Historians never quite know what kind of discoveries will enable them to write a history. For today’s guest, the list of things that contributed to his most recent book included a long-shot grant proposal, an elementary school fundraiser, and the rise of digitized genealogical records.
On this episode of Drafting the Past, Kate spoke with Dr. Tyler Anbinder. Tyler is an emeritus professor history at George Washington University. He is the award-winning author of four books, including Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum, and City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York. His most recent book, which came out last year, is Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York. You’ll hear Tyler talk about how each of his research projects led to the next, how he works to blend remarkable detail with compelling writing, and how he tries to teach writing skills to his students—including one featured on a previous episode of Drafting the Past. We also talked about the humbling process of having his book reviewed by a fact checker.
Note: Bookshop.org links are affiliate links. If you purchase books through these links, Drafting the Past gets a small percentage that helps to keep the show going.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York
- City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York
- Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum
- Nativism & Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings & the Politics of the 1850s
- John McPhee, Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process
- James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom
- Ronald Takaki
- DTP Episode 51: Lindsay Chervinsky Loves That Writing Is Work
- Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker
- Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
Historians never quite know what kinds of discoveries will enable them to write a history. For today's guest, the list of things that contributed to his most recent book included a long-shot grant proposal, an elementary school fundraiser, and the rise of digitized genealogical records. On this week's episode of Drafting the Past, I spoke with Dr. Tyler Anbinder. Tyler is an emeritus professor of history at George Washington University. He's the award winning author of four books, including Five Points: The Nineteenth-Century New York City Neighborhood that Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections, and Became the World's Most Notorious Slum and City of Dreams: The 400-Year Epic History of Immigrant New York. His most recent book, which came out last year, is Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York. I was so excited about this conversation, I forgot to even let him say hi before we dove right into my questions. You'll hear Tyler talk about how each of his research projects led to the next, how he works to blend remarkable detail with compelling writing, and how he tries to teach writing skills to his students, including one featured on a previous episode of Drafting the Past. We'll also talk about the humbling process of having his book reviewed by a fact checker. Here's Dr. Tyler Anbinder.
Tyler Anbinder 1:23
When I started in academia, I never thought of myself as a writer first, or even-- that, that didn't occur to me when I decided that's what I wanted to do. I kind of went into academia because I had really no plan to do that kind of thing at all, until my senior year as an undergraduate, when an instructor of mine, Clarence Walker, asked me to be his teaching assistant. And this was at Wesleyan in Connecticut, where teaching assistants aren't actually allowed, at least back then, weren't allowed to do grading. So all you did as a teaching assistant was you ran discussion sections and I ran these discussion sections, and I loved it, and I loved being in front of the class, because these were they were actually, the sections were too big to actually be discussion sections, so they were more directed talking about the material. And I love that so much. I thought maybe I should do this. And I had to had a teacher in high school who had said that I would make a great teacher, and at the time, I said, Oh, that's crazy. But then that reoccurred to me, and that was how I got into that. And so my goal was to be a teacher with the writing part wasn't first and foremost in my mind. So it was really only when I started working on my dissertation that I found how much I liked writing, though I have to admit, when I was working on my dissertation, you know, writing was more of an excruciating chore, and it was only in time that it came to be a thing I loved as opposed to a thing I had to do.
Kate Carpenter 2:56
And at some point you started to think that that there might be trade writing potential in your work. What prompted that switch for you?
Tyler Anbinder 3:03
Well, it was a couple of things. So first, my dissertation, which was about the Know Nothing Party, the anti immigrant, anti Catholic political party from the 1850s in the United States. That book got reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and in the New Republic. So I thought, huh, I guess there's interest in the kind of stuff I do outside of, you know, academic journals. But still, I didn't think that much of it. And I started out on my second project, which was a-- but I should say, part of it was once I saw those reviews in the New York Times and in the New Republic, I thought, Oh, I wish I had written the book differently to appeal to those audiences, because what I thought was, if I had read the New Republic and then went to the bookstore and found my book and browsed it, I would say, oh, that's way too academic. Look at those footnotes at the bottom of the page. And so much of the writing is kind of focused on, you know, making arguments that really only 10 people care about. And so that inspired me with my next project, to think in my writing that I could have a bigger audience and not to write in such a way that I would make those people feel excluded. And so my second project was about this immigrant neighborhood in New York City, called Five Points, which has kind of become better known since the Martin Scorsese movie Gangs of New York, but wasn't well known at all back in the 1990s and I came upon that subject, and I start working, started working on it and and actually, when I, when I was working on that, I met, you know, I'd go to conferences that I would meet editors. And I met this editor from what was then The Free Press, which eventually became part of Simon and Schuster, Bruce Nichols, and he asked me what I was doing for my next project. And I told him, and he said, Well, a trade press like us wouldn't be interested in that. What else you thinking? I said, Well, when I finished that, I want to do a history of immigrant life in New York City from the first Dutch settlers all the way to the present. He said, Oh, that's the book I want. Come back to me when I'm, when you've got that book ready. And I said, okay, but then I was work, as I was working on my Five Points book, and I was as I was writing it, I thought, you know, I could see this appealing to a trade audience if it was done in a way that wasn't so academic, because I felt like the material really about immigrant life, and really had this appeal to, you know, all the Americans who were interested in kind of ethnic revival, and that was when genealogy, this kind of do yourself genealogy, was becoming a big thing again. So when I had written about two thirds of the manuscript, I mentioned to this editor that I thought maybe it had trade potential, I said. And he said, No, no, no, it definitely wouldn't have trade potential. But I'll read it. I'll read what you've written so far, just as a courtesy, and tell you if I really think I'm right or not. And then he read it, and he said, You know, I think you are right, it does have trade potential. And so he ended up publishing it, and then published my next book also. So that was kind of how that developed, though, not before I had other people agree with him and say, and say, No. I had this, when I thought it had trade potential, I went to a, because I knew for a trade book I needed an agent. So my friend who is a journalist suggested, well, why don't you go to my agent? I'm sure she'll take it on. So I sent the same manuscript that I actually sent to the editor to this agent, and she called me back and said, Tyler, you will never publish a trade book. You just have to accept that fact you'll never publish a trade book. Just go back to your academic writing. I was happy to prove her wrong one day.
Tyler Anbinder 6:30
Yes, I'm glad you kept at it.
Tyler Anbinder 6:46
Yes, and yeah. So I, you know, I went to the second agent, and she's been my agent for 25 years. Jill Grinberg, so I only got one agent rejection, but, but I know lots of people who are great writers who get many, many agent rejections. It's, it's kind of crazy how, like, you would think an agent has no incentive to say no to anybody, because all they can do is make money and and yet, it seems to be hard to find an agent, which makes no sense, except, I guess it's one of those things where, like, supply doesn't reach demand.
Kate Carpenter 7:16
I suppose, like the rest of us, agents have a limited amount of time, right? Well, let's talk a little bit about how you do your writing, when and where do you work? I am looking at what appears to be a beautiful office. Is this where you do your writing?
Tyler Anbinder 7:29
I do write in my office, and I like having, what you can't see here is is my desk faces out to the street. I love having the view of the street in front of me when I'm writing, I like being able to see what's going on and what the weather is like. I'm not one of those people who needs to be like in a in a cell and away from everything that way, right? And so back, you know, I got my PhD in 1990 and when I first became a professor, lots of people still wrote in their offices. And even from the beginning, I found I couldn't do that. There were just students kept interrupting, and that was just too, or colleagues would, you know? It was the kind of place, my first job was at the University of Wyoming, and that was the kind of place where people, everybody spent every day in their office, and everybody poked their heads in to see what what are you up to? You want to have lunch, you want to have a cup of coffee? So I found I couldn't write there, so I started writing at home then, and kept doing it. I like writing at home. I have four kids, so I found that the best writing time was, you know, between when they went to school and when they came home from school. And then there were some projects where I found I needed to write at night also, and I am not proud of that, because that is not I, you know, I don't think that's a great thing to do for your health or your kids and your home life. But, you know, I had my big book about immigrant life in New York to get that done on deadline. I stayed up, you know, after everybody in the house went to sleep, I would stay up for two or three more hours and keep writing. The other thing I find that's really important is to write every day. That is my big piece of advice I give to people, and I know we talked about before we started recording, you know, you had asked about the best writing advice I ever gave, I had ever gotten, and I'm not, I can't remember if anyone ever gave me that advice, honestly, but I know that's the advice I give. I just find that writing is the kind of thing that if you stop doing it, it's much harder to get started again, and even just a half hour a day is just so great in kind of keeping the writing juices flowing. I don't know what the right term is, so I find that finding a way to write every day is important. I once read--this may be where I got it from--I once read a biography ofGraham Greene, the novelist. And it said that he wrote 100 words every day. That was his thing, that he had to write 100 words every day. And he'd be in his villa on the Amalfi Coast, and he'd write his 100 words. And as soon as 100 words were done, he poured himself his first of many drinks of the day. And even if it was 11 in the morning, that was when writing stopped and drinking started. So I don't limit myself to 100 words the way he did, but I but I do find that doing it every day when I'm writing is really important.
Kate Carpenter 10:30
Now that you are in emeritus status as a professor, does your writing life look different?
Tyler Anbinder 10:35
So yes and no, yes in the sense that I don't have to interrupt it for teaching. I don't have to interrupt it even worse for meetings, I don't have to interrupt it for grading, though I have gone back to teaching. Now I'm not teaching at George Washington University, but I teach as a volunteer for some groups in northern Virginia where I live, to senior citizens. And now I'm I somehow I got discovered. So now other groups that do senior citizens, but do it just online, have contacted me, so I do some stuff for them. So I've gone back to teaching because I missed the teaching. I didn't miss the committees and the meetings and the grading and, dare I say, office hours and stuff like that. So yeah, so in that way, the writing is easier because there are fewer distractions. So no, emeritus status has only made writing easier. So my last book, the one that came out last year, I wrote pretty much the entire thing after Covid started and after I had stopped teaching.
Kate Carpenter 11:40
How do you organize yourself? Are there tools that you use? I mean, I know that for Plentiful Country, there were a spectacular number of sources, and we can talk more about that. But do you have ways that you like to keep everything organized as you work?
Tyler Anbinder 11:51
So it's interesting that you asked that because so I listen to your podcast, and I am always very interested to hear the answers other writers give to this and in this manner, I am super old school. Now, not so old school that, like my first book was written with four by six note cards, right? The entire thing, it made me really happy when, you know, not so long ago, when John McPhee, right? You know John McPhee, The New Yorker writer. You know, one of the great writers. So when he wrote his his book on writing, he talked about how he would literally lay the note cards out on a big huge, he would get this huge piece of plywood and put it on like saw horses, and he would lay his note cards out and organize his book that way. And that was how I did my first book without knowing that John McPhee did that, even though I admired him at that point. So I was very pleased to hear that. But since then, still old school-ish, is I started in I just put everything in Word documents, all my notes, everything in there. And I don't use any of these, the things that that everybody else uses these days, that I hear your other guests talk about, and the main reason for that is fear, absolute fear, because when I started in in the early 1990s my Know Nothing project had a I used a database program to keep a lot of the because I kind of collected stuff about people who I could show had joined the Know Nothing Party that I had gotten from various primary sources, so I thought I put it in this database program, and the company that made it went defunct, and the thing became unusable. And so that so scarred me, because here I am, 35 years later, and I wonder what was in there. Because every once in a while, somebody writes to me and says, How did you know such and such? How can you prove that? And the answer is usually, well, it was in that database that I can no longer access. So that scarred me so much. I thought, you know, because I know people use Scrivener and all these things, and I'm like, how do we know those are going to still exist? How do I know that there's not going to be a crash? And so I know there are answers to all those things, but I just keep everything in Word.
Kate Carpenter 14:05
I think if it works for you, there's no reason to change, just for novelty's sake. Where in the research process do you start writing?
Tyler Anbinder 14:12
That's also one of my favorite questions that you ask your guests, because I am always fascinated with the variety of the answers. Because, as you know, they're all over the place. I'm always so surprised. I have always been a big believer that you can't start writing until you're pretty much done with the research. My dissertation advisor, Eric Foner, told me that, and I have always found that to be true. And his rationale and mine is every part of your book depends on you knowing what's going to be in every part of the book. And so you really can't write chapter one if you haven't researched chapter 10 yet. And I found that to be true. And so for most of my life, I worked that way, and I would research to what I thought was pretty much all the research, knowing that as you wrote, you would find holes, and you'd have to do more research to plug in those holes. But then, as I got older, that changed somewhat. It changed, so my third book is this 400 year history of immigrant life in New York City, and I found that the amount of material I needed for that book was so overwhelming. So I started out planning to do it the same way I had done the other books, but then I found that it was so overwhelming to try to keep all that information, in a sense, in my head. Now I know in theory, it would be written down, but to be able to use that information to think about how you're writing. It needs to, in a sense, be in your head, also, right, to to inform, right, because I know I'm going to put this thing in chapter 23 of that book, so I can hint at it here in chapter one. So you kind of need to know, but at the same time, I found it was just too much information. And so for that book, for the first time, the last quarter of that book, I decided, I mean, I knew what was going to be in the chapters overall, but I decided I wasn't going to do all the research, in part, because that was kind of a contemporary, slash semi contemporary section of the book. And so it also occurred to me that better things would be written about those subjects in the time. Because that book, you know, I started on it in theory in, what? After Five Points was published in 2001 and it got published in 2016. So I knew more stuff would be published, in particular about those. So I kind of did three quarters of the research, and then I said, I can't do anymore, and I started writing. And then when I got basically three quarters done, I then stopped writing and researched the last quarter of the book, and then wrote that. And so that's that's what I did. But then with my most recent book, I basically went back to the old method of researching the whole thing, though, again, as I worked on that book, and this would be kind of surprising to a lot of people, as I worked on that book, which is all about people in the 1850s, and 60s. So much new information came out, not by scholars, but online, on ancestry.com and sites like that, about the people I was writing about, that I had to do a lot of revisions, because I learned so much more about the people you know in the two years that I was writing, doing the actual writing of the book.
Kate Carpenter 17:30
What does that revision look like for you? I mean, do you go back to laying things out on plywood in front of you, or do you do have a system for revising?
Tyler Anbinder 17:40
So I am a big believer in revising every day, and this is something I noticed your guests often don't talk about in as much detail, but so I'm curious to know, but I find there is no day when I start writing that I don't first revise what I wrote, not only the day before, but sometimes week or month. So so my basic method is, if I'm writing chapter one and I write, you know, I write two paragraphs on day one of writing, on day two of writing, I don't write any more until I've revised those first two paragraphs. And then on day three, I don't start writing until I've revised the first, all the paragraphs. And basically, I revise every paragraph of whatever chapter I'm working on every day that I'm working on that chapter. So I do a lot of revising. And I know that's not everybody's method. I had some colleagues at GW who were very much the opposite. Their goal was just get everything on paper and revise it later. And every once in a while, they'd asked me to read their work in progress, and I would be like, Oh my god, this is the worst written thing ever. This is so bad, but they ended up being fine in the end, but they would literally go write the entire manuscript. Well, write, I say almost euphemistically, because it was barely written. It was just like lots of quotes and, you know, no transitions and no beauty in the writing, and then they fix all that at the end, which just boggled my mind. But some people can do that, and they do it really well. So I say good for you.
Kate Carpenter 19:16
Does that mean that, I mean, by the time you get to the end of a chapter, are there days where you just spend all your time revising?
Tyler Anbinder 19:22
No, because so in theory, and this is usually the case in practice, you know, once you're two thirds of the way through a chapter, those first parts hardly need any revision at all. And I'm more glancing at them and just but, but one of the really important things about that that I think a lot of writers neglect is, is the flow, right? So the flow is so important for your writing and the rhythm. And these are the kinds of things I talked about in the writing classes I taught, which, you know, there's just hardly any courses on writing for history grad students, and it just always shocked me. So I started teaching a course on writing, and we were talking about things like flow and rhythm, right? And I never had a course in them, but they're, they're just key and, you know, in John McPhee's book, he talks all about them, and how can a writer not, so for the flow, I find it's really important for the voice, because it's, because finding your voice is so important, and it's not just your voice, it's the book's voice too. Because, like, the book can have, different books of yours can have different voices depending on the audience you're trying to reach. So I found that for the flow and to kind of reestablish the voice in my head that I was looking for that reading, reading that stuff that I had written before was just really important.
Kate Carpenter 20:45
Do you find it hard to read other people's work while you're in the midst of a project? Or are you not so affected?
Tyler Anbinder 20:51
No, I don't find that a problem at all. No. In fact, I find that more helpful, because every once in a while it's inspiring, kind of like, ooh. I want to write more like that. More often, if I'm reading other academics, I'm like, ooh, all right, I don't want to write like that, but no. But there are academics that definitely inspire my writing, like the two big inspirations I had after I got my PhD, after I worked with Foner, were James McPherson, because I loved his book, Battle Cry of Freedom, because I teach about the American Civil War. And when I was in grad school, everybody would lament that there is no and can never be a good single volume history of the Civil War, because there's too much you have to put in. So you either have to sacrifice readability for detail, or you have to sacrifice detail for readability. And then McPherson wrote this book, aha, it can be done because it's full of all this detail, and yet it's a great read. And then this other writer that inspired me, who was an academic, was a guy named Ronald Takaki, who taught at Berkeley and taught Asian American history, and his writing about Asian American history, I just found so almost poetic. It was really moving. And I especially loved the way he he worked his own family's history into his books. And I said, One day, I want to do that. And so and then I was able to do that with my third book, and, and it's still when people write to me about the book, it's always one of the things they say is their favorite part was when I worked, the immigrants in my own family tree into that book. So, so, yeah, no, I never find reading other people a problem. It's always, it's always helpful, either because of the positive examples or the negative examples.
Kate Carpenter 22:43
To hear how Tyler pulls together detail and readability in his own book, I asked him to read an excerpt for us. You'll hear him give a little context for this passage, followed by Dr. Tyler Anbinder reading an excerpt from Plentiful Country: The Great Potato Famine and the Making of Irish New York.
Tyler Anbinder 23:01
So this this excerpt is from the beginning of chapter two. This is a book about the immigrants who came to New York as a result of the Irish potato famine. The first chapter of the book talks about the famine itself. And now with the second chapter, I'm trying to set up what life was like in New York, but I wanted with each chapter to kind of look in depth at one immigrant or one immigrant family, to to kind of bring to life in a more detailed and understandable way the kind of experiences that the hundreds of 1000s of immigrants were going through. And so that's why I end up with kind of this much detail in this opening vignette,
Tyler Anbinder 23:44
“…most victims of the Famine relied on family members to pay their way to America. But a small proportion, somewhere between 3 and 10 percent, emigrated thanks to landlord, government, or charitable assistance. One of these subsidized immigrants was Cornelius Sullivan (whom we met at the beginning of chapter 1) from bucolic Tuosist on the Lansdowne estate in County Kerry. Even in a metropolis like New York, teeming with one hundred thousand Famine refugees by 1851, Sullivan and the other Lansdowne immigrants stood out. Most of the Famine immigrants, especially those who arrived in 1846 and 1847 when remittances were scarce and chain migration had not yet brought many poorer Irishmen to America, came from the middle to lower-middle ranks of Irish society. New Yorkers did not grasp this fact until they laid eyes on Lansdowne’s gaunt, penniless exiles. The Evening Post lamented that they had been shamefully dumped on the docks ‘in starving condition.’ The Sun called them ‘the most miserable looking creatures that we have ever seen landed upon our shores.’ As a result of both their disorientation and their poverty, Cornelius Sullivan and many of his Lansdowne compatriots initially had to live at the charity boardinghouse run by the New York Commissioners of Emigration on Canal Street. Cornelius and his son Daniel were still lodging there (or had returned there) five weeks after their arrival in New York, while his wife, Honora, and their three other children had to take refuge at the city almshouse on Blackwells Island in the East River. Cornelius and Daniel were far from the only Lansdowne immigrants at the charity rooming house. ‘It is a remarkable fact, that in one night there were no less than 196 Sullivans and 95 Shays in the Canal street lodging house,’ remarked one newspaper. (Sullivan and Shea were the two most common surnames in and around Kenmare.) ‘They were all the tenants of the Marquis of Lansdowne.’ Given his precarious circumstances, after five weeks in New York, Cornelius Sullivan did something that might surprise us—he opened a bank account. When he walked in the Emigrant Savings Bank on Chambers Street behind City Hall, he placed $5 (nearly a week’s wages for a day laborer, and equal to about $200 today) on the counter as his first deposit. The bank secretary asked Sullivan exactly where in Ireland he had been born, the date he had arrived in America, the name of the ship on which he had traveled, where he was living, and his occupation (Sullivan said ‘farmer’). Life must have been incredibly difficult for the Sullivans. Their ten-year-old daughter, Norry, died sometime during the family’s first six weeks in America. Soon, Cornelius moved the rest of his family out of the almshouse and into a dilapidated apartment among brothels and bawdy basement dance halls on Little Walter Street, one of the seediest blocks in Five Points, a notoriously overcrowded, run-down, impoverished neighborhood a half mile northeast of City Hall, which was home to more Irish immigrants than any other part of New York. Scraping by was difficult. Three months after Sullivan opened his account, he withdrew his $5 and closed it.”
Kate Carpenter 26:59
So one of the reasons I picked this passage is that I wanted to talk a little bit about sources. Could you tell me what went into writing this passage?
Tyler Anbinder 27:09
Literally, what went into writing that passage was a decade of research. Crazy as that sounds. Where this project started was with this one collection, the Immigrant Savings Bank Records, which were deposited at New York Public Library right around the year 2000. And so the bank records list each depositor's name and the information I mentioned in the in the part you had me read, the bank asked for security reasons, all this information about each depositor, so exactly where they were born, in Ireland, and in the ship they came on, the names of their relatives. And this was all for security reasons. This is before photo ID. So if you went into the bank and asked for your money, they would say, Well, if you're really Cornelius Sullivan, what's your mother's maiden name? And in fact, the Immigrant Savings Bank is the first business we know of that used mother's maiden name as a security question, but they had other things that they could ask you, what was the name of the ship you came on? What's, where is your youngest sister living right now? They asked for all that information. So I started, I looked at that stuff back in 2000 to use for my Five Points, but right at the very end, because the book was pretty much done when that collection was opened. And so I looked at it, and I found that the Five Pointers, who I described in my Five Points book as being, all you know, impoverished and stuck in poverty, actually had a lot more money in their bank accounts than we would have thought, and it was kind of too late to make much change to the Five Points book. So I kind of mentioned this and say it's, who knows why this is, we'll have to do more research. So I had this information about him and the other bank customers who lived in Five Points, and then it just stuck with me. But it was hard to figure out how you could kind of find more information about someone like him, because, right, he's he's poor. He doesn't leave much of a record, and this is back in 2000. Newspapers haven't been digitized, right? And so, so I kind of left it off and thought, well, it's too bad, but we're never gonna know more about people like him. So he's mentioned in my Five Points book, just very briefly. But you know, you skip ahead 10 years, and now all the censuses are digitized, and you can put Cornelius Sullivan into, you know, ancestry.com and up all these Cornelius Sullivans come. The problem is there are, you know, hundreds of Cornelius Sullivans living in America in 1860 and how do you know which is the right one? But you can use the bank records, because it says what year he arrived, and what his wife's name is and what his kids' names are. You can use that information to kind of figure out which is the right Cornelius Sullivan. So that, that was when it occurred to me that you could actually start tracing people like him, but it would take a huge amount of work because, you know, finding one or two Cornelius Sullivans wouldn't make a book. You'd need hundreds and hundreds. So I applied for a grant, and I thought, oh, there's no way I'll get this grant. And then I can say, Well, I tried, because I was department chair at this point, and I was always nagging my faculty members to apply for big, impressive grants. And they'd say, Well, but I'll never get that grant. It's not worth applying. And so I said, All right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna set the example. I'm going to apply for this big, huge grant that I'm sure I'll never get, and then I put in the grant, you know, I want to hire an army of research assistants who are going to look for the 18,000 bank customers who opened accounts during the 1850s and I thought, Oh, who's going to fund that, that's crazy. But then the NEH funded it, and gave, gave me a quarter of a million dollars, and then my university matched, you know, gave another 100,000 so now I had $400,000 and I hired, hired dozens of research assistants, and they looked for those people. And what I learned is, it's really hard to teach students how to do this kind of work. Even though I thought I can do it, why can't they do it? It turns out, it takes a lot more judgment than you think. And then eventually what I what I thought was, well, if I'm really gonna be able to do this, I need professional help. So I hired a genealogist, which was the smartest thing I ever did. And although I'd say I wasn't even so smart, it was like dumb luck in part, I went, my kids elementary school was having a a charity auction, and I'm walking around, and one of the things you could bid on was the services of an of a genealogist. And actually knew this woman because she was the mother of one of my son's T ball teammates. I said, Oh, I'll, I'll bid on that. And I was the only bidder, and so I won that. So then I said to her, you know, so look, here's Cornelius Sullivan. What can you find? And she found so much. It was just insane how much she found. And that's 2010. Okay, in the meantime, I was writing my book on the history of immigrant life in New York City. I'd gotten this huge advance for this, so I had to get that done. So I basically set the army of research assistants to work. I wrote my book about New York City, and then when I was done with that, in 2016 I went back to this project about the famine immigrants. I said to Janet, she's a genealogist. Says, all right, Janet, now go back and see what you can find. And it turned out, in those six years, between 2010 and 2016, she could find tons more, because so much more stuff had been digitized in the meantime. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that, literally, to the period that I last handed in the last copy of the galleys of this book in you know, what was, that February? No, it would have been the fall of 2023 Janet was finding new stuff on people in my book, it would just pop up. Somebody has put all the Minnesota 1885 censuses online, and that's how we found, that's how I found this person whose vignette starts one of the other chapters. And it just so the amount of the stuff that's going online that can help historians is just increasing exponentially every year.
Kate Carpenter 33:06
Yeah, that's incredible. I did want to talk about something you make a make a stylistic choice that you talk about in your know, on sources at the end of the book. That might seem minor, but I think it's really major in terms of how the book reads. And that's that you note that there are often places where the sources are conflicting for various reasons, either because census enumerators are not always very careful in how they write things down, or, you know, maybe someone gives their name or date of birth differently in different places for whatever reason. And so you sometimes had to just make a judgment call about which was the more likely to be true based on everything you know about this period and the people, but you made the interesting choice that in writing it, you did not always qualify that you know, you didn't always say like he was probably born in whatever year. And I think historians can be nervous about that, but I think it makes a huge difference in how this book reads and how the narrative comes across. So can you talk to me a little bit about how you came to that conclusion? Was there a point at which you did qualify everything and then changed your mind?
Tyler Anbinder 34:09
So in a previous book, in my previous book, I had, well, in probably the two previous books, ever since I started working with a trade editor, which was my second book, he had been very much like readers hate when every when every sentence says probably or likely, or we think, or it seems like and and I know as a reader, I always felt the same way. So when he when he suggested, you know, you need to use your best judgment and just write what you think, and you can either qualify things in your notes, which in a trade book is going to be end notes. And these days, you even have to fight in a trade book to have notes at end notes. And so I thought that the thing to do with this book that was best was to just come right out and say that, because when you're writing about, this entire book is written about typically, otherwise forgotten people, right? Just regular people. Historians don't tend to be able to write much about, and so it seemed to me that I had to be up front and say, you know, so much of what of this stuff is speculative. I mean, even you would find the same event like every once in a while, these people would have their 15 minutes of fame, like I talked about this one guy who who did a marathon walking session to raise money. So he said, I'm gonna walk. I can't remember how many miles, some crazy number of miles in, oh yeah, he said he was gonna walk 75 miles in 24 hours around this little indoor ring, and he charged people money to come see him. And this actually made the news in Brooklyn, where this took place. And so a lot of the newspapers covered it, and they all said different things, contradicting each other. And they all, in theory, went to the same thing, although maybe some of them didn't go and just were copying what their colleagues had written. So anybody who was going to go look at my sources would say, hey, wait a second. It doesn't say that here. But then if they went to the next source, they say, Oh, it does say it here. Or how did he choose? And so I figured it was just worth being explicit and saying that, you know, historians have to make judgments all the time. And rather than constantly say, we think maybe probably that, we just admit that judgment is what goes into this, and it's impossible to write without it the kind of writing we do, at least writing about people like this, it certainly is.
Kate Carpenter 36:30
If anyone were to accuse you of not being a careful enough person, I would counter to them that you also hired a fact checker for your book, which is not something that a lot of historians do. First of all, I think a lot of people don't realize, don't realize that presses don't fact check non fiction books as a matter of course, and that it is not an inexpensive process to hire a fact checker, and so a lot of people either choose not to or just are unable to. What was it like to have a book like this go through a fact checking process?
Tyler Anbinder 36:59
Well? So the answer is, what it was like? It was humbling. It was very, very humbling. And I came upon this because so I had an amazing copy editor for my City of Dreams book, and that person did a great job of not exactly fact checking, but kind of fact checking. I mean, just, you know, historians, most of the historians I would talk to would always say, oh, there's nothing more important than having a great editor. But then, when you're working with a trade press, the editor, the editor is kind of looking at big conceptual things, then the editor is not concerned with detail, and so the copy editor does that kind of stuff. And the copy editors are almost always now freelancers, and so the the quality can rate can vary tremendously. And so the copy editor I had for City of Dreams was amazing and did that kind of stuff. The copy editor I had for this most recent book, Plentiful Country, clearly had a lot of stuff to do and not much time to do it, and so and I had come across fact checkers recently, because fact checkers had started calling me from the New York Times and The New Yorker, had gotten fact checkers from both those calling me for stories they were doing about nativism, typically, so anti immigrant sentiment, they're like, Oh, this guy wrote a book about this. We'll fact check it with him. And so I thought, huh, that's, that's a really, you know, it couldn't hurt. And, you know, I got, I had this advance. I could take some of the money from advance. So I tried. I started out. I said, I'll just do one chapter and see what it's like. Oh, my God. There was so much that I found. So the main thing that the fact checker found was typos, and you would think, well, why didn't the copy editor found them? And it's because the typos were grammatically correct. The originals were not grammatically correct. And so I had mistakenly, and I don't know to this day whether they are things that either auto correct changed in Word, or it's things that as I was transcribing the the quotes, my brain wanted to correct the grammatical errors in what was there. So she found a lot of that. And so I was overjoyed to say, oh my gosh, there's so much of that, you know. And what are we, we're talking about maybe, I don't know, maybe eight of these in the first chapter she did, but to me, that's huge. I don't want to be that, right? I don't know if you've been at it long enough to have this experience like I have, but as you're working on a book, you're reading other historians' work, and sometimes you read it, you're like, wow. And you've read the same sources them, you're Wow, they get everything right. And then you read others, and you're like, oh my gosh, it's like, all this, all these mistakes in here, right? And you you think very bad thoughts about the sloppy historian, and you think very good thoughts about the not sloppy historian. I want to be the person who had the good thoughts about so but it was not only that. Then I -- this is really, I think, important for historians who use newspaper databases. So, like, you can go to a newspaper database and can search for something, and up at the top of the screen it says, this is from this newspaper. It has the name and this page. So as I was doing my research, because I got tons of stuff for this this last book from newspapers.com and, you know, I use three. I subscribe to three or four to get all the ethnic newspapers in particular, and all the little newspapers that might have something on my not very famous people. So it turns out that what it says at the top of the screen there is often wrong. That not only is the page number wrong, because the page number it got by, you know that scanning thing where it like tries to read the writing, it gets that wrong all the time. And then it even gets a newspaper name wrong, because sometimes that newspaper, 30 years later, would be called this, but previously it had this other name, and the newspaper site has put them together, but really had different names. So not only did I have the page numbers wrong sometimes, but had the actual newspaper name wrong. So I'm so glad I hired this fact checker, because that would have killed me to have actual wrong newspapers, right? And you know, as a historian, you're going to have something things wrong in your book. There's just no way around that, but the things you can control, then, it seemed to me it was worth at my stage of the career where I could afford it, that was money well spent.
Kate Carpenter 41:25
I want to shift gears just a little bit, because I want to talk a bit about teaching writing. We connected initially because your former student, Lindsay Chervinsky, was on the podcast earlier, and she had mentioned that when she was studying with you, you had walked her through even some sort of grammar basics that had just been left out of her education, as is true for a lot of us, but you've also mentioned that you you have taught writing and writing history as a professor, and that that's something you take seriously. How do you approach teaching students about writing?
Tyler Anbinder 41:59
Well, so one thing is, I guess, first off the bat is, I take it very seriously, which we can't say about all historians, which I think is a shame. And I think that's in part because a lot of historians feel very bad about their writing, right? I know a lot of colleagues who, once I got to know them well enough, or as department chair, I found like actually felt shame about their writing, something they felt terrible about. They thought I'm a really good researcher, but writing is not my strong point, and they actually felt really bad about writing. And so the last thing they were going to do is want to talk about writing in their classes because, or critique other people's writing, because they felt so bad about their own writing. So that's the first thing I thought was so interesting. As department chair, you learn all the stuff about your colleagues that you don't otherwise learn. So I found that really only a quarter of my colleagues at George Washington University even felt competent enough to talk about writing. And then even of that quarter, half of them felt like, well, the main thing I add, it's not my job to teach them, right? There was someone who was supposed to teach them writing. It's not me. I'm teaching them about my subject, and so my comments are all going to be on that subject, and if they're a bad writer, then they're just a bad writer. And I always felt like I could add so much by helping people with the writing, because I found that as an undergraduate, you know, the people I was most grateful to were the people who took, you know, who made the effort to work with me on my writing. Because, you know, I mentioned my the person who inspired me to be a professor was Clarence Walker. Clarence never said one word about my writing. He would just write a on every paper. A, this is fabulous. A, A, A, that doesn't help you, right? It was, it was the guy who gave me Bs and said, your ideas are good, but this could be written much better. And then would actually call me into his office and go through the paper, paragraph by paragraph. Look at this. This could have been better. And and so those were the people I most admired. And so those were the people I wanted to kind of try to emulate. And I figured there would be lots of students who would just say, I don't care, and that's fine. And then the ones who care were ones like Lindsay who would then come into my--because I would always write on the papers, if I thought somebody could improve their writing, I would say, you know, if you want to learn more about how to improve this, come see me. And so you have students like Lindsay who came into my office and said, alright, I know writing is my weakness. How can I make it my strength? And then we kind of launch into that so, so that was one thing. And then I, you know, what I always also found was that a really important way to help students with their writing is not to be so negative about it, is to always couch it in positive terms like so I always, every single paper I ever graded, I started with positives, right? Even the D paper, I start with positives, you know? And then I say, here are the things. Here are some things you can improve if you'd like to. And then what I would always make sure also to do is not give too many different pieces of writing advice in any one writing assignment, I'd always limit it to three. I'd say, All right, here are three things to think about. Working on transitions, let's say, and awkwardness, let's say, and then maybe concluding sentences, let's say whatever they happen to be. And then if the student improved on those on the next paper, I'd say, okay, you've really done well in these now we can work on these other things, which were also a problem in your first paper, but I didn't mention them because I didn't want to overwhelm you. And so, you know, Lindsay was that kind of student, and Lindsay I only got in her senior year, so, and Lindsay was, was exaggerating, I think, the extent, well, the extent to which her writing needed improvement. But it was, as it turned out, with her, some like basic grammar rules, like what's a dangling modifier, right? Most people aren't taught that. Somebody has to teach you things like that. And now I'm very proud of Lindsay, because she's a famous writer.
Kate Carpenter 45:56
Are there people you regularly turn to for feedback on your writing?
Tyler Anbinder 46:00
Yes, so various colleagues, depending on the project. One of my favorite colleagues to turn to is was my colleague, Richard Stott, who's also retired now, and we kind of wrote about the same kind of things in the same kind of period. But then as I got older, you know people from different institutions who I knew, both knew about the subject I was writing about and were good at critiquing writing. So like my friend Kevin Kenny at NYU, is kind of the perfect person to critique your writing, because he's brutally honest and he is scrupulous, you know. So he gives you lots of detail and lots of suggestions, and he thinks both about the little picture and the big picture, which is, you can't ask for anything more with that, because your typical reader either will focus on the big picture. Here are some conceptual changes you might think about for this chapter, or they'll focus on the little things. There's too many quotations in your paragraphs, and so when you find someone who can do both, then that's perfect.
Kate Carpenter 47:07
You've mentioned several people in the course of our conversation that you, whose writing you admire, that you turn to for inspiration. Are there other people that you read, that you think of as the writers you are drawing from as you do your own writing?
Tyler Anbinder 47:19
One thing I found a lot of inspiration from, I'm not sure inspiration is the right word, but kind of role models is like some New Yorker writers. I often would tell students to read the New Yorker for examples of good writing I loved back when he wrote a lot, Adam Gopnik, I love now Jia Tolentino's writing, right? Any writing that kind of makes you smile. And I find their writing makes me smile, not just for the content, but for the writing itself, is really refreshing. And these days, most of my reading is is actually fiction, like I've since I retired, I've become a big detective story fan, so I've been kind of making my way through like the classic, the classic detective story writers. So I read like all the PD James, and then I've just gone through one series after another. And once, once I find a series, I like, I like, I have to read every book in the series. So I've been doing that, and I find that reading that writing is absolutely helpful for academic writing, because the whole problem with academic writing is it's academic writing, right? The content for academic writing has to be academic. The writing does not have to be academic. There does not have to be jargon to get everything you want to say can be gotten across with zero jargon, and jargon gets does not get you anywhere in academia. Nobody's gonna say, Oh, I'm gonna give that person tenure, because their book has all this jargon. It didn't have the jargon I would vote against their tenure, right? Nobody's gonna say that. And yet, students see the jargon in other people's writing and say, Oh, it must be mandatory that I use those big words that I don't actually know what they mean, and it turns out nobody knows what they mean, but other people use them, so I better use them so I look like a serious writer. Somebody has to break that chain, and that's what I tell people, and sometimes they listen and sometimes they don't.
Kate Carpenter 49:15
Dr. Tyler Anbinder, it has been a delight to talk with you about writing and to think through these things with you. Thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past.
Tyler Anbinder 49:24
Sure. Thanks for having me on, Kate.
Kate Carpenter 49:26
Thanks for joining me and Dr. Tyler Anbinder for this episode of Drafting the Past. If you would like to hear what Tyler is working on for his next book project, consider becoming a Patreon supporter of Drafting the Past. He'll be answering that question in bonus audio at patreon.com/draftingthepast exclusively for Patreon supporters. The monthly financial support of those subscribers helps me continue bringing Drafting the Past and these great interviews to you. And of course, for links to the books Tyler and I talked about, as well as a transcript of the episode, visit draftingthepast.com. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
Kate Carpenter 50:06
Oh, one more thing. Thanks to the listener who reminded me that I promised to keep you updated on my dissertation progress and then promptly stopped doing so. If you've been dying for an update, here's what I've got. I am still in the thick of writing the fifth of five chapters of my dissertation on the history of storm chasing and making slow but steady progress. Right now, in fact, I'm writing about the news that a major Hollywood blockbuster, which you might have heard of, called Twister, was being made about storm chasing and how storm chasers shared their experiences with the filmmakers, but they also worried about the effects of that kind of publicity. It's a pretty fun part of the dissertation to write. So more on that to come. Thanks for being interested. See you next time.
