it's another thing to be able to do it, and I think this, if there was a real challenge here as a writing enterprise for me, it was translating the legal stories into the kind of mini biographies or episodes that I'm trying to tell without losing the kind of legal significance over time. You know, this isn't a social history, I'm not a social historian, and I think there are ways of telling stories of lives and events and places without being one thing or the other, but for me it was, this was the toughest part. Now there's a kind of corollary to that, which is that when you're dealing with enslaved people who are the targets of laws and trying to tell those stories, well, you know you're dealing with a two-fold problem there, which is number one, enslaved victims of these at times horrific laws are not going to leave behind lengthy paper trails, and number two, the paper trails that we do have tend to be written by the people who benefited most from those horrific laws, which were the white enslavers, and so having to read against the grain a bit of those lawmakers and their laws and the way they're put into practice was another very significant challenge to be able to tell the stories without falling prey to regurgitating kind of the official line.
Kate Carpenter 38:19
Were there any stories you wanted to tell, but the archive just didn't, didn't make it possible?
Gautham Rao 38:23
Yes, several, many I should say, especially in the early period, where you know the way these slave patrol records work, for instance, is that they're they're really rudimentary, you know, they may say something like, you know, so and so patroller didn't show up. And so I would start digging around for that patroller to try to find out why they didn't show up. Are there any other court records, any sort of property disputes? Maybe I can get a some sort of, you know, death, upon death, they could find an inventory of property or something like, anything that I could tell this person's story, and I probably looked for 40 or 50 of these folks and found zero that was going to be helpful. As one example, there's, you know, in the, in a couple of the chapters I talk about enslaved people or kidnapped people who end up being sold into slavery or sold back into slavery, and you know, I would love to track down the stories there, but it turned out to be not possible, based on at least what I was trying to do. There are parts of the, you know, relying on the WPA slave narratives where you really just wish you could go back to the interview and ask, can you expand on this question, but I know, you know, the list of questions is oftentimes predetermined, and the interviewers were looking for certain kinds of information, so that was another area where I really dug around trying to find more on more information on a couple people. People who had been interviewed, and I was hitting brick walls so I had to really kind of limit, limit my use of those. So, just a couple examples. I mean, there's many more. Ultimately, you know, Reconstruction - I had never studied Reconstruction in earnest, and I understand why it's so hard now, in terms of layers of authority and the sheer number of things going on in any given place at any given time, but I would have loved to dig into certain areas where Klan activity was much more heavy, heavier than one might expect to find out the story of local governance there. Turned out to be very tough.
Kate Carpenter 40:34
I'm also really interested in, I know that you are a pretty voracious reader of theory and secondary sources, you don't get out of University of Chicago without enjoying theory, but that doesn't, you don't feel that when you're reading this book. It doesn't feel weighed down by all of that information. How do you think about making sure that your historiography and theory are shaping the story you're telling without intruding on it?
Gautham Rao 41:01
That was probably the biggest challenge for me in terms of the conceptual aspect here, because I do tend to think of things in theoretical ways, and this project was no different. I think going back to grad school, when I was, was heavily, well as an undergraduate, I was really, I did very little else than theory, and I'd done a bunch of study on the Frankfurt School, in particular, but was interested also in post-structural theory, and things of that nature. So it's just the way I tend to, tended to think about things. So, in this project, well, my first book, I should say, you know, that was heavily influenced by thinking about classical political economists, so you know, Marx, Smith, Ricardo, people like this, and I was, I was trying to think of the United States founding, our government as, as a creature of the moment, really of political economy, but you know, I'm not, I didn't want to write an intellectual history, so I was really trying to think through the way Marx was talking about the formation of nation states and the role of capital, for instance, but I didn't want that to be the central part of the story. It had to be about people, it had to be about power and institutions, so I kind of got used to it there, where I was not censoring myself, but I was trying to think about the ideas, as opposed to what you know, as opposed to the Marx quote from economic philosophic manuscripts, or whatever, and so that was that was a good gateway, I think, into how to do this. When it came to this book, the White Power book, in a way, it was much easier, because I had already decided, you know, I was going to focus on the stories of the people and the places, and so I could really foreground some of the more theoretical stuff and have it inform again the way I was thinking about things, but not be, not be ever present. So, in this book, I mentioned, you know, in the beginning of the book, the concept of a permanent emergency that enslavers found themselves obsessed with, and that, you know, it's a takeaway from the social theorist Giorgio Agamben, and you know, thinking about the way Walter Benjamin talks about things as well in Theses and Philosophy of History, so I was definitely thinking in those terms. I would say Pierre Bourdieu is a huge influence as well, in the way I was thinking of this book, but I had to make sure that I wasn't, you know, I don't think a general reader cares much about what Bourdieu would say about the mindset of an enslaver who is sort of caught in a moment of slave rebellion, but they do care about slave rebellion, right? And so, can I get the Bourdieuian concept without having to sort of overload the text with it? I think that was the key, key kind of way to do it, and I tried to do that throughout the book. One of the strange tropes that I noted is that the enslavers that I am looking at here, and especially the ones who end up in positions of power, lawmakers, and that kind of stuff, the way they talk about dangers, public dangers, when it comes to maroons or runaway slaves or fugitives, it's just shockingly reminiscent of the way that the Nazi social theorist and theorist of law Carl Schmitt writes about enemyship and thinking of the law as between friend and enemy, and you know that was, I ended up reading way too much Carl Schmitt for my liking along the way to writing this book, but I was at no point wanted to confuse the text with reference to the way he is thinking about so-called enemies. So that's the theoretical part. The historiographical part, if I have any regrets about this book, it is that I really couldn't pay homage to the scholars whose work that has been so transformative for me, just in terms of the way this book was going to end up looking. And you know, again, what a, thinking about what a AP history student might take away from it.
Gautham Rao 45:13
It's not going to be the fact that incredible scholars have led me to this point. So I had to make this this compromise, which still doesn't sit well with me, which is to say I would thank as many of them as I could as profusely as I could in the acknowledgements, but in the prose and the in the notes to the text I was going to try to keep things as simple and connected to primary sources as I could. Again, it's not, not my, my preferred path here, because my grad students will tell you that I am a footnote obsessive, and I always am asking them, well, did you read the footnotes? So that was tough for me, that was really tough, but you know, I think about most of all scholars like Sally Hadden, whose book Slave Patrols, which I first read in 2004 and which I've been, you know, wrestling with since then, and whose footnotes in that book were so important for me to find primary sources, and Sally has also been incredibly generous over the years to help me with the project, but that's one example. There, there, there are certainly others. So, that was that was a much tougher thing to deal with than the theory element.
Kate Carpenter 46:28
Where in the process of writing and revising do you start seeking feedback from other people?
Gautham Rao 46:33
I'll mention the University of Chicago again here, because one of the things that happens there, or at least happened when I was there, was that you get feedback pretty bluntly and pretty quickly about projects, and I learned there to take the approach to feedback less as a sort of thing to be defended against and more of a thing to really benefit from. And so I tend to be when I give a conference paper or something, and I'm testing out an idea, I genuinely am desperate for people to tell me if they think it's a good idea or not. I really want to know what works and what doesn't work, and so that's the same way with writing, you know? If people find that it's not hitting, then I definitely want to know that. So I tend to do workshops and conferences, and as much as I can get, because I think you know it's a real, it's a, honestly, it's a privilege to be edited and to be, to be read, and so I'm part of these networks, and I am like, you know what, I have this opportunity, I may as well take advantage of it to try to put my stuff out there. So you know there are times where it has not gone really how I would have wanted it, you know. I remember doing a second writer, second book writer's workshop at the Society for the Historians of the Early American Republic, great conference, incredible people, and this is a tool for people who had done a first book to try to get their way to a second, and I had workshopped this idea about this history of Thomas Jefferson's federal government, thinking about that. Pretty much no one thought it was a good idea, and they thought the proposal I was shopping was not very, not all that great, and they were right. They were totally right. But it was, it was, you know, hearing from other people can be, can be very helpful. In terms of this book, God knows, I mean, the acknowledgements, I tried to get all the number of workshops and symposia that I had presented chapters in over the years, which were so pivotal in helping me figure out what was working, what wasn't, what was missing. So I'm a sort of, if I can get feedback, I love it. At an early stage, at a late stage, it's, I think, again, a privilege.
Kate Carpenter 48:53
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Gautham Rao 48:56
So, the most influential writing advice I've ever gotten. This is going to sound quirky, but-- I can't remember who told me this, but it was a long time ago. It was to always end on something easy, so when you're done writing for the day, don't end on the hard part that you haven't figured out, end on an easy part, so it's easier to pick up the next day. And so I've sort of made that my approach, and I'll only end on something that I'll say, oh, only the conclusion's left. That's my kind of main advice, I'd say. And then I'll just mention one other thing, which is that if everyone tells you it's not working, it's not working, and I think you know, as authors, we tend to have our chestnuts, and we tend to think this is actually gold, but if everyone tells you it's not, chances are you're talking to smart people and they know their stuff, and so should probably listen.
Kate Carpenter 49:51
Tell me about a book that you've read recently that you've been recommending.
Gautham Rao 49:55
Gosh, so I'm right now blessed with being the chairperson of the Littleton-Griswold Prize for the AHA, and so when I tell you I'm doing a lot of reading, I am, I am not exaggerating at all. But let's go with Michael Willrich's book, American Anarchy. So this is a book that Basic put out in 2024 I believe, so it is, you know, written by a legal historian, Michael Willrich at Brandeis, and it's a beautiful book in terms of the way it is written as a sort of series of interlapping, overlapping biographies, but also just hitting on things that you will know, again, you know, Haymarket and other kind of pivotal moments in the Progressive Era, early 20th century, but it's telling the story of radicalism, American radicalism, through, through kind of lives. And I think, you know, in a weird way, the radicalism seems a lot less radical when it's connected to biography and to a kind of intimacy that he builds into the prose, and I think that's the beauty of it and why I find it, find it so compelling, but it's yet another example of writing sophisticated histories of legal and political thinkers and moments and pivotal events, but doing it in a way that makes it accessible, I think, to a broader reading public.
Kate Carpenter 49:55
Before I let you go, I do want to know about what you're working on next. So, I know you mentioned earlier a project on the Confederacy, but I've also read that you're working on another fun book. What are you up to?
Gautham Rao 51:42
Okay, so I will give you, I have you know, less fun or not fun at all, and I have a great deal more fun. So the Not Fun project is the Confederacy. So I'm working on what I'm envisioning to be a legal and constitutional history of the Confederate States of America, and so it is a bit of a purposeful misnomer there, because ultimately what I'm trying to think through here is just how force and compulsion was standing in for the rule of law in a lot of ways in the Confederacy. And so the parallel to a republic of enslavers, I think, is pretty hard to escape, so trying to measure the extent to which the master-slave relationship, if you will, ends up being part of the way that the government of the Confederacy is functioning. Early stages, and, like I said before, I tend to choose wildly unwieldy projects, and this is certainly in that category. So, that's the not as fun thing. And then the fun thing is this book project on the TV show The West Wing, which grew out of a class I teach at American University, which is called The West Wing as History. So, I started teaching this back in about 2016, 2016 and the entire course, and then the book idea is about how the show, perhaps inadvertently, is repackaging American history narratives about the presidency, about the White House, about Washington, DC, about the federal government, so it's how it's packaging, repackaging American history as fiction, so trying to uncover some of those precedents and personalities that the show turns into the story of Jed Bartlett and his senior staff and whatnot. So that's been, you know, it's an enormous joy to teach that class and to see-- all my colleagues are very skeptical that 18 to 20 year olds can care about a TV show from 1999 but they are, they're really invested in it for different reasons, and so it's been a real source of inspiration and energy for me. And I've been working on this on the side for a little while and working up a book proposal with with my agent and trying to think about it as a book. As we've learned in a sort of preliminary approach to this, really tough moment for playful histories of American politics right now where things are pretty dark and gloomy, so maybe the timing isn't quite right for that, but we're, I'm still working on it. I'm envisioning it to be kind of a shorter book, but one which, which both people who know the history of 1990s politics and, you know, the Gingrich-Clinton stuff, and that kind of history, but also people who are interested in the show itself might, might find my thoughts on something fun and useful to read.
Kate Carpenter 54:42
Terrific. Well, Dr. Gautham Rao, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past, and talking with me about your book and your writing process.
Gautham Rao 54:49
Thank you so much.
Kate Carpenter 54:50
Thanks again to Dr. Gautham Rao for joining me on this episode of Drafting the Past, and thanks to you for listening. You'll find links to his books, as well as the other things we mentioned in the episode in the show notes. If you love the show and you want to support it, but you maybe don't have any spare cash to become a Patreon supporter, please leave a review in your favorite podcast app. It really does help other like-minded history writers find the show. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
