In this episode we’re taking a look at another great new book on this history of the American Revolution: The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, by Richard Bell. In this book, we get to see how the revolution affected not only North America, but most of the world. To learn more about how you write a book that manages to cover such a massive subject with remarkable alacrity, I’m joined by the author of The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, Dr. Richard Bell.
Rick Bell is a professor of history at the University of Maryland and is the author of three books, as well as an edited collection. His first book was We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States, which came out in 2012. He followed that up with Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, an award-winning book that was published in 2019. The American Revolution and the Fate of the World came out at the end of last year. He has also created two streaming courses through the Great Courses series online, with a third on the way.
I have to tell you, I was a little surprised at how I absolutely devoured this book, and I was even more surprised to learn how it came together. I think you’ll love learning about Rick’s approach to writing, his thinking about structure and character, and his habit of wandering the halls of his department, talking to himself. Here’s my interview with Dr. Rick Bell.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Richard Bell, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World
- Richard Bell, Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home
- Richard Bell, We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States
- Richard Bell on Great Courses Plus: “America’s Long Struggle Against Slavery”
- Richard Bell on Great Courses Plus: “Ordinary Americans in the Revolution”
- Zotero
- Octet musical
- Alan Taylor
- Jill Lepore
- Eric Foner
- Ira Berlin
- Ilyon Woo, Master Slave Husband Wife: An Epic Journey from Slavery to Freedom
- Edward P. Jones, The Known World
Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links. If you buy books through these links, Drafting the Past earns a small amount of money that helps to keep the show going.
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. Remember how I warned you a couple of weeks ago that this year's 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence meant that we'd be taking a look at a handful of American Revolution books this year? We have another one today, The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, by Richard Bell. In this book, we get to see how the revolution affected not only North America but most of the world. To learn more about how you write a book that manages to cover such a massive subject with remarkable alacrity, I'm joined by the author of The American Revolution and the Fate of the World, Dr Richard Bell.
Richard Bell 0:43
It's my pleasure.
Kate Carpenter 0:44
Rick Bell is a Professor of History at the University of Maryland, and is the author of three books, as well as an edited collection. His first book was We Shall Be No More: Suicide and Self-Government in the Newly United States, which came out in 2012. He followed that up with Stolen: Five Free Boys Kidnapped Into Slavery and Their Astonishing Odyssey Home, an award-winning book that was published in 2019. The American Revolution and the Fate of the World came out at the end of last year. He has also created two streaming courses through the Great Courses series online with a third on the way. I have to tell you, I was a little surprised at how I absolutely devoured this book, and I was even more surprised to learn how it came together. I think you're gonna love learning about Rick's approach to writing, his thinking about structure and character, and his habit of wandering the halls of his department talking to himself. Here's my interview with Dr Rick Bell.
Richard Bell 1:41
I'm not sure when I started thinking of myself as a writer, Kate, but it's definitely true, because I've now written three books and edited a collection of essays by other people, written maybe a dozen peer reviewed academic essays and book chapters, and find myself writing lectures seemingly all the time. So judging by the output, I guess I'm a writer. I think of myself as a teacher primarily, but I have a university appointment at University of Maryland, which I'm very proud to have. And so like any university professor, my career is split between teaching and research and writing and service. So the first major piece of writing I did, and this will be very familiar to listeners with an academic background, was an undergraduate senior thesis back in the day at University of Cambridge, which also coincided with my late breaking discovery of American history. Because, as your listeners will no doubt note, I may not originally be from America, and I went to University of Cambridge as a British undergraduate studying medieval European history, and got sidetracked in American colonial history, which was one of the best decisions I've ever made, to be sidetracked by American history, and decided I'd go off and write a senior thesis on early American history, which sent me to archives in Richmond, Virginia. I was working on gender discrimination in the evangelical Baptist churches, and it was the first time I'd lived abroad on my own, even, albeit just for a month also, and then came back to write that thesis. that was a positive enough experience that I thought maybe I should do more of this sort of thing. And this is how we often sort of roll over from one degree program to another, trying not to face the real world out there and the other sorts of job markets which are out there. And I come from a family of accountants, by the way, so going to graduate school in the humanities, this was my rebellion against those career expectations. So I went to get a PhD. I had the great fortune of going to Harvard and worked with some terrific people there. And then the PhD thesis, of course, was the biggest, scariest piece of writing I undertook as a young person. I think it took me. I think I graduated in seven years, which is about average. And four or five of those years were spent researching and writing what became my PhD thesis about suicide in early American history, a cultural history. And then the stakes just kept getting higher. After that, I don't know what happened. I was a I was a tenure track professor at University of Maryland, and as many of your listeners will know, research one schools like the University of Maryland, the criteria for tenure in history and in the humanities more broadly amount to one thing, write a book. And so I had six years to adapt and convert and drastically overhaul my PhD thesis into a monograph into a book, which I was very fortunate to publish with the University Press, Harvard University Press, that came out in about 2012 and then subsequently, I've written a couple of other books, which I hope we'll talk about in more detail. But I guess there was no like light switch moment when I became a writer, Kate, they just get the page counts. Just kept. Getting longer of what I was doing, and the stakes seemed to creep up and up, right until whether I'd be fired, or whether I had a job depended on whether I finished that first book or not. So it's been an evolution.
Kate Carpenter 5:11
Well before we get to those books, I want to ask just practical questions about your writing. So when and where do you like to do your work?
Richard Bell 5:18
Oh, geez, you know, I'm also married to a writer, and I think we do things quite differently. Actually, I like noise and busyness, and I am scared by silence and isolation. So I remember writing a lot of my PhD thesis in the local Starbucks, which was the one closest to the law school, and so it was filled with like law school students having what to me as a humanities PhD sounded like very obnoxious conversations, and because I really didn't want to listen to the contents of those, they became sort of background noise that I tuned out instead. And that's basically been my MO ever since. I can write pretty much anywhere. I do write on trains. I do write on planes. I write in any coffee shop with good coffee and good Wi Fi here and around the place. Sometimes I write in archives while I'm researching, though that's not as common as you might think, and if I am, you know, not feeling the spirit or the muse or whatever you prefer to call it, I'll use the old, you know, Pomodoro technique of, you know, making sure I must write for 25 minutes and not do anything else that's not writing and wait for that alarm to go off and then give myself a little five minute break of reward, of checking the New York Times or social media or whatever else. So I like noise and distractions. Since covid, I've actually set up my laptop in our faculty lounge, which gets a lot of through traffic from faculty, using the mailboxes and the Xerox machine, rather than right in my office. While that is probably deeply annoying to my colleagues. They've been too polite to mention it, but I do get to be more social that way. So again, I like to have a busy environment while I'm writing. I don't write in a in an ivory tower or monkish cell.
Kate Carpenter 7:13
Do you write all the time, every day? Or are there certain times of the week or year that you like to write?
Richard Bell 7:18
I don't write at night. I think the morning hours are when I do my best work, but I'm perfectly capable of writing till about three or four in the afternoon if things are going well. I do think of writing as work and as a job that needs scheduling. And so when I'm particularly pressed, you know, I will block out multiple hours on days in my calendar. And you know, say I have to write so many words or so many pages, or I have to cut so many words, and cutting and revising is equally important right now. I'm in a cutting phase, for instance. So if you saw my calendar today, it says you must cut 30% of the words in this document over the next two hours, right? And I think we all live busy lives, Kate, and if I don't schedule that time and protect it and block it out, it will get cannibalized by other things, by meetings and by all my other service and teaching commitments. So I found blocking time out to be very useful. I've also found accountability to be very useful as well. That can take all sorts of different forms, my own guilt and writing toward deadlines, which I find incredibly essential, actually writing towards deadlines. But also I'm a member of two different groups which check in on each other regularly, and they're quite different from each other. Actually, one meets every day, Monday through Friday, for two hours, 930 to 1130 and it's not as elaborate as it might sound, we just check in on zoom the roughly five of us at 930 we each go around the room ever so quickly say what we want to accomplish over the next two hours of work, whatever work might mean. And then we go silent and turn our cameras and mics off. We do some work, and then we report back to each other at the end of the two hours on whether or not we accomplished anything we promised we would do that's a very low stakes thing. And there's the folks in that productivity group. None of them are in my field, but they're all other academics at my university working very different projects. And then I'm a member of perhaps a more traditional writing group. I call the first one a productivity group. I'm going to call this second one a writing group, which meets roughly every month, and there are five of us in that group, and we all work on early American history, and I think all of us would see ourselves as public facing scholars, and we're from different places. Three of us have academic positions. Two of us write for a living. One of us is a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and it's not me, Kate. So we exchange, you know, work in progress chapters every month. So I'm the presenter roughly every three or four or five months, depending on what I'm working on at the time. And I find those, you know, high stakes environments. Right? I care a great deal what my peers think about my work in progress. I want it to be not my first draft I show them, but my fourth draft that I show them, and then we see what happens after that. So that's another form of accountability.
Kate Carpenter 10:11
How do you like to organize your research and your writing? Are there tools that you use? What do you rely on?
Richard Bell 10:16
Yeah, so I'm also a teacher of graduate students and undergraduates, and I teach research seminars from time to time. I'm teaching one right now here at the University of Maryland to about 12 MA and PhD students. And I give them all sorts of advice about what you should do when you're researching. And do I follow all that advice? Some of it, some of it, I go my own way. So in previous research projects, I've used store bought database software to manage my note taking and my citations. Back in the day, I used FileMaker Pro, I'm not even sure they make that anymore. And more recently, I've used Zotero, and had a decent enough experience with Zotero, and I will say, among my students, among the young hipsters, Zotero seems to remain the Top program of choice, though they certainly mentioned a few others that I wrote down at the time, thinking I need to look at these. But I also, like many of us, have trouble disciplining myself to consistently used database software, and so there are plenty of folders of random Microsoft Word documents floating around that are always waiting to be organized and re cataloged and uploaded to Zotero, etc, etc. So it's a mix of aspiration to do this the right way and the practicalities of always being on the run and never having the right document open at the right time.
Kate Carpenter 11:44
Where in that research process do you like to start writing?
Richard Bell 11:47
Oh, geez, I don't know how to answer that. I think all the projects I've done have been different. I'll tell you about the last major research project I completed, which is the book that came out in November of 2025 the American Revolution, fate of the world. I know we'll talk more about that later on. That began in a strange way. I was giving a series of public talks about various pretty traditional American revolutionary topics, let's say the Boston Massacre or something like that, giving them, you know, libraries, senior centers, sometimes even in bars, because there's an organization in DC called profs and pints, which sends profs into bars to talk to confuse people there about the Boston Massacre while they're trying to enjoy their drinks. And so I'd give talks like like that, and during questions, I'd inevitably get a question from someone who, of course, picked up on my unusual accent for a scholar of the American Revolution, and they would ask me something like, you know, okay, so you're British. So what did British people think of the American Revolution? And I had to be honest back then, this is five years ago, and say, I have no idea. I didn't study that in school. We didn't study the revolution at all, where I came from, and I'm not a scholar of British history, so I'll have to go find out. And so I basically went to the research library at my university, University of Maryland, and got off, got off the shelves all the books about British society in the late 1700s and tried to educate myself about what British people thought about the American Revolution. Wrote that up into a talk I heard. I called it disunited kingdom, which tells you a lot about my thesis right there. And started giving that in bars and senior centers and libraries around the place. And then we get to Q and A, and people will say, Okay, that's interesting, but what about Ireland or what about Jamaica? And I'd say, I have no idea what the revolution was like in those places. And I'd go off and write talks. So what I'm saying here is that the book that I've just published is actually one of the byproducts of that endless sort of rhythm of writing a talk and then being sent back to go write another talk. But within each of those talk projects, I'm usually pretty disciplined in gathering all my research materials, transcribing all my notes, whether they're from primary sources or secondary sources, and if I'm using other people's scholarship, I'm very vigilant about not plagiarizing their work and putting my thoughts in my voice. So I do a lot of that sort of work, and then I end up with these massive documents full of my notes in my voice, plus quotations and facts and figures. And then the verb I use in my head and in my calendar is I boil. I boil and distill, you know, 300 pages of notes, down to 100 pages of notes, and then down to 20 pages of notes. And in that distilling process, I'm constantly thinking like I find that that boiling process is when my arguments emerge and when, organically, actually the structure of whatever paper or book chapter or talk I'm giving. Tends to emerge. So for me, it's quite an organic sort of process. I don't start with an outline of where I'm going to end up. That outline emerges from the thinking about what I want to boil down, what I want to discard, or what I want to surface there. So of course, research and writing are always hand in hand, but I would say that the writing follows an intense period of research gathering and processing.
Kate Carpenter 15:26
Is there a point in that distillation process that you say, Okay, now I'm writing a draft, or does one just sort of merge into the other?
Richard Bell 15:33
I think it merges into another. There's a point in the process where I change the file name that the literal name of the file from sorted boils boiled notes to draft. And I guess that's that moment where it's official, right? If I've changed the name of the file, then it's no longer sorted boiled notes. It's now the zero draft of this. And the zero draft is going to be terrible, as we all know, right? But that's the starting point for the next, for the next phase, where we just go back, you know, through one jagged paragraph after another, making it less jagged, make it sound like I'm a native English speaker, and all that sort of things we have to do in the drafting process. And I find drafting and redrafting immensely satisfying here. I think again, that's where real work is done there, because some of the so much of my work these days originates in the form of public talks, where I'm writing the scripts for public talks, which then go on to become book chapters. I'm constantly reading my work aloud to myself. It's a very common part of my practice for me to print out, you know, draft number two, draft number three and then march up and down the hallway of my building, my my department, on less busy days when I'm not going to annoy too many other colleagues and students and talk to myself right read this draft aloud, because I think, as we all know, whatever the eye can catch, the ear is an even more powerful tool for catching those Those Clangers. And so that's a big part of my process.
Kate Carpenter 17:03
You mentioned your writing group, and I'm curious where in the process do you like to bring something to other people for feedback?
Richard Bell 17:10
Depends on who the people are, I think right, depends on the level of trust I have with those people. And I'm going to assume that maybe some of the members of my writing group choose to listen to this episode. And I think they all know that, and they're probably the same way. We are all proud enough of our writing that we don't want to show the messiest preliminary. You know, how the sausage gets made is never pretty, right? How the sausage gets made is never pretty. So I think I said earlier on that if we think of it in terms of the number of drafts, and I might get to six or seven drafts before I consider anything Submittable or anything like that to publish, or something like that, I'm usually going to show draft three or four to my writing group, because I don't think it's a good use of their time to show them draft zero or draft one. I want them to be useful when it's great to have a Pulitzer Prize finalist reading your draft right, and that's a waste of that Pulitzer Prize finalist time if I'm showing them draft number one or draft number a zero. So I try to make the best use of that extraordinary resource that I can I think that for me, that means bringing them into the process where I'm relatively happy with something and I need skilled eyes and ears to see all the things I've missed or that I'm blind to or that I'm flat out wrong about. And the people in my writing group are not necessarily subject experts in my particular sub field of American history. But by God, they know how to tell a story and how to see where the rhythm and the hinge points are and whether characters are well developed, and that's the sort of feedback I need about the halfway point draft four or something like that.
Kate Carpenter 18:56
I want to ask a little bit about your publishing trajectory, because your first book and the edited collection were with university presses, but your two most recent books have been with trade presses. What prompted you to take that leap into trade publication?
Richard Bell 19:10
Yeah, it's interesting. I've been very fortunate to have that opportunity, and I get asked questions about how that happens quite frequently by colleagues who are definitely interested in reaching the same sort of audiences that trade books theoretically allow us to reach. So my first trade book was published with Simon and Schuster in 2018 and it's a book called stolen five free boys kidnapped into slavery and their astonishing Odyssey home. As you can tell from the title, it's a story right, with a beginning, a middle and an end. It's a narrow story. It's a small story. It's a true story, to be clear, a historical non fiction about a kidnapping that took place in Philadelphia in 1825 when five free people, as free as you and me, Kate, were grabbed off the street by a gang of professional people snatchers who make their living in. Turning free black kids into southern slaves. I could talk about the contents of that in great detail, of course, but to talk about the process, I would say that as I had started to zero in on that subject matter as a research project, I had thought to myself, Wow, this feels different than the subject of my previous book, which was a cultural history of suicide over like 80 years, this seems to have the possibility of commercial appeal, and it was wonderful when I started giving academic conference papers about different aspects of this project in its very early phases that a literary agent, cold called me basically, and said, Hey, I saw your paper title on the Organization of American Historians conference schedule for some conference in Chicago in 2012 or whatever. Have you thought about publishing this as a book? And have you thought about a trade press? And I said, Well, yes, I have thought about both those things, but I didn't know how to do it. And so that person, that cold caller, became my agent, Katherine Flynn at the Calligraph Agency in Boston, a great agency. And she, of course, saw the commercial appeal in a story like that, and helped me get my materials in to the sort of shape where she could pitch this project to commercial publishers. And, you know, we academic writers think we know how to do that. It turns out we don't, and we do need professional, I think, help and advice from literary agents who do that for a living and understand market, the market way better than we do. So I found that a very positive and constructive experience, and it resulted in a book contract with Simon and Schuster. And I got to work with the great Dawn Davis at Simon and there was a part of me probably that was trepidatious about that, that, you know, thinking I'd have to sell my soul to the to the commercial imperatives of writing a book that everyone wants to read and that, you know, my editor would be, you know, crossing out paragraphs and telling me to sex it up on every page, or whatever the equivalent would be for a book about slavery for God's sake. And that that didn't happen my editor, who was x, who is excellent, offered me thoughtful feedback about how to make my story sharper and crisper and cleaner, and I never felt like I was being imposed upon, and I felt like we were on the same page. So what I'm saying, I guess, in my own way, Kate, is that I was very comfortable with what the territory that comes with dipping your toe into commercial publishing? And so when the when the chance came, more recently, to pitch another commercial project to an editor, I was very happy to go down that route again, end up working in the different press, different editor, and yet, similarly, had a very positive, supportive experience where I did not feel like I was being railroaded into choices I didn't want to make at any point.
Kate Carpenter 23:04
When did you decide that that these lectures that you'd been doing might be a book altogether?
Richard Bell 23:09
Yeah, that was a bit, this is weird, right? I don't know how other people come to their projects, but it felt weird at the time, because, again, in the post covid world, Zoom came into our lives, and suddenly someone like me, who'd be giving a few talks in bars and libraries before covid Now could log on any time of day and be with groups of people gathered together on Zoom who were desperate for intellectual stimulation in our basements. And I could find, you know, big audiences signing in to hear lectures about various topics. And so as I ran through my previous repertoire, quite swiftly, I was looking to build out new content. And so these questions I got from audiences, you know, what about Britain? What about Ireland? What about Jamaica? Led me down those paths and the way I remember it now. And maybe this is a false memory, but it's definitely the memory I have is that I'd written four or five of these hour long talks about different aspects of the global dimensions of the American Revolutionary War, and it was only then that I realized I was actually writing chapters of a book about the global American Revolution. Now there's more to it, of course, right? An oral talk and a book chapter are different things. I'm well aware of that and I but I suddenly had to start thinking sort of structurally about how these five disparate talks fit together. And as I build out other talks that I thought would now become book chapters, what their relationship would be, I needed to start to sort of cover the waterfront more intentionally, so that by the time I'd written 14 talks, I would have a book that made sense when you stitched it together. So I've never done a research project that came together that particular way, but I think it's actually. Helped me commit to a structure in this new book, which I think is the right structure. So just to explain to folks who haven't read the book yet, the new book The American Revolution and the Fate of the World. There are two ways to write a global history of the American Revolution. One is to let chronology be your master or your mistress. Right? So page one begins at the start, and 400 pages later, you've reached the end, and you've moved through chronologically the war. And that means paragraph by paragraph, you're going to be jumping around the globe a lot, right? The third paragraph is going to be in place x. The fourth paragraph will begin Meanwhile, in place y, and then you go to Gibraltar for a paragraph, and then you go to Yorktown for a paragraph, and then you'd be back to Gibraltar for the next thing that happens there. And you'd be constantly meanwhiling, right, ping ponging across the globe. And there are, you know, there are other books that do similar things to try to tell big, sweeping stories. In fact, most histories of the revolution do that. They do the meanwhile, right, even though they do it on a domestic canvas just in the I 95 corridor from like Massachusetts to Virginia, but with a global canvas, I thought that would be head snapping fundamentally over 400 pages, and it would not lend itself to going deep or holding readers' attention in one particular place or on One particular population. So the structure of the book replicates the origin structure of its contents, which is that there are 14 chapters, and each one is about something different. So one chapter, chapter two is about the American Revolution in Britain. One chapter, chapter four is about the Native American experience in the revolution. One chapter, chapter, let's make up a number 12. Is about India in the revolution. There are other chapters about the Caribbean, about the Spanish Empire, maritime, POWs, enslaved individuals, you name it. And that's in part, because that's how this content originated. But I also am absolutely convinced this is the only sensible way to actually structure a book like this, right? To pick a theme, tell that story, and then pick another theme and do it again. Right now, the downside of that, it should be obvious to anyone, right? It means you go through the war 14 times, and there are some tent pole moments which get treated more than once, right? So the Battle of Yorktown appears in three different chapters of my book, but in one chapter, I'm talking about it from the Hessian German perspective. From another. I'm talking about it from the perspective of French troops, from another. I'm talking about it from the perspective of black refugees, right? So it looks different each time we go through it. It's a bit sort of, sort of a Rashomon effect, if you if you put it together at the end. But I think the advantages are, readers get to go deep. They get to meet characters and learn about characters and invest in those characters and places. So when I was pitching this project to commercial publishers, I was crystal clear with my agent, if anyone questions this structure, or tries to say we're going to meanwhile it we're walking away. We're not going we're not going down that path. Right? I'm generally a very flexible, easy to deal with person, as I hope, as a client for editors. But this was the hill I was going to die on, that this structure is the right structure.
Kate Carpenter 28:15
To talk more about the book structuring characters, I asked Rick to read an excerpt from his new book. Here's Dr Richard Bell reading from the start of chapter eight of The American Revolution and the Fate of the World.
Richard Bell 28:27
“When the Revolutionary War broke out, William Russell was a nobody trying his best to become a somebody. His father was a shipwright, one of thousands of Boston craftsmen employed in maritime construction and waterfront work. It was hard, repetitive labor, and Russell wanted dearly to do something different. He saw himself not as a laborer but as a scholar. His mother had run a small school when he was little, and so, when Russell grew up and left home, he set his sights on becoming a teacher like her. But the Revolutionary War had other ideas. Russell’s teaching apprenticeship suddenly evaporated in the wake of Lexington and Concord as boys abandoned their books and rushed off to enlist. Russell and his wife, Mary, had young children of their own to feed, and he could not afford to be out of work for long, so he soon followed his students to the nearest patriot mustering place. His sympathies had long tilted in that direction. He was a minor member of the Sons of Liberty, and his descendants later claimed he had been a bit player in the Boston Tea Party, too. In the summer of 1776, Russell enlisted as a sergeant in an artillery company of the Massachusetts militia. He would serve thirty months in patriot uniform, digging trenches and building earthworks during the abortive siege of British-occupied Newport, Rhode Island, in August 1778. This was the disastrous campaign in which the newly arrived French Navy left patriot units like Russell’s in the lurch; the fiasco that nearly destroyed the fragile Franco-patriot alliance. Russell quit a few months after that, in early 1779, feeling a bit humiliated, perhaps, but also angry that promised pay had failed to materialize. When Russell got back to Boston, he found his family in tatters. Two of his children had taken ill and died while he was away. The British had also plundered his home on Temple Street as they evacuated the city, turning his wife and surviving children into refugees. There was still no teaching work to be had, either, so he had to leave again. This time it was to follow the example of Mary’s brother Moses and go to see on a privateer, a retrofitted merchant ship authorized by the Continental Congress or one of the rebel states to attack British vessels and plunder their cargoes. At thirty-one, Russell was older than most other privateering volunteers, but he was broke and out of options. Redcoat soldiers had ruined his life and crushed his dreams, and privateering held out the rare chance to strike back. On June 19, 1779, Russell sailed out of Boston harbor on an eighteen-gun vessel named the Jason.”
Kate Carpenter 31:11
Okay, first of all, are you narrating your audio book?
Richard Bell 31:15
Oh, yes, they did. They did let me narrate my audio book. I had to beg and plead because I really wanted to do it, and they let me.
Kate Carpenter 31:21
You're quite marvelous. So I'm glad to hear. Well, I chose this excerpt in part because I wanted to talk about how you use characters and protagonists in this book. So most of your chapters use a protagonist like William Russell here to sort of guide readers through each each perspective in the book, how did you choose whose stories you were going to tell and bring bring those biographies together?
Richard Bell 31:46
Yeah, yeah. Thanks for flagging that. That is one of the distinctive features of this book, that 14 thematic chapters, five of them, the theme is a person, and that person is used as a representative of a larger group, so the reader learns not just about the person, but about the group from which they're drawn. So you just heard the intro to the William Russell chapter. I'm going to try not to call him Bill Russell, to confuse any sports fans out there. I was desperate to call him Bill the whole time, but everyone who knew sports told me that was a bad idea. So William Russell is one of maybe 50,000 Patriot privateers who will do essential work attacking British maritime shipping in the Atlantic at a time when patriots do not have a navy with no offense to John Paul Jones, the US Navy is a man in a dinghy with a dog. It's just not a real it's nothing to be scared of. Patriot privateers like William Russell fill the void where the continental Navy should be and not is not yet. What else do I want to say about that? I wanted readers to invest in characters here, because more often than not, I'm taking readers into unfamiliar places or arenas of the war with which they have no familiarity, right? So this is not really a book about, you know, George Washington and the Battle of Saratoga and Lexington and Concord, some of the familiar tent poles are definitely here, like the Battle of Yorktown. But otherwise this tries to draw your attention into new directions you may not have thought of before. And if you got if I'm going to give you 20 pages about privateering, most of which I think will be quite unfamiliar to most readers who are usually used to being told land based stories about the American Revolutionary War, then I think having a character to pull you into that story can be a really useful sort of lack of a better phrase teaching tool there. So I was always on the lookout for the one character who could help me tell a story, one of the 14 stories here. And sometimes I found those characters, William Russell. It is a character I follow throughout this chapter. He's on almost every page, and the other four characters spread across different chapters of the book are Peggy Shippen, who comes from a loyalist leaning family, and she's my loyalist refugee. There is Harry Washington, who's enslaved at Mount Vernon and escapes and end up in ends up in British Canada, then British Sierra Leone. He's my freedom seeking fugitive. There is Molly Brandt, which is her English name, of course, she's a Haudenosaunee Iroquois woman, and she is my way into thinking about the trans Appalachian West and Native America. And there is Baron Steuben, probably the most familiar central character I have in the book, The out of work, Prussian drill master, who tries to europeanize George Washington's Continental Army. And I loved it when the plan came together. I could find the one character who. Who I hoped could be a through line through unfamiliar terrain and material that wasn't always possible. Some of these chapters are so wide ranging that it's fantastical to think that any human being could encompass all of them. So a great example would be one of my favorite chapters in the book is about the Spanish alliance in the war. We all dimly know that France was involved in the war. Most of us have forgotten that Spain was deeply involved in the war. I would argue as critical, if not more critical a partner than France in the war. And yet Spanish involvement is everywhere all the time. So when Spain gets in in 1779 it launches attack after attack on British installations across Western Europe. Spain tries to invade southern Britain. Spain launches a three and a half year siege of British Gibraltar off the coast of Spain itself. Spain is also attacking British Caribbean possessions. Spain is also pushing in from Spanish Louisiana into British Florida, Spain's also pushing in around the Great Lakes. Think of Chicago land area. Now, imagine there's one person who pops up in all those places, right? He would, he or she would be very tired and constantly, you know, commuting. So there's no one person that can carry a sprawling chapter like that. But in other chapters where things weren't, maybe quite that magnitude of chaos, I tried to find that one person who could draw us in. And even in the chapters when things are more sprawling, you'll usually find two or three characters basically serving like a relay team, right, carrying the reader forward for 10 pages, then handing it off to someone else to carry you forward for the next five pages and then onward. And the chapters are short. They're only about 20 pages.
Kate Carpenter 36:47
You mentioned that one of the challenges of having these 14 chapters thematically written is that, of course, there's repetition involved. Right? The same events recur in different places and from different perspectives. You do a really great job of reminding readers of those things without making a slog through long descriptions multiple times. There's a really great example of that in this excerpt to where you sort of just sum up, you know, this was the disastrous campaign in which the newly arrived French navy left Patriot units in the lurch, sort of referencing then that that French chapter did that come through in revision? How did you keep that in that very clean and light touch?
Richard Bell 37:27
Yes, that's exactly right. So that there's two lines in the excerpt we just read at the start of the William Russell privateers chapter, where we mentioned that you know Russell, before he becomes a privateer, is swept up in a patriot and French joint attack on Newport, Rhode Island, which is a British possession at the time, which is a disaster. And I breezed through that so quickly, not just because I need to get to the privateering, but because I've already told readers about that for about two or three pages in a Chapter, almost immediately before or two chapters back, pretty close, actually. So my assumption is that readers will remember to some degree, and it would indeed be patronizing to stop and tell them the exact same things again. But we've now talked, Kate, you and I about how this project emerged organically from initially quite segregated in person talks and so yeah, much of the work of turning talks into a book had to do with the connective tissue that now I hope you know, binds the chapters together. So the 14 of them, I think, are more than the sum of their parts, right? I think they add up to something greater than the 14 individual components. And so I talked to you previously about walking up and down the hallway with draft four of whatever I'm working on as we reached the end of the writing process with my editor, Becky Salatin at Riverhead. Penguin, you know, I had to run up and down the hallway reading all the chapters, or three chapters in a row, to make sure that we're not repeating ourselves, but also, we're setting up characters who will become through lines in multiple chapters, Lord Cornwallis is actually a good example here. I think most Americans know Lord Cornwallis from one thing he did in his life, which is lose the Battle of Yorktown in October of 1781, and I have him losing that battle three times. He loses three times in this book, but then in two other chapters, he pops up in very different circumstances, because he will be sent to India in the 1790s to reform the bloated and corrupt East India Company and to try to expand Britain's territorial footprint there, having just lost 13 Colonies in North America. And he proves very successful and determined to do that. And he does such a good job, as far as his paymasters in London are concerned, that they sent him to Ireland in 1798 to suppress a rebellion. There. I have an India chapter. I have an Ireland chapter. So Cornwallis will walk onto the stage each time. And of course. I do not reset his biography each time, right? That would be very tedious. We try and show him in new lights, let's say so. By the end of the book, you realize that from the perspective of the British hierarchy or the British Empire, the defeat at Yorktown is not the cataclysmic Empire ending event that we in America might assume, right? It's definitely a setback. It's a humiliating setback for him and for the Empire, for the king and the Prime Minister, but the British Empire and Cornwallis live to fight another day and actually find renewed ambition and aspiration as a result of losing those 13 Colonies and trying to link together what happens in Ireland and Asia, what happens in America and Cornwallis turns out to be my multi chapter way to do that.
Kate Carpenter 40:48
This is obviously a book with a huge scope, as you've just illustrated, and that means, of course, that you can't include everything that's happening in all of those places all the time, or else we would be reading this book for years. How did you decide what would stay in and what you would leave out?
Richard Bell 41:03
Yes, I mean, I hope I made the right decisions. I'm very proud and comfortable with how this book came out so far, but it's perfectly when people's rights to read this and say, Hey, what about and then fill in the blank with their pet project, right? And so a longer book could have included other topics, right? There's very limited coverage of Russia in this book. There is limited coverage of southern Africa. In this book, there are relevant places in Europe that like Poland or Corsica or Greece, which could be tied to the American Revolution in useful, productive, illuminating ways. If, if the Patriots have three key European allies, it's France, Spain and the Netherlands. And you will know Kate from reading the book that France gets its own chapter and Spain does Netherlands don't Netherlands get screwed by me in this in this book, because, you know, my evaluation was, The Netherlands get in so late, and their participation is so limited that they don't it doesn't add up to the meatiness of the other chapters. To write a 15th Chapter which centers the Netherlands. So what I did instead was, at any moment in other chapters, when the Netherlands contribution is visible, I made sure to acknowledge that so references to Dutch participation pop up, actually in four or four or five different places. I remind folks in the India chapter that the Dutch control Cape Town, which is the main shipping route for French and British armies to the Indian Ocean to engage in that war. I remind people in, I think the Africa chapter, or maybe the Australia chapter, I can never remember, which that the Dutch control 13 slave forts in West Africa. And so when the British are trying to starve up those slave forts, using British convicts to do it, which is wild, many of those convicts are flee to nearby Dutch forts to avoid doing that work. And then earlier in the book, in a chapter about the British Caribbean, I say that even though the Caribbean was a somewhat sleepy theater in the very early years of the war, much of the activity in those early years was gun running and gun smuggling from the Dutch island of St eustatius, which was neutral at the time. So I found other ways to sort of incorporate the Dutch at the relevant points here. So I did not want this book to be any longer. I want people to read this book. And I think that means, you know, knowing when, knowing when to stop. But you know, any reader is entitled to say, What about and I will say, you know, go write your own book about the American Revolution is a global conflict. You'll have to make these choices yourself.
Kate Carpenter 43:46
Speaking of choices you make, I do want to ask one more thing, because you make, you make a brief appearance as a narrator in the introduction. You sort of talk about your own experiences of learning history and what you did and didn't learn. I did, I confess, reach out to one of the members of your writing group to ask for any inside Intel before I was prepping these questions, and learned that you had some resistance to including yourself in that introduction, and that it was something that your editor--
Richard Bell 44:11
You have done your opposition research.
Kate Carpenter 44:13
Yeah, I like to be prepared, but I'm curious what, why did your editor push for that, and how did that kind of play out in that conversation.
Richard Bell 44:21
I can't remember who pushed for it. Maybe it was my editor. It may well have been. It may have been members of my writing group pushing me to do that. So, yeah, that's a brief moment, I think, in the introduction, where I tell readers on the page who have never heard my speaking voice that I'm British and I have to acknowledge that, and I talk about very briefly, my own education as a British school boy, not being taught anything about American history, especially the revolution or its global significance, and instead being taught about the mythical British equivalents of that which is. Is Britain defeating France and Spain in the Tudor golden age, and then defeating the Nazis in World War Two. And I, I say these are myths, right? And every nation tells its young people and consumers of pop culture myths that happen to me as a British school boy, and it's happening to all of us here in the US as well, all the time, where we're confronted in pop culture, at least with a shrunken and sanitized version of the American Revolution. So I was using my my own experience, to sort of highlight that myths are commonplace, and also to flag that I've been, I guess, an outsider and a late comer to the study of American history, and that perhaps not, growing up in this pop culture universe on this side of the Atlantic has enabled me to more keenly perceive how myth and history are sometimes at odds when we talk about the revolution in public in this country. You know, I've got to tell you that, you know, before writing that I definitely was uncomfortable, not opposed, but uncomfortable about writing about myself. That's not why I'm a writer. I don't think I'm that interesting. I think people want to learn about the history rather than about this particular author. But, you know, my editor and my writing group thought I had a useful perspective here that would help me, you know, deliver the concept of the book as a reframing that breaks out of mythology, that breaks out of romantic, narrow rebels versus Red Coats understanding. And I think that's the right advice, actually. And I will say that I've been talking about the book in public since it came out in November of 2025 doing a lot of public events, and I've actually leaned in to the biographical part more heavily in public than I do on the page in the book there, and sort of flesh out some of those stories and some of my own international experiences recently, which have confirmed The globalness of the American Revolution. So, for instance, I went on vacation with my family to Nova Scotia, Canada this past summer, and we were in a mall in Halifax. And weirdly, there was a history museum in the mall, which is, doesn't happen in my mall, but it was a Black History Museum. And it was about, you know, black refugees of American slavery fleeing to British Canada to Nova Scotia during the Revolutionary War, and the curator was himself a descendant of one of these black refugees. And he was descendant of a black refugee in my book, which was just astonishing to me. I was like, this is this guy's a celebrity. So me and my friend took pictures with him, and I show those pictures when I'm talking about the book in public. And then about a year ago, I had a chance to go on a vacation to Taiwan, because there was a really great fair deal for like, 500 bucks to go to Taiwan. So I was like, I'll go. And I talked to some student groups while I was there about the American Revolution. And these Asian students, what they were most interested in was the British East India Company's tea trade in Guangzhou, that brings on the famous Boston Tea Party, right? So, you know, I've had lots of travel experiences or personal experiences which remind me that the evidence of this being a global war is often hiding in plain sight. All we have to do is acknowledge it and look at it rather than render it invisible. So that's been a useful, I guess, teaching tool with teaching about the book in public.
Kate Carpenter 48:25
We just have a little time together, and I want to ask about some of the influences on your own writing. So first, I'd like to know what's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Richard Bell 48:35
Oh, geez, I'm very bad at retaining or actually living by writing advice. So every time I hear something cool, I think I should definitely write that down and put it on my, you know, on a post it note right in front of my laptop. And then I never do which means it seeps out of my brain, like within three days I will say that I think, as I said to you earlier on, I think that writing is hard and requires time management and discipline, and that I treat it as work and as a job that has to be blocked into my calendar. So I'm always, I always resonate with writers who say, if you want to write something, you have to sit in the chair, right? You're not going to write something if you're not sitting in the chair and working on the document, right? So that concept of sitting in the chair and being undistracted for whatever portion of time it is, even if it's only 25 minutes of Pomodoro, right? I find that incredibly valuable advice. I would also say that I heard someone smarter than me. Actually, it was in a play a couple of weeks ago I saw in DC a new musical called Octet, which is about the distractions of the Internet age and social media, and the characters in that play octet, they're in a sort of Alcoholics Anonymous type group for people who are addicted to their screens and social media. And they read out a series of sort of mantra. Mantras for this fake group about people needing support. And one of the mantras, which came out more cleanly than I'm about to paraphrase it, and I tried to remember, as I was hearing it, was something like, you know, consumption is in inverse proportion to creativity, which what I took to mean is every minute you spend scrolling is a minute you're not spending creating and writing. Now, I scroll like everyone else, I scroll like everyone else, but I feel guilty about it more and more.
Kate Carpenter 50:33
Who do you read? What books do you turn to for inspiration for writing?
Richard Bell 50:38
Yeah, I try to read a lot outside of work. So I guess I'll just mention two really obvious categories we talked earlier in this conversation, Kate about trying to make the transition from academic publishing to commercial trade publishing. And of course, no one who comes up in academia is ever offered any real training in how to write for a general a general audience. So those of us who try to make that shift are either taking a leap into the dark, or we have to try and educate ourselves and train ourselves to make that a leap. So to state the absolute obvious, I try to read good historical non fiction by writers I admire who have made that leap, and I try to see how they did it right in terms of sentences, characters and all that sort of stuff. So writers I come back to again and again would be Alan Taylor, who's written, who's won more Pulitzer Prizes than I've had hot dinners. Jill Lepore, of course, who is a staggering stylist, who writes for The New Yorker and many other things, and people like that. Eric Foner would be a good example. Ira Berlin would be a good example as well. And then people who don't hold academic positions, who've also just succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, of making history accessible to the general public. One of the people who blurred my book, a friend of mine, Ilyon Woo wrote this terrific book, Master Slave Husband, Wife, about the Craft escape a couple of years ago. I think her prose is just luminous, and I want to be like her when I grow up. So reading that sort of stuff is, I think, good background for doing these sorts of projects. And I would actually say, more importantly for me, I read a lot of literary fiction as well, which usually has nothing to do with what I write about at work. But I'm just in awe of people who craft sentences for a living and create fictional worlds and create from scratch characters you invest in and care about. So I'm constantly, you know, underlining the books I own, historical fiction, non historical fiction. I read a lot of contemporary fiction, actually, to see how people do that stuff, how they communicate, you know, character with a gesture or a description or something like that. So that's been a model for me, and most of that is not historical fiction. But if I'm going to point to point to one book that I think does this really well, it's actually, ironically, going to be historical fiction. A book won all the prizes about 20 years ago. Book was by a DC writer called Edward P Jones, and the book is called The Known World. And Edward P Jones, who did very little research, by his own admission, imagined himself into the mindset of black slave owners in Virginia in the 1850s those people did exist, and we know almost nothing about them, and he imagined himself into their consciousness and their worlds. But more than that, sentence by sentence, it is Toni Morrison levels of gorgeousness. And so I think any writer you know hopes a little bit of that Edward Jones magic can rub off from time to time. That's the hope.
Kate Carpenter 53:49
Wow, I have to read that. Now, before I let you go, I want to know, are you up for talking about what you're working on now. You alluded to it earlier.
Richard Bell 53:56
Oh, did I? I don't remember that. So let's think so I've got one project that's already completed, but not yet out, and that's not a book project, because books take time. I spent most of 2025 writing a 12 part six hour video lecture course for the Great Courses Plus about the Declaration of Independence, and by God, it is a deep dive into that document, coming at it from every possible angle, including the global angle. Of course, I'm really proud of how those lectures came out. We recorded them in a studio in Chantilly, Virginia in December, and they will drop on the Great Courses Plus platform, I believe, in May or April of 2026 I hope folks will go take a look at them. I'm super proud of them. And of course, the timing is to set up for July 2026, America, 250 so that's been fun, and that's definitely a public facing project, even if it's not a book. I'm currently debating what my next book project will be. I have rushed into book projects before thinking, what's the next thing? What's the next thing I must get? On with the next thing, and when I did that, that book project didn't pan out, and I wouldn't say wasted, but two years my life went by without anything to show for that. So I'm trying to think very intentionally about before I commit to another project, as members of my writing group will testify, I shared with them three book ideas a few weeks ago, last time I was my turn to present, and they liked two of them and didn't like the third, I presented the same three ideas to my agent. She liked two of them and didn't like the third, but not the same ones as my writing group, of course. And then my own preference is, you know, I have my own favorites as well, so we'll see which one bubbles to the surface. I had assumed that I would write one and only one book about the American Revolution in my life. My other books are about different subjects, and I've really liked having to retrain and retool from project to project to master different things that said, I came away from this project about the global dimensions of the American Revolution with a strong interest in how wars end, and how people who are at each other's throats go back to being people who live next to each other. And so maybe there's a book about war's end, the end of the revolution that's still in me, we will see.
Kate Carpenter 56:22
Fantastic. Dr. Rick Bell, what a pleasure to hear about your writing process. Thank you so much for joining me for Drafting the Past.
Richard Bell 56:30
Been so been my pleasure. Thanks, Kate.
Kate Carpenter 56:32
Thanks again to Rick Bell for joining me for this episode, and thanks to you for listening. Find links to his books and the other books we mentioned in this episode in the show notes at draftingthepast.com. Be sure to subscribe to the show on your favorite podcast listening platform so you never miss an episode. Wherever you are in the world, I hope that you and your loved ones are safe. Until next time, friends don't let friends write boring history.
