Dr. Andrew Hartman is a professor of history at Illinois State University. Before that, as you’ll learn in this episode, he was a high school social studies teacher, and he specializes in teaching future social studies teachers. He is the author of three books: Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School; A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars; and his newest book, Karl Marx in America. He has also written extensively in publications like the Washington Post, Slate, Jacobin, Bookforum, and more. You’ll hear how Andrew tackled such a huge project, a decade in the making, how he became a subject in his own history, and why being an endurance athlete might help if you’re a writer.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Andrew Hartman, Karl Marx in America
- Andrew Hartman, A War for the Soul of America: A History of the Culture Wars
- Andrew Hartman, Education and the Cold War: The Battle for the American School
- Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, American Nietzsche
- Eric Hobsbawm Age Of series: The Age of Revolution, The Age of Empire, The Age of Capital, The Age of Extremes
- Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States
[Note: Links to bookshop.org are usually affiliate links. If you purchase a book via these links, Drafting the Past earns a small commission that helps to keep the show going, at no added cost to you.]
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:00
Kate, this is drafting the past, a podcast about the craft of writing history, and I'm your host, Kate Carpenter, in each episode, I'm joined by a historian to dig into their writing process and find out how they bring history to the page. This time around, I'm happy to get to chat with Dr Andrew
Andrew Hartman 0:16
Hartman, thanks so much for having me, Kate. Longtime listener, first time caller.
Kate Carpenter 0:20
Andrew is a professor of history at Illinois State University. Before that, as you'll learn in this episode, he was a high school social studies teacher, and he specializes in teaching future social studies teachers. He is the author of three books, education and the Cold War, the battle for the American School, a war for the soul of America, a history of the culture wars and his newest book, Karl Marx in America. He has also written extensively in publications like The Washington Post, slate, book forum and more. You'll hear how Andrew tackled such a huge project a decade in the making, how he became a subject in his own history, and why being an endurance athlete might just help if you're a writer, although I might just have to take his word for it. Enjoy my conversation with Dr Andrew Hartman.
Andrew Hartman 1:06
So my mom was an English teacher. I grew up reading and writing a lot, and I always sort of imagined someday I might be a writer. I didn't really imagine, or I didn't really know how I would achieve that, but I did imagine someday I would be a writer. And then I majored in history in college, lots of writing, as you know. But after that kind of wondering where I was going to go, what I was going to do, I decided to become a high school history teacher, which was a very enjoyable job. I did that for two years. Learned tons about history teaching myself in the process, but also that it's very tough to write as a high school history teacher, but I was still trying to, I was still very interested in writing. So I was writing articles for various magazines, kind of lesser known, left wing and liberal magazines, trying to make a go of it as a writer. And I was enjoying it quite a bit. And so that's when I decided, after a couple of years of teaching high school, that I wanted to do my PhD in history, because I enjoyed teaching, but I also wanted to research and write.
Kate Carpenter 2:18
This is your third book.
Andrew Hartman 2:20
That's correct.
Kate Carpenter 2:22
I noticed in the acknowledgments you thanked your agent, who sadly passed away before this book came out, but you said something about, for having seen in me the potential as a trade writer. When did you sort of start thinking about taking that direction with your writing?
Andrew Hartman 2:39
Well, and maybe you and lots of your listeners can sort of understand this, but I've always written in a way that I wanted lots of people to be able to understand, without necessarily defining myself as a particular kind of writer, academic or trade writer. You know, when you go to grad school, you learn a specific style of writing that is not always consistent with trade style writing. And so my first book, which was premised on my dissertation, I still am proud of the way in which it was written, but definitely not written in a way that would sort of attract a large audience. And so for my second book, which is a history of the culture wars, A War for the Soul of America, I intentionally tried to write in a way that would be as accessible as possible, without losing the complexity of the ideas. And even though I didn't pitch it as a trade book, the University of Chicago Press, which published it, tried to sell it as one of these crossover books, and I think it did pretty well in that market, and was reviewed quite extensively by trade venues such as The Wall Street Journal, such as the New Republic and from there. But I didn't have an agent for that first book, but an agent, John Wright, had read that book, and he thought that I needed representation as such. I didn't know much about the whole gig of being a literary agent or being represented by one, but I thought, Okay, this sounds interesting, and he helped me craft a book proposal for my new book, Karl Marx in America, to sell on the trade market. And it just so happened that the University of Chicago Press was the one that paid the most and was the most interested in it. So I returned to the same press and the same editor, which has been a good experience.
Kate Carpenter 4:33
We're going to dig in a little more to how you wrote Karl Marx in America, but first, I just kind of generally want to talk about your writing process and approach. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Andrew Hartman 4:44
So when I was younger, when I was in grad school, I would write whenever I could, whenever the moment hit me. So there are a lot of late nights, a lot of early mornings, a lot of weekends, just whenever, but that was before massive amounts of responsibility like a full time job and parenthood. And so now I've kind of settled into a routine where I try to write as much as possible when I'm not teaching or doing duties for the university between Monday and Friday, between eight and four, eight and five. So it's, I treat it like a regular sort of eight to four, eight to five job. I've tried very hard to carve out writing time on days I'm not on campus, and so Monday, Wednesday, Friday during the teaching year, I do my best to write all three of those days. And I do write quite a bit in the summertime. Like, try to write five days a week during the summer. And so it's just it's kind of a grind, you know, like, if you want to be a full time academic, and in my case, a full time parent, you have to grind it out.
Kate Carpenter 5:54
So how do you like to organize yourself, both your sources and in your physical writing?
Andrew Hartman 5:59
I don't recommend this to any other writers. Basically, I'm doing the same thing I started doing when, even before graduate school, I take notes on Microsoft Word and just organize it in that way. It's old school. I know that there are new forms of software that people have found very useful, but I've never, I guess I just have decided never to take the time to learn the new software, because this has always worked for me. Increasingly, as I get older and, I guess, wiser about my own writing process, I take far fewer notes than I used to, so that kind of saves the time, especially when I'm reading secondary literature. I used to take extensive notes on secondary literature out of you know, like, I think we all go through this just out of a sense of insecurity about my own knowledge and my own sort of take on things that has largely changed, so that when I'm reading secondary sources, I don't take a lot of notes, but I still take extensive notes on Microsoft Word when I'm in the archives or when I'm reading primary sources.
Kate Carpenter 7:08
Do you organize, like archival photos in some way, or are you mostly just focused on note taking?
Andrew Hartman 7:14
Nope, so like and again, I don't recommend this to anybody.
Kate Carpenter 7:18
That's what everyone says.
Andrew Hartman 7:19
I know, I'm sure, right? So we all think we're inefficient. When I go to archives, I do most of my note taking in the archive itself, because I know myself, and if I just take photos of particular sources, I'm much less likely to actually spend the time necessary to go over those sources when I get home or whatever. Again, I don't, I'm not sure that's the most efficient way, but it does mean long, long days in the archives just digging into the sources. And if I come across some sources that I don't think I'll have time with in the archive, then I do take, usually just images of those sources and or if the archives still allow it to make hard paper copies of those as well.
Kate Carpenter 8:03
Where in that research process do you do think about it as starting to write?
Andrew Hartman 8:08
Kind of always writing. For me, the writing and research process is very interrelated. I'm sure lot that's true of lots of historians. Like when I write a book proposal, it's before I've really done tons of the archival research I know I still have to do, and so just constantly writing. I used to be a regular blogger for the Society of US Intellectual History blog. So for my last book on the history of the culture wars, I was constantly blog, blogging about my findings and my thoughts on various things related to the culture wars. So just a constant process of writing and then figuring out the holes in my argument or in my research and going back to the archives or back to the sources. With this book, I did not do very much public writing during the process, but I was constantly writing and sharing various things with some of my trusted readers.
Kate Carpenter 9:06
Once you have what you would consider a draft, what does revision look like for you?
Andrew Hartman 9:11
When I'm writing, I am, again, inefficient in the sense that I am a perfectionist, and so I'll write and rewrite a paragraph several times before I move on, so that by the time I get to a complete draft of a chapter or even a whole manuscript, to my mind, it's in much better shape than probably many would think of a first draft, and that's because I just take my time with the writing and revision as I go. But of course, that's usually before somebody else has read it, and then, you know, I have about eight people whom I trust to read my drafts, and once I get feedback from them, then there's usually pretty major revisions, and that's not even including the feedback I get from my editor at Chicago, Tim Mennel. He's a he's an excellent, very close reader of my work. And then this book in particular had three very careful peer reviews, blind peer reviews, which were sometimes hard to read because especially one of them was extremely critical, like this still happens three books in, extremely difficult to read at the time, but in the long run, very helpful at helping me make edits and sort of anticipate criticism.
Kate Carpenter 10:33
Yeah, so you again, in the acknowledgements, you described Karl Marx in America as your white whale, and I know you've been working on it for a while. How did you kind of keep up with it? How did you keep the faith and keep going?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
Yeah, it took almost 10 years of research and writing, and I never thought I'd be the person who had spent 10 years researching and writing any one book to begin with. I thought it was a neat idea. Nobody had done it. And there were these other books I had read and even reviewed that were reception histories of say, Nietzsche, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen's American Nietzsche. There were several other good ones I'd read a few years ago on Heidegger, on Edmund Burke, there's some recent good ones on John Locke and on Adam Smith. And you know, all of these books that I mentioned I'm a big fan of, but they're all kind of in the range of like 250 to 300 pages. But as I started the writing process, I quickly learned that this was going to be a much bigger book if I wanted to do it right, in the way that I thought it was right. There was so much there in terms of the Marx reception history, and also so much that I thought I needed to contextualize to kind of tell the story correctly that I just early on, I'm like, Oh crap, this is going to take a really long time if I want to do it right, but I want to do it right, and especially because it's a topic that there will be lots of people coming at it with already very solidified opinions. So I just decided early, early on in the writing process, I'm just going to take my time with it and get it right. And so even though it was frustrating at how long it was taking, I knew that I was doing the right thing, and I guess that's sort of comforted me somewhat in how long it was taking.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
Did you ever have moments where you thought about setting it aside?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
I never did. I guess I got pretty obsessive about it. I mean, I have to say, I always enjoyed it, even though there were obvious moments of frustration. It's a topic that proved really interesting to me, and trying to figure it all out and put it on paper was kind of like a big puzzle project that I quite enjoyed again, lots of moments of struggle and frustration, but no, there was never a moment when I was in doubt about finishing it. I knew it would happen as long as I could live long enough to finish it.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
Well, I want to, I have a bunch of questions about the book specifically so. So why don't we stop here, and I'll ask you to read an excerpt of Karl Marx in America. And I've asked you to read the beginning of chapter two, and just for the sake of readers, I'll say that in the first chapter, you kind of give us an overview of Karl Marx while he was alive, and how he engaged with the United States and its sort of political and cultural changes as he was thinking and writing. And in chapter two, you're starting to sort of turn to the project of the rest of the book. So I'll have you have you read here for us.
Andrew Hartman 1:06
Chapter Two is titled "Working Class Hero: The Gilded Age." Little quote to start it off by Eugene Debs "Karl Marx's Capital was the very first to set the wires humming in my system." "When Karl Marx died in 1883, his legacy appeared secure to the thousands of radicals who attended his raucous memorial in New York City. These working-class militants hailed Marx as the architect of a coming cooperative commonwealth. To the American ruling class, in contrast, Karl Marx was at most an afterthought, buried under the wreckage of the Paris Commune. But Marx’s name, and his ideas, did not die. The spirit of Marx remained alive, not because a glorious socialist future came to fruition, but rather because American capitalism itself confirmed his apocalyptic vision of it. Although rabble-rousing socialists in the mold of Marx held a grim view of capitalism, they were not alone in grasping that a rapidly expanding economy did not benefit everyone. In the United States, where capitalism experienced explosive growth after the Civil War, critics were relatively few but not entirely ignored. In their 1873 novel that gave the era its name, Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner depicted a ‘Gilded Age’ marked by grave social problems hidden beneath a shiny veneer. In contrast, many elites held that the nation had never been more prosperous, never more virtuous. Such was the tenor of the Centennial Celebration of 1876, attended by massive crowds in Philadelphia, where speaker after speaker pronounced on the American penchant for transcending Old World decay. As one declared, ‘the very scheme of our national life prohibits decline.’ Centennial triumphalism was a bit awkward in an economy that had yet to recover from the devastating panic of 1873. Lingering depression meant high rates of unemployment and, for those workers lucky enough to hold onto their jobs, deep wage cuts. These circumstances precipitated the Great Railroad Strike of 1877. Capitalism, in short, had created a setting in which Marx’s ideas could flourish. Of course, tinder alone is not enough to start a fire. The contradictions of late nineteenth-century capitalism, which allowed for the accumulation of unparalleled fortunes for a few while millions toiled in humiliating and often dangerous conditions, made it likelier that Marx’s words would resonate. But somebody to had light a match. Those somebodies were socialists."
Kate Carpenter 1:06
I picked this passage in part just because it lets us kind of have a glimpse into how the structure of this book is working. As you transition from Marx while he's alive to then his reception. How did you settle on this structure? Was that always the way you saw this book coming together? Did it evolve?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
I think it was always the way I if I can remember correctly, always the way I thought it would be structured. But when I started writing in particular, it became more concrete in my head, and that is that the subject and method were kind of the same, or one and the same in the sense that I'm writing about one of the most famous philosophers in the modern world who had a very materialist conception of the work, of how history worked, and that concrete, political and economic changes shaped the larger social, cultural and intellectual milieu. And so I didn't want it to just be an intellectual history in the sense of just to focus on the ideas, I wanted to situate those ideas in a larger world. And the larger world that made sense in terms of historicizing Marx's reception in the United States was a larger political world, shaped not only by high politics, but also shaped by changing economic modes of production, and especially by a focus on labor, organized labor, but labor in general. And so it really became not just an intellectual history of how people thought about Marx, but a larger contextual understanding of American history, from the Civil War to the present through the lens of Marx, Marxists, and various Marxisms.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
I mean, as I said to you ahead of this, like, you're basically writing a US history survey that is then also this intellectual history, which seems like a lot as a writer, to sort of like, keep all those parts going, make sure the balance is all there. How did you juggle that? How did you think about putting that all together?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
That's a, like, an excellent question, but also a tough one for me to answer, because it just all seemed to make sense as I was writing it, at least to me, but that is-- so in each chapter, if I could just like read some of the chapter titles, there's a particular version of Marx that seemed most paramount in terms of how people in the United States were reading and understanding Marx. Well, the first chapter, as you already stated, was just about Marx's thoughts on America for the most part. And so it's titled "American Revolutionary" because he wrote so much about not just the United States, but the Civil War in particular, and thought of it as a revolution, a world shaking revolution, as I said. In chapter two, "Working Class Hero: The Gilded Age," that is, to me, indicative of the type of Marx that people were reading and writing about and thinking about in this time period, because they really did focus on his labor theory of value in relation to power and capital. And so that was the version of Marx. And so, like the history surrounding that, was a history of industrial capitalism's emergence in the United States and the ways in which organized labor and also various organized socialist movements emerged to challenge the seemingly tight, titanic, unparalleled power of capital in the Gilded Age. Chapter Three is titled "Bolshevik: The Russian Revolution," because this changed entirely the ways in which people thought about and read about Marx and wrote about Marx, because they had this revolution that took place in one of the, in the largest country, at least geographically speaking, in the world, and self avowed Marxists had come to power. And so there was no way that people who were Marxist or socialist in the United States could think about Marx without taking account of the Bolshevik Revolution and so on and so forth. And so each chapter, to me, became like a sort of self encased history of how Americans were reading Marx in a particular context. And so I really thought about how what kind of context I had to provide in order to be able to teach readers or show readers that this particular Marx almost seemed, not inevitable, nothing's inevitable in history, but almost seemed kind of over determined.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
This is not a short book as a result, but I have to imagine that there were still a lot of things that you couldn't include. You know that you had to pick and choose. So how, how did you think about what would go in and what you would leave out?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
It's a 600 page book, and that's after massive edits and cuts forced upon me by my very sane editor, because it could have been 1000 pages. And as you said, there's just like, I guess, one of the most surprising findings to me that I now know that I didn't know 10 years ago when I started this project, was just how many people wrote about Marx, thought about Marx. I knew it'd be a lot of people, but it just seemed, especially in the 20th century, that everybody who was anybody, was thinking about Marx. And there was a long time when I wanted to put them all in there. And I very quickly upon writing, learned that I couldn't do everything with this book, and that there would be, as a result, some people disappointed, and in the reviews have shown that some people are disappointed. I didn't include X, Y or Z, but it was impossible to do everything, and even in 600 pages, and I guess I focused on, as I sort of said earlier, those aspects of Marx and Marxism that seemed most revealing about that time period in my eyes. And I think I'm happy with the choices I made, but I know some, not everyone, will be.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
I'm always interested, for intellectual historians, that it seems like there's a real challenge that intellectual history can get very non concrete, I guess is how I'd put it. But for, especially when you're writing for a more general audience, you know, you really want to make it engaging. Want to kind of give them something to hold on to. So what were your strategies for making sure that that focus stayed in this book?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
Well, part of and I think this is also related to the fact that I was writing a history of Karl Marx's ideas, which are all about sort of grounding things in material reality. He's known as a historical materialist. And you're right, intellectual history, which I love. I mean, I am an intellectual historian, and I love reading. It can sometimes seem abstract, esoteric even, though I think it's true that ideas create context for other ideas. But in writing a history of Marx, I believed that it would become most relevant to people in terms of understanding the ideas in relation to their lives, if I could root them in something that seems more concrete to people, which is often politics or labor movements or the economy, which is also an abstraction, but whatever, sure, so I just, I made very sort of like concrete efforts to just root them in things that might seem more recognizable to people like during the 1960s when these young radicals had ideas about Marx and they were reading the young Marx, who seemed somewhat existentialist, I knew it would make more sense if I could root that in the in the reasons why they felt detached from American democracy and had their own existentialist angst related to the civil rights movement and also related to their effort to end the war in Vietnam. And those would be anchors that readers would be able to sort of connect with, but also I made the intentional choice to really emphasize a lot of people in the book who would be known to lots of readers, someone like W.E.B. DuBois, but maybe this aspect of DuBois would be lesser known. So there's a lot of that, even as I'm also trying to sort of bring attention to figures who I think are interesting and often overlooked. So sort of rescue effort for some figure, someone like Raya Dunayevskaya, this really interesting figure I write about in the early post war period up through the 1960s.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
I want to focus a little bit on the final chapter, because you do something sort of surprising here. As you and I both know, as listeners probably know, many historians, especially in academia, are kind of reluctant to put themselves in their books. And if they do, they tend to do it in the introduction, right? It's sort of this, like opening, framing, and then we we set that part aside. In the final chapter, you really sort of bring in your perspective, your sort of political stance and and how you have engaged with Marx, in addition to how Americans in the 21st century especially have engaged with Marx. How did you think about putting that last chapter together? Were you always in it, or did that evolve?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
So the last chapter is the last thing I wrote. And in the back of my mind, I had long thought I should somehow position myself in this book. And I agree, like most authors, if they do that at all, will probably do it in the introduction, maybe the conclusion, but they'll usually in the introduction like they foreground their own positionality, and that oftentimes is there's a sense that that'll help the readers along in terms of what they stand for and how they're making an argument about something. But rather than that, I thought it would be more interesting for me, and also if I treated myself as one of my subjects. And so the final chapter is about how people are reading and thinking about Marx now, or at least have been since, in the last 20 to 25 years. And in the late 90s, early 2000s is really when I grew enamored with Marx and became a Marxist. And I thought that I would just put myself in the story, because I actually represent a generation of people who did not often turn to Marx, except sometimes maybe in an academic register. So I'm kind of like a Gen X Marxist, somebody who grew up in the sort of shadow of Reagan and of deep celebration of capitalism. There are not a lot of Marxists of my generation. There are lots in the 60s, so lots of boomers, or at least there were, and the millennial socialist movement has produced lots of people reading and thinking about Marx, in the millennial generation and maybe younger, but weren't a lot of me, and so I was trying to figure, it was almost like I became a subject in the book, and a puzzle to figure out, like, how this bridge happened, how I came to Marx. You know, selfishly, I just wanted to place myself alongside all these people I write about. But I also thought that it would maybe be interesting for the readers.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
I want to switch gears here a little bit and talk about your own influences. Kind of background. You started your career as a social studies history teacher, as you mentioned earlier, you also have mentioned that in at your university, in the MA in history program, you teach a lot of of history teachers, social studies teachers. Do you think that that experience and perspective affects the way that you write about history?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
Without a doubt. So my experience as a teacher shaped my first book project, which was titled Education in the Cold War. I was really interested in trying to understand how we came to think about the schools and in the 20th century, how the Cold War really shaped and reshaped that. My second book project is a history of the culture wars. Like I felt like being in education, you're constantly living out the culture wars. And I wanted to understand the history of that. This book wouldn't, there's not such an explicit connection. But a couple of things, I think my experience as a teacher and also as a teacher of teachers helped, has always shaped my writing and scholarship. And one, I try to write in a clear fashion so that, like, for example, a high school history teacher could understand this and make use of this in the classroom. To me, that's really important. And I also try to contextualize things in relation to I mean, I guess my whole interest in the sort of sociology of knowledge, my whole interest in intellectual history, stems a lot from the ways in which I think about the dissemination of knowledge through the classroom and in other venues. That's been shaped by my experience as a teacher and as a teacher of teachers. That's a couple of ways I found teaching to be a very political subject, and so I'm often interested in the various ways in which politics and education intersect. And I think that's a common commonality in much of the work I've done.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
This question is perhaps less to do with writing, but I'm curious to know, when you are teaching history teachers, do you get pushback of like, I can't present this in the classroom, or there's no way I can go into this kind of nuance?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
Well, so you know, most of my students are undergrads, okay, and they have most of them, not all, but most of them have just have zero experience in the classroom. So for better or worse, they often turn to me as a sage, but they're also comparing what I'm teaching them to what they're getting from other professors, both history professors and in other disciplines, and especially their professors in the College of Education. And so they're getting, I think, lots of different messages. And one of the things I'm trying to teach them is that there's no one correct way to teach. You have to figure out what works for you, and you have to go with that, but I do try to broaden their perspective to make the case that you can push the envelope when it comes to curriculum. You can teach outside the sort of like narrow structure of lots of district curriculums. There are lots of ways to do this, so I try to give them the tools to do that. But more importantly, I try to demonstrate to them and open up their imaginations to the possibilities of what history education can look like, both politically, you know, I think it's really interesting for students to challenge, for teachers to challenge students. Their sort of sense of the possibilities of politics, but also pedagogically, like there's lots of interesting ways to teach students history, the process of history, how to think like a historian, without a sort of rote lecture style, slash multiple choice style, form of assessment. I mean, it's a great it's, I really do love the job, and it's kind of like lucked into it, in the sense that my first year in graduate school, the sort of introduction to the discipline professor I had, Angela Zimmerman, she had us do this assignment in the second week of class, where we examined the job market and tried to think about how we fit into it. Now, this was in 2001, the job market, this would look a lot different now. It'd be a short assignment now, but sorry to say and but I'm not telling you anything you don't know, right?
Kate Carpenter 1:06
Certainly not.
Andrew Hartman 1:06
But one of the things I discovered at that point is that there's this, there was this sort of market for people like me who had experience and certification in teaching high school, who had PhDs in history, because there are several history departments across the country that train teachers, and they're looking for historians with experience in the public schools. And I thought, Well, hey, that's me. If it gives me a leg up on getting a job, I'm going to kind of focus my carving out my career in that way, and it proved to work. And I ABD was hired at Illinois State University, which has this very large history education program that's one of the best in the country, and it's been a great career. And I really feel like teaching teachers just feel so tangible in a profession that often doesn't feel very tangible.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
Yeah, I like that. So earlier in our conversation, you mentioned that there were about eight people that you look to for feedback on your writing. How does the writing community and that kind of feedback affect you?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
Yeah, and I guess this is the community I've built just over many, many years of sharing my work, and it kind of ebbs and flows in terms of who I think will help me with any particular form of writing, most of them I consider obviously friends. Some of them are very hard and honest readers, and I know I need a few of those, but not too many, because even after writing three books, the ego is a fragile thing, and you also need to hear from readers who like certain things about your writing. And so I try to balance that. I have some readers who like, have tons and tons of historiographical background who can like, say, Well, have you considered this historian's argument? And this, I have others who are really good with the writing, like, You're not exactly clear here, and others who are just like, this argument's making no sense. And you know, like, I just have found that that community I've built up, and it's just like, ad hoc, we don't all ever get together. I just send them stuff, and they send me back feedback, and I try to do the same for them. It's just been so helpful. Because, as you know, and I would assume most people listening to this know, writing is a very lonely endeavor, and you have to share your writing with other people, otherwise you're just whistling into the wind.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
Are there other writers who you look to as sources of inspiration for your approach to writing?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
Would it be a cop out to say Karl Marx? Yes, it would. Yeah, so many. And I really am attracted to good writing a historian who, and I can't say like I've attained this type of writing ability, but I love Eric Hobsbawm's writing. Especially loved his Age Of trilogy, you know, these big synthetic books that were not only synthetic, but told a particular story about a long period of time. I guess to some degree, I've modeled Karl Marx and America off of like his books, The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire. I love those three books, and even The Age of Extremes, which is kind of like the 20th century version of it. I think ever since, even before I entered grad school, I was attracted to big books that told big, sweeping stories or made provocative, big arguments. One of the first history books that really convinced me I wanted to be a history teacher was Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States. It was written and very clearly made a huge argument. It was provocative. It made me rethink everything I thought about US history at the time, which wasn't much, and that's probably to whom he pitched the book and so. So it's that style of writing and that style of historical writing that I've always been attracted to.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
What's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
Can't remember who said this. It might have just been something I read on social media. Someone once said writing is like cycling in the Tour de France, or, you know, you just have to get in the saddle and stay there as an endurance athlete. So I'm a swimmer. I've always been a swimmer. It just like seems parallel. You just have to keep at it, even when it feels awful, even when it's nothing but a struggle, even when you just feel like your blood, sweat and tears are all over your computer. Just have to keep at it, and it'll just get easier the next day, hopefully, just kind of kind of grind it out. I always sort of had this romantic notion that, you know, you could drink coffee all night in a and just in a frenzy, write out a whole chapter or something. And I've heard of people doing that, and that just sounds crazy to me. It's more like if I can get two paragraphs on the page today, and if I can do that five days a week, it'll accumulate, and before I know it, 10 years later, I'll have a 600 page book.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
Well, I know you mentioned before we started recording that it's been a busy summer. You've been talking to a lot of people about Karl Marx in America, and you're headed into another busy semester where I know you'll be focused on teaching. Is there anything on the horizon for a next project, or are you just sort of blank slate at this point?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
I'm a blank slate. I have maybe, like 10 ideas, but I haven't really thought about them hard enough or taken anything seriously enough to, like, say with any certainty that I have a next project. And it's a weird place to be, because after finishing my last two books, even before that, I already knew what I what the next project was. But it gets to a point where I think I just, I need a break from that, not a long one, because I do enjoy the process of research and writing books, but right now I'm kind of a blank slate.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
Do you think, I know you write fairly frequently for public facing outlets, in more magazine length. Is that kind of a direction you'll focus for a while?
Andrew Hartman 1:06
Yeah, I think so. I have a number of books I'm reviewing, and that's that's enjoyable because I can focus on other people's work. Sure, yeah, it's a nice break.
Kate Carpenter 1:06
Well, Dr. Andrew Hartman, thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past to talk about the writing process.
Andrew Hartman 1:06
Thank you so much, Kate. This has been fun.
Kate Carpenter 39:06
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Drafting the Past. If you like what you heard, share the episode with a friend, and leave a review online. You can head to draftingthepast.com for links to the books we talked about today, show notes, and more ways you can support the podcast. Until next time, remember that friends don’t let friends write boring history.
