Jennifer A. Jordan and the Craft of Hands-On History Research

Kate Carpenter
Welcome to the Drafting the Past podcast, a show about how historians write history. I'm your host, Kate Carpenter. Sometimes the book a historian started out writing becomes something pretty different by the time it's finished. That was the case for today's guest, who planned to write something like a global history about the unexpected places people grew hops for beer, but ended up focusing largely on one part of Wisconsin for her new book. It's a great example of how sometimes telling a seemingly smaller story can allow a historian to explore bigger themes. I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Jennifer A. Jordan to talk about her new book, Beer Ghosts: In Search of Lost Hops and the Women Who Grew Them.

Jennifer Jordan
Thanks for having me.

Kate Carpenter
Jennifer is a professor of sociology, urban studies, and history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She's the author of two additional books: Structures of Memory: Understanding Urban Change in Berlin and Beyond and Edible Memory: The Lure of Heirloom Tomatoes and Other Forgotten Foods. Her research for Beer Ghost had her not only digging through archives but traipsing around the edges of fields looking for hop vines. And I loved chatting with her about her hands-on approach to history. We also talked about the kind of dogged and detailed archival research it took to write this history, and how she found the perfect voice for the book that's warm and inviting, without being overly casual. You'll also hear about some of the best book promotion I've ever heard on the show. Beer Ghost is a delightful book to read, and Jennifer was an even more delightful guest. Enjoy my conversation with Dr. Jennifer Jordan.

Jennifer Jordan
I am definitely someone who has written words on paper for a long time. I was thinking about that. I've been going through some boxes of papers recently, and I still have the R2D2-C3PO spiral bound notebook that I got soon after the original Star Wars came out, in which I started writing down very important things in my life as a seven-year-old or eight-year-old. I think I still have the Holly Hobby diary where I recorded getting my ears pierced. So kind of recording things like I've always been an archiver, I think, and always words are always flowing in my mind, and I'm sort of always narrating the present. And then I think I'm also always telling myself little stories about the past, just as I go through my day. And then a lot of that ends up on paper in some form. So academia eventually became a way to to write and then also have health insurance. Like back, you know, I I was on the job market 27 years ago, so 28 years ago. So things have— it's a different world than it was then. But that was sort of my thinking was this is a career where I can be a writer and also have some stability.

Kate Carpenter
Let's start just with all the details of how you like to work. When and where do you like to do your writing?

Jennifer Jordan
There are two, I would, say two very different modes, and one is, oh no, this is due really soon. Everything goes out the window, and I have to work on it all day long, every day, and so that's like the final stage of Beer Ghosts, especially woo like the page proofs, and and then I indexed it myself. This was the first time I had indexed my own book, and indexers deserve every penny that they charge because that was—it was kind of fun. My index is, in in my view, actually very subversive. I don't know that anyone else will notice, but it is, you know, it has a message. And but it took so much time. So normally, I am a nine to five worker. Don't work on weekends, just have a normal schedule. What for me feels normal, and so when I'm not in that like project completion mode, and it's like let's say it's the semester, Thursdays are my writing day, and they're really pretty sacred. People disrespected them when I was department chair, and I may still have some resentment about that, but I really like. I just know Thursday is the day where I can immerse myself in in whatever I'm working on, and that can mean reading, it can mean taking notes, it can be writing new prose, it can mean revising. I use the term writing quite broadly to mean you know working on the current big writing project. I also I guess I would add to that I'm a morning writer too. Like I really, I love that first caffeinated rush of writing time and and project time.

Kate Carpenter
Do you set sort of goals for yourself or have things you're trying to accomplish in a given writing day?

Jennifer Jordan
No, and I feel like that's—I'm very different from a lot of writers in that I've listened to a few of these podcasts and heard how you know the overlap and then the tremendous departures in ways that that many of us approach this. And I am, I absolutely do not respond to a detailed set of tasks to check off. It's much more immersive, and and really, it's partly I'm an overwriter, so I, you know, Beer Ghosts, it's not a super long book. It at one point it was I don't know 550 pages long. So, but that's how I think. It's you know I don't regret all the cutting that had to happen. Like that's just part of the process for me. And I don't, I'm not wistful about like having spent all that time writing those words that that all needed to happen. But it means like there's no way I can measure my progress in how many words I write in a given day. In fact, it's probably better to just always plan to measure by how much I've cut. You know, that's a better marker of of whether I'm making progress. But for me, it's really time. It's like, okay, I'm going to spend all day Thursday immersed in, right now, it's textiles. It's you know, I'm going to read. I'm going to take notes. I'm going to write up, you know, consolidate notes from other places, from my notebooks and my phone. Any of that at work for me counts as writing.

Kate Carpenter
Do you have systems to organize your research and notes?

Jennifer Jordan
I do. I do. There are sort of two things that happen. One is ,a lot of my writing, like there are sentences in Beer Ghosts that were written in my head while driving or while in some way unable to actually write them down, but I imprint them in my head. Like I have this whole little mnemonic system for kind of remembering ideas that come up when I can't write them down or take a voice memo or something, so I sort of filter that all in. I just every so often I do a sweep of like, okay, pull the notes off the phone. I also have paper notebooks, like pull the notes out of the paper notebooks, put them into my computer. So that's kind of for the writing part, and then for the research, it's really folders on my hard drive that all have a corresponding life on OneDrive and on a thumb drive, everything's backed up. But I use just like the hard drive on my Mac. Like the way that the folders are organized is also a way of outlining the project. And at like an early stage in the writing process, when a folder starts needing a whole lot of subfolders, right? When it just starts getting really full of information, that is a sign, right? That is a sign that this is the direction that the project is going in. That this is the material to pay attention to. When those folders get really rich, and you have to start then adding subfolders, and I have a lot of strategies for letting a project tell me what it wants, like not to turn it into a sentient thing. But I do sometimes, I feel like you have to find a way to put it outside of yourself to listen to it or to see it, and then let it tell you where to go. So that's even my hard drive can do that for me.

Kate Carpenter
Is that where in the process you start writing, when you when you notice those subfolders multiplying?

Jennifer Jordan
I I really write, I wouldn't say from day one. I think there's a little phase where I'm not writing, and that is library book phase. So I'm, at one point with Beer Ghosts, there was a shopping cart at the UWM library with my name on it at the circulation desk because I was checking out, I had so many interlibrary loan books and so many books from the library that I was just working through, and so they would just toss them all into the shopping cart and have them ready for me when I came to pick things up. So I felt like that was a real honor that I had my own shopping cart at the library, but I use just and you know a lot of this you can do now in Google Books too. So I certainly spend a lot of time reading histories of Wisconsin counties from 1920, you know, that are all digitized on Google Books. But I do a lot of library book reading, and it's flipping through physical books is a really important part of the process for me, and it's partly, again, it's like getting outside of my own head and letting things emerge that I'm not looking for, and that can then be kind of transformative. This entire book, Beer Ghosts, was sparked by one sentence in another book, so I think reading is really important, and that's, I take notes from books, and so I have you know just huge stacks, digital stacks of reading notes that I can then, if you know, the start of the writing process is often just going through all of those reading note files and kind of dumping ideas, quotations, a few sentences into a new document.

Kate Carpenter
And you're just keeping those in documents?

Jennifer Jordan
Yeah, yeah. I'm, I just write in Word.

Kate Carpenter
Do you like to outline? Do you structure kind of what you're planning?

Jennifer Jordan
I do up to a point, and then it always changes. And that's also like this iterative process of the hard drive files with the project itself, and there there is a sort of shocking thing about the origin of this book, or about kind of the different stages of the book. But one of them is just that basically, I've done enough research for many other books, and I'm sure that I am not alone in that. And at a certain point, I had to throw much of that overboard. So you know, initially the outline is chapter on hops in this country, chapter on hops in this other country, etc. At a so at a certain point, one just one chapter of what I had outlined as the whole book that became the book, and so then that kind of blossoms into these sections. So I do outline. There's also, I don't really do this anymore, but for many earlier projects, I would outline everything by putting major ideas on post-it notes and then putting them on the wall wherever I was. So at one point I was a fellow. I had a Fulbright in Vienna, and I was at this cultural studies center. And I just covered the wall of my office there in post-it notes to outline Edible Memory, my last book. And people thought it was hilarious. Like it just looks like chaos in some ways, and there were many jokes about like what would happen if someone came in and rearranged all my post-it notes, you know. And the the true answer to that is nothing because once it's actually on a post-it note and on the wall, it's already kind of in my brain in that place. But that method freaks me out now, and I don't use it. And there's always a stage in a project where recycling, like ripping all those post-it notes off the wall and stuffing them into the recycling, was like really liberating.

Kate Carpenter
Sure. I meant to ask, what was the sentence that prompted this book?

Jennifer Jordan
It was in Richard Unger's book on beer and brewing in Renaissance and medieval Europe, so just you know, nice background readings. And at one point, he mentions hops growing fairly close to the Baltic Sea, like pretty far north in Germany. And my antenna just perked up. I thought that is weird. Like I have always thought of hops growing in Germany in the southern regions in the Hallataal in Spalt, and here is this evidence that hops grew in many other places and in places I wouldn't have suspected. So then I thought, huh, I wonder where else hops have grown and don't grow any longer. Hijinks ensued, you know, like yada yada yada, Beer Ghosts is coming out in a few weeks.

Kate Carpenter
Amazing. How do you handle revision, especially as an overwriter?

Jennifer Jordan
I think revision is really where the magic happens. I don't mind revision. I don't mind critique. I think that you know I've been writing for a long time. I still have so much to learn about writing from myself and from other people. And revision is the place where that can happen, I think, and so I'm much more comfortable having just a ton of writing on the page and then getting to work with that, and even in the final stage of of page proofs on Beer Ghosts, I was like, I can still make this better, and I don't think, you know, I think I was right. Like, I don't think that's just kind of being a neurotic author. I think it's like, oh, you know, I'm seeing this now with the clearest eyes I've ever seen it with, and there are still additional. And they were actually quite tolerant of, you know, I made a lot of small changes to the final proofs just to, you know, fix some verbs and fix some repetition. And so, yeah, I I think revision is really beautiful, like both for the thinking itself, for kind of understanding the research, and for stepping back and maybe letting go of some initial assumptions. And then it's also a really beautiful place to you know make the writing better and to craft the ways in which the message comes across. I think it also looks really, really different if you are trying to revise a dissertation and your funding is running out in a couple of months, or if you are trying to get tenure and journals are being really slow, you know, with review processes. Like it's, the luxury of, revision is very different if you're on a deadline, and especially if you're on a deadline that affects your finances or you know these other big things. And so I feel like some of what I'm saying about writing, it really has to be seen in the context of being tenured and being you know really far down. Like I have so much more of my career behind me than I do ahead of me. You know, not in a morose way, just like in a literally, you know, you don't have this career forever, and and so some of some of that, I think, some of those positive feelings about revision may come from having the time to do it. It's a lot more stressful if there's a lot of other external and kind of life shaping factors.

Kate Carpenter
You mentioned to me ahead of this that Beer Ghosts was your third book, but it was the hardest one to get across the finish line. What was it that made this one so challenging?

Jennifer Jordan
It was challenging at almost every stage. There were times that were, that were really enjoyable. There there are times where I was really in the flow of kind of writing and storytelling, and I really enjoyed that and the research. I loved the archival research, but it's partly that the actual book itself, the topic, changed dramatically in the course of writing, and then this is also, this is a trade book with a university press, and I think that's like an important distinction. I have a trade contract with Chicago. This is not, I don't have a contract for a more standard academic monograph, and so there is an expectation that I would write it in a way that you know people outside of my field would be, and hopefully people outside of academia might want to read it. And we are not trained to write that way in, you know, our academic careers, at least sociologists, historical sociologists, etc. So I had to kind of keep learning, keep trying to do that. On the other hand, even with a trade contract at Chicago, the book goes out for academic peer review, and so I had to please both that sense of a broader audience and these academic specialists, and I think that that makes it a better book. I think the peer review process made it a better book, but it was really hard to aim for both of those audiences.

Kate Carpenter
I caught in your acknowledgments that this book went through three rounds of peer review. Why?

Jennifer Jordan
A couple of reasons. So, so first of all, I had, I got an advanced contract for the book, which is not everyone's cup of tea, and it's and I may not do that for my next book, but I did it for the last one. I did it for Edible Memory, and then I did it for Beer Ghosts, and it's partly because I take a long time to write a book. I'm not an article writer. I sort of look unproductive for a long time while I'm working on a book. And having the advance contract on my CV was a way of just being like, there's something happening. You know, something is in the works. It also, I think, helps think about the audience. Think about you know where this project is going to end up. So first, I got the advance contract. Then a familiar story, you know, time passed and things, various things happened, including becoming department chair a few months before the pandemic, and you know just things slowed down a little bit, and then also the project really changed and morphed. Also, it has had three editors at Chicago, and I'm I feel so grateful that Elizabeth Branch Dyson, who kind of got handed it, you know, she did not sign this book. Doug Mitchell did back in the day, and so here she ends up with it, and I'm really grateful for her willingness to stick with it and to watch it become something different. And so then, when I finally like wrapped up the manuscript in a very different form from what the original proposal was proposing, then it went out for one round of peer review, and I thought like that book was as good as I could get it at that point. And I ended up with some very critical peer review. And I do not, in other times I've been told, I mean, the reviewers themselves kind of outed themselves to me. This time I have no idea who any of the reviewers were, but that first round was very critical. Had some, you know, helpful things to say. One reviewer in particular just, very intense might be the word for it. And I will say, in both cases, they also misunderstood kind of key things. That's on me to explain those things in a better way. So that was useful to know that that wasn't coming across, but it was also puzzling. Like, oh, that's maybe, that's why you're kind of bothered by this. So one review thought somehow that I had 4000 diaries of hop farmers or hop farmers, hop pickers. I have one diary. I have—

Kate Carpenter
That's a big misunderstanding.

Jennifer Jordan
I have 4000 hop farmers in my database. You know, I know the names of 4000 hop farmers. But again, clearly, like that needed a better explanation. And so, so then I went through a big round of revision. Oh, the other thing that happened is one reviewer thought that it was preposterous to think that brewers would buy hops from anyone but Wisconsin hop farmers due to like transportation costs. The other reviewer thought it was preposterous that brewers would brew with anything but German hops coming from Germany. So again, that's, it's on me to kind of clarify what's going on here. But I then engaged in what might be called some revenge researching, where I mean, it's not even really revenge, but it's just like I am right about this. So I dove into the UWM archives that hold the ledgers of Blatz Brewery, and then also Pabst, and then in its previous incarnation as Best Brewery. So it's amazing to work at the university that holds the papers of like these two really important breweries, and so I poured through those ledgers, and and I mean I knew I was right. I knew that Wisconsin brewers and brewers everywhere were buying hops from everywhere. Like all you have to do is look at international trade statistics, and you see they swing radically from one year to the next in the 1860s, 1870s. You know when it's everything's on a steamship or on a schooner, it's still just these wild vacillations in who's buying what hops.

Jennifer Jordan
And so I already knew that, but here I could just point to like Valentin in a single day, you know, buying hops from Germany in gold, and buying hops from a farmer down the road, and buying hops from upstate New York. So that it's probably a footnote, but it was really important to me to get it right. And again, it was frustrating to have peer reviewers have completely opposite reads of what I was saying. On the other hand, it it made me, you know, dive even deeper, have even more evidence of what I was seeing, and I think illustrate it in a clearer way. So then, back to the the third round, so I revised, revised, revised, revised. My writing group did suggest to me that I needed to stop doing additional research in the archive and wrap it up. So I did, sent it back, and then it went out to one of the same reviewers and then a different reviewer for another round, and that round was, you know, they still had things that they wanted to see, but but it was a lot better.

Kate Carpenter
I'm glad.

Jennifer Jordan
Oh my goodness, it was a lot. It was a lot.

Kate Carpenter
You hinted at how the book changed over time. Can you talk a little bit more though about that evolution where you started and how you ended up where you did?

Jennifer Jordan
So after reading that sentence about hops growing near the Baltic Sea, I started to dig around and see, okay, where did hops used to grow? Because I've always been interested in, I would say, the intersections of landscape, memory, and forgetting. And so this idea that the world is kind of dotted with the sites of forgotten hops was really intriguing to me. There were some linguistic limits to that because Belgium, I would say Belgium, and then the Czech Republic are so important to the story of hops, and those are languages I do not speak and cannot really access archivally. German is, I can handle, and then England, obviously. So the book started to become like, let's look at forgotten hops in Germany, let's look in England, let's move then to the East Coast, out to Wisconsin, and then toward California, which was also briefly an incredibly important site of hop production. So that original outline of the book and the original folders on my hard drive were Germany, England, New York, New England, New York, Wisconsin, California. And obviously, this whole story ends in the Pacific Northwest, where hops have been dominant now since the early 20th century. So, but that was not the Pacific Northwest. Great things have been written about it. That story has been told. So that wasn't going to be part of my story. And so, as I wrote the proposal, I was basically proposing a project on 1000 years of hop history and many different countries and U.S. states. The book now covers about 40 years of hop history and mostly one county in Wisconsin. So that is a really big change, and hilariously in my book proposal, the Wisconsin chapter, I say, well, there just doesn't seem to be that much material on Wisconsin, so this chapter may be a little bit brief. And it turned out I had everything reversed, right? I could tell these bigger stories about Germany, about England, about the Northeast in the U.S., because there were lots of secondary sources already about them. There was archival material, some of which I could access remotely, but there was a lot of good secondary source material on these places. On Wisconsin, there was almost nothing in terms of secondary sources, a couple of articles and a you know a couple of pages in sort of one history of North American hops. So I thought, well, I guess there just isn't that much there, and I was wrong. I was very very wrong. And one of the really big moments in that process was being at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison, and just asking the archivists there, you know, do you have a sense of like where these hop farms were? That was really my my starting question. Wisconsin was like, where were they? Where were these places? And anyone I had asked was like, oh, no one knows. We we don't know. And the archivist was like, well, have you looked at the agricultural census?

Jennifer Jordan
And as I say in my book, reader, I had not. And so they start bringing out these enormous tomes of the handwritten agricultural census, and there's 1850, 1860, and 1870 are the years that I used. And I started out thinking, well, let me just look at Sauk County, which was the biggest hop producer in the hop boom. And then I thought, well, let me look at the top 10 counties. And then I thought, well, really, I could actually find every single hop farmer that has ever existed in Wisconsin in those decades in the the decennial census for 1850, 60, 70, and so I did, and that meant sitting with the physical books. There's a really bad microfilm copy of these, and then there are the hard copies, and that's it. So other states have been digitized and transcribed, and can be accessed through Ancestry.com, the Agricultural Census, but not Wisconsin. So I had to go to Madison, which is about two hours. Ah, not sorry, not two hours, hour and a half from Milwaukee, and sit there and either photograph the pages or just enter names of farmers into my Excel database. And I didn't know where that would lead, and it led to about 4000 names. Yeah, so that that right there is very rich. The other thing that happened, and this is embarrassing, is that when I started writing this book, I wasn't thinking about women. I was really mesmerized by the amount of information I could get from this from the agricultural census, and the ag census only mentions one household member. It mentions almost always the man in the house who is the farmer. There are women listed who are widows, often, but usually it's it's a man. And it's embarrassing to me how long it took me to think about who was with these men, you know, who came with them down the Erie Canal across the Great Lakes. And then I realized, well, I can find out for every single one of them. I can take that name, put it into Ancestry.com, which has the population census digitized and transcribed, and so I can populate that household by doing that. And so I did. So really, I have 8000 hop farmers because I have 4000, mostly men, and then almost all of them are married, and so I have their presumed spouse in another column, and so that right there allowed me to see both kind of who's the household, and then where's where are people coming from, where were they born? That also tells a lot of that story, and then I found, you know, letters and the diary of a hop picker, ledgers. So Wisconsin ended up being an incredibly rich source, and then also just so much easier to do research here in my home state with archives on my campus or archives a pretty easy drive or bus ride away versus let's say, trying to look at you know 19th-century German archives on the Baltic Sea.

Kate Carpenter
You also did a lot of literal legwork, and to talk about that, I think maybe I'll have you read this excerpt now, since since it describes some of that work, and then we can get into it more. So, if you don't mind reading this excerpt from "Hops on the Rise in the 1850s," that would be great.

Jennifer Jordan
Now I see hops in parks, verges, and ditches. I enter the thicket, the woods, the swamp, the valley, the fields. On this particular day, I waded into the brambles and nettles and followed vines up the rock face, continually disappointed to find the wrong arrangement of leaves. Wild grape and cucumber vine can be deceptively hop-like to the eager hop hunter. I wasn't quite dressed for this work, a mistake I somehow made repeatedly, with bare ankles and arms, and, correctly it turns out, nervous about wild parsnip and ticks. The mark the wild parsnip left on my pale skin on an earlier hop hunt took a couple of years to fade. The nettles and blackberries I didn't as much mind. Their sting and scratch are more temporary than other dangers of a Wisconsin ditch.

Jennifer Jordan
As I continued my search, I finally saw a set of hop leaves emerge out of the tangle of plant life, possibly a remnant or relative of what might have been Jesse and Rebecca Coddington's hops. A month later, I returned to the same spot and was rewarded with a sight of cluster upon cluster of rich green hop cones hanging from the vines that clambered up the rock. The Coddingtons' hops, perhaps, the rhizomes reproducing themselves below the earth over decades and heading towards centuries.

Kate Carpenter
So, I mean, I love this. Maybe because I'm a garden and plant nerd, so I just love the idea that you can actually find the descendants of the same hops that that you're talking about in your research there. But could you talk about kind of how how you got to this moment, how you found this spot? I know there's sort of a story of how you how you ended up in this particular patch of land.

Jennifer Jordan
Sure, there are there are some competing stories about who the first hop farmer was in Sauk County, and just to kind of clarify, Sauk County is essentially Aldo Leopold's Sand County. If anyone has read The Sand County Almanac, it's it is that vicinity. It's also very close to the Wisconsin Dells. So if anyone has ever gone to the water parks out there or seen the water ski show, that is, that's hop country. That is is all the area where this action took place, and so one of the households that is tied to this kind of origin of commercial hop growing in Sauk County is Jesse and Rebecca Coddington. And like so many of the early hop farmers, they were actually both born in England, and then they spent quite a long time in the hop-growing counties of New York, New York State, and then came to Wisconsin in I think the late 1840s, early 1850s. And Jesse had hop roots shipped out to him from the hop yard where he had worked in upstate New York, and that's was really exciting to me when I found this because there's that material and like genetic link to the hop industry there. There's a real assumption among a lot of folks in Wisconsin that the hop farmers must have been Germans and that they must have been growing German hops, and I have found no evidence, like zero, of German hops being grown in Wisconsin in my time period, in you know kind of 1830s to 1870s. So Jesse had these hop roots shipped and started growing them. There are sort of amusing anecdotes about like the the first sack of hops and how they got it to market on their neighbor's wagon, and it constantly broke down and kind of made a handful of gold from this this one sack of hops. But so I knew who they were, and I had found them in the census. And then there are these kind of amazing maps from the early work of surveying that show a lot of names of property owners, and these maps are, they're fascinating, complicated, problematic. You know, they're full of erasure. The names that appear on them are almost exclusively of white men, settlers. There is one, the map that I used from 1857, there is one Ho Chunk property owner listed on it, even though this land is full of Ho Chunk people at the time. But they're erased from, or you know, the map maker erased them from his creation. This, it does allow me to see where Coddington was in 1857, and then I could overlay that with the current property owners. So I used like just online tax records, property tax records, and then different maps that are available, and and sort of matched up the 1857 map with the contemporary map, and then found the property. You know, could find the owner's name and then the street address. And so it's it's tricky out there. It's rural. It's not like there are, you know, sort of addresses posted everywhere. But I could get, I could see this little curve in the road. It's also really hard. There are like no pullout places or verges or anything on these roads. There just happened to be one right where I was looking for these hops, so I could pull my Subaru off to just out of traffic and then start to look around for these hops. And I knew, I knew at the time that this was a thing. I knew that you know there are other breweries across the country that had kind of found hops growing near old hop farms and had brewed beers with them, and you know kind of use that as a way to connect present beer to past beer.

Kate Carpenter
I love that we even find that you you grow them and then bring them to the the brewery's community brew. I love that.

Jennifer Jordan
Yes, and in fact, we, my husband just brewed with the Coddington hops for a beer that they are calling Beer Ghosts at brewery where he brews, and then Old World Wisconsin, like the Living History Museum in Wisconsin, will I think tomorrow they're taking the kegs out there, so it'll be on tap out there too. Because of course in Wisconsin, the Living History Museum also has a tavern and a brewery.

Kate Carpenter
Sure, sure. This is the best book publicity I've ever heard anyone talk about. Custom beer.

Jennifer Jordan
Yep.

Kate Carpenter
It struck me reading it that maybe your willingness to kind of take us along with you on your field research in this book and and to do that kind of research to begin with probably comes from your work as a sociologist. I don't know that, some historians obviously love to do this, but not all necessarily think that way. Do you think that being a sociologist brings a different perspective to historical work?

Jennifer Jordan
It's really hard for me to say. I I think that I I occupy edges of disciplinary boundaries. I was an anthropology major in college, and then I went to a very cultural sociology program for my PhD, and I teach a lot of cultural sociology, historical sociology. So it's really hard for me to say kind of where I land, I guess, within that discipline. To me, it's partly about like modeling. Like I want other people to see how they can do some of this work too, and it's so meaningful to me, it is so. It's so much a part of my life to look around wherever I am and think about, you know, who used to be here and how were things arranged and how did we get to this particular point. And you know, that's it's not always an easy question. It's not always a happy question, but it is a meaningful question. And and I get a lot of kind of grounding and and meaning in in my life out of out of asking those questions and so partly like revealing the actual the physicality of the research process and and the kind of I don't know the details I guess it's partly a way of to me of suggesting like you too could could do something similar, and I would not suggest doing it on this scale. Like I didn't know what I was getting into when I started, and and that's partly why this was a hard book to write, is because there was there's a lot of detail, and even the you know the positive blurbs, and you know most people mention that it's very detailed, which is great. Like that was my intention, but it's there is so much there, and it is possible to ask a smaller question. You know, to tell a small, a smaller, a shorter, a more succinct story. But I, I do feel like, and that's partly what the what the final chapter is about too is is I would love to, and and I do this in my teaching too to just give people like a toolkit of these are ways to see the landscape around you in a very different way and in a very with a very different lens.

Kate Carpenter
I also want to talk about your voice in this book. I loved it, and you know, in part, you you bring us alongside you as you're doing some of this research and make it really clear. Your voice, though, is so it's so warm and friendly. I think in this book, like it really, it's a thoroughly researched. I'm trying to think of the right words here because I I don't want to, you know, I don't want to say it's chatty because that sort of implies that it's maybe unserious. But I really had the sense that you were telling me this story, and that even though you did do an incredible amount of research, I never felt sort of like bogged down and like, and now I must tell you about this thing. You know, there was really, really a sense that you had sifted through all of this to to surface these wonderful stories and tell them to us. How did you think about voice in this book? Is that something you had to consciously work on?

Jennifer Jordan
It was. I would say it's a bit of a balancing act, and and there were moments in the peer review process where I, I think they rightly called me out on having crossed a line into being kind of too chatty, or sort of suddenly injecting a little too much of of myself, and I really appreciated that that pushback. And it's interesting because those are there were moments that actually other readers of the book really liked, but the peer reviewers were like, no, like get rid of that. And so I did, and I and I think that that's fine. Like it's a little bit like of a tighter ship, kind of that I'm there, I am present, but there's a little bit less digression than there was originally in in the draft. But the flip side, I think that warmth that you're sensing, a lot of that is also my teaching style. Like I think that this book is very shaped by my students and my experiences in the classroom, and I, I don't want to brag, but but I like to think that I bring a kind—

Kate Carpenter
Brag away!

Jennifer Jordan
—a grandmother orca energy to my teaching. I don't know if you're familiar with the grandmother orcas, but you know this idea that actually the old grandma orcas are like the power behind the orca pod, and they know where the food is, and they know where the ancient you know fishing grounds are, and and people listen to them. And I've tried to embrace some of that that started when I was department chair, but you know, there's there's also there's a warmth, and and as you say, but it's atop this like you know pretty meticulous research. But I I feel like I want people to come into the manuscript. You know, I want people in my classroom to come into the discussion, and I want them to walk away thinking about the world in a different way. And there are many ways to do that. You know, one is like with bluster or with proclamations or kind of argumentation, and another way is a sort of gentleness that people don't know that their minds are being changed, or that you know that they're sort of being shown a new way to to look at things. So I think that's that's part of where that comes from. It it's not very conscious. It's more like an ethos, or just kind of how I try to approach things. And then a lot of I would say the more maybe lyrical moments. Almost all of that was written on my phone, which sounds like terrible, like writing hygiene. But it, but it's just you know ideas come and you have to capture them. You have to just, or I do at least, because I won't remember them later. So I have to just get it onto something: notebook, phone, back of a receipt, you know, whatever it might be, like write it down, and and I think a lot of those the writing that I feel most emotionally connected to in the book came from those sort of moments of like almost reverie.

Kate Carpenter
Yeah, there's a very nice blend of extremely grounded, you know, in the nettles, and then sort of this more metaphorical lyrical approach. I'm curious to know how you think about your projects and how you think about moving between them. Earlier, you identified the common thread, I think, in your projects by saying that you're really interested in landscape and memory. But I think that if someone just looks at your bibliography, they might be like, "Huh, what's happening here?" Because you know, you start with Berlin and then heirloom vegetables and beer, and and I know next you're moving to textiles. How do you know what your next project is going to be? What what catches you?

Jennifer Jordan
It's it's very deep, and I again I think that some of that comes from the good fortune of my career of having a job where I can do what you know, like for mainstream sociology, these are some weird projects. Like even even Edible Memory is like, what? Like a sociology of heirloom tomatoes? And Beer Ghosts. Like what? How is that sociology? But but it you know to me it very much is and it's it also borders on history and and I they all make sense to me from the inside because of those connections between memory, landscape, forgetting in many ways they all ask a very similar question of you know what do we remember, what we forget and why, or what traces remain of what once was. But with each one, I really follow a deep sense of what is interesting to me. And you know, sure, by the end of the project, like it is no longer interesting when you're in in page proofs, that is not interesting. But for most of it, I really try to trust my instincts about what part is interesting and what part is not interesting. And you know that even that came up with my writing group. It came up with my editor at different times, where we'd sort of play with different possibilities for how to keep revising Beer Ghosts, and sometimes people, you know, who I respect very much, who I am very fond of, would suggest directions that I would I would toy with the idea, and then be like, "Oh, absolutely not! Like, no, I have to like stick to this path." And so there is some sense of of really trusting my instinct about what is interesting, and I couldn't always tell you why. But the new textile project is is a good example of this. And I'm kind of I'm past the library book stage, although I'm still doing a lot of library books. Have I spent a lot of time looking at mill ponds and at dammed up New England rivers and you know forgotten sites of pulling mills and carding mills? Yes. So I'm already in kind of the landscape phase, but it's also a case of I think part of what you're doing when you're developing a project is closing doors. Not that, not that, not that, but this. And so a lot of that has been going on, and it's a slow process. It's not a great way to crank out a lot of peer-reviewed journal articles, for example. But I I think of myself as a book writer, and and I'm comfortable with this method, and and it's it's also it's enjoyable. But it is. I spend a lot of my day, even when I'm doing other things, cooking dinner or whatever, going for a walk. I I'm always playing with the idea in my head, like rolling it around, sort of thinking, okay, this this way, this way, this way. You know, what's the what's the meat here, and and with Beer Ghosts, it took a long time to figure out really like what the heart of the story was, and and I think that will be the same also with this textiles project.

Kate Carpenter
I want to ask you about your tendency to kind of immerse yourself in your research, both of course archivally, but also in sort of experiential learning, you know that not not only are you traipsing around looking for hops and then growing them yourself, but for this next book, you mentioned to me that you were learning how to weave and embracing that. In fact, hilariously, I think you said that you had studied weaving with the same woman that Seth Rockman on a previous episode told me that he had studied with as well.

Jennifer Jordan
Actually, the same man.

Kate Carpenter
Oh, the same man. Yes, okay. Sorry, sir.

Jennifer Jordan
And the same young man. Yes, indeed. Yeah, it's it's a funny kinship to have had the the same weaving teacher. And I'm even now on the board of directors for that weaving school. Like that's how hard I had fallen for weaving. This new project is going to somehow be about hand weavers and industrialization, luddites kind of lurking, you know, on the horizon, and and water power. It's, right now, I'm kind of in my keyword space. I don't. I don't have like the argument yet, but I also sort of, things converged, kind of personal life interests and then research interests. And when I ended my term as department chair, which was very challenging, and I think anyone who has been chair may say the same.

Kate Carpenter
Especially during a pandemic.

Jennifer Jordan
It was, yeah, it was it was something else. And when that ended, it really felt like this space opened up in my brain, and it needed something. And I was like looking, you know, scrolling through Instagram, and saw someone with like, I didn't even know what to call it, but it looked like a small loom. And I just said out loud to my husband, like, "Huh, I wonder. I might someday want a loom." And he is a very good giver of gifts. And for my birthday, the next birthday that came around, he had ordered the small loom from a woodworker, and there was my small loom. And I had no idea how to use it, so I checked out a bunch of library books, as one does, and started learning. And then it turns out that Milwaukee, the Milwaukee Rec Department, has a weaving center. It's the basement of a middle school just across the river from where we live, and there are about 100 floor looms in there. And so, for like $50, you can have eight weeks, 10 weeks of almost personalized instruction on these looms. So I started taking weaving classes there, and I'm I'm such a novice. I'm you know I even now I'm still I still am so new, but I got really excited about it. And then this the Newbury School of Weaving came up on my radar. It would used to be the Marshfield School of Weaving moved to Newbury, and they have a class in pre 1850 weaving, and that is my jam. Like that, just the thought of going back in time in that way, and then also in that weaving class, you weave from, and this is kind of a little bit similar to to some of what Seth did there. But we warped looms based on things like a photograph of a piece of fabric at a museum. So we had to sort of sit there and count threads and think about it. We also warped a loom just based on an archival document, where the, it's not the sort of conventional draft patterns that you get later in the 19th century. It's just this sort of more cryptic way of describing the fabric. So we would sit there and look at it, and you know think about what this means. You know what's a bier when it, on a loom spelled b i e r and how many threads and etc. So we learned all of these techniques. It was a week long class. We spent all week warping the looms, which just means putting like the vertical threads on. And the the final Friday of the week we did some weaving, but it was the point was the warping. It sounds so nerdy to say, but it was really one of the best weeks of my life. Like I was, to be in my 50s and learn something so new to me and be so excited about it. It just feels like a real gift. And and I like I didn't know that you could just keep doing that. It's really, it's really exciting. And and so I, you know, I kind of weave in my in my private life. Like I, you know, I have looms at home. I don't have a barn loom, you know, or anything at like a huge, you know, something that looks like a four poster bed, whatever.

Jennifer Jordan
I have smaller looms, but I love weaving on a personal level, and also now I have so much more understanding of the research materials that I am looking at, and so much more understanding of what spinning and carding mean in relation to what's happening on the loom, and why you know water power mattered, and when it didn't matter, and you know, like it's so much like I have this visceral, physical understanding of what these fibers do, and even things like that week of of weaving class, we were weaving with different fibers, so we had one linen project set up, and then a wool project, and with the wool, one of my classmates and I were, you know, working on that loom, and it just it smelled like you were snuggling with a sheep, like it still smelled like sheep, and in in like not a bad way, but it was like that was a really sheepy corner of of the weaving school, and then the linen project, we also learned how to do what's called sizing, so that you coat the fibers before they come through the heddles in something. And in this case, Justin, our weaving teacher, made sizing with tallow from one of his cattle from the year before and flour, and you know we cooked it up on the little stove in the weaving school, and then you brush it on to the fibers. It's this protective coating. So basically, that corner of the weaving skull smelled like a McDonald's. It smelled like you know, like frying French fries on this on this linen. So there's also that kind of real tactile sensory experience too.

Kate Carpenter
Amazing. Are there other people that you read as inspiration?

Jennifer Jordan
It's so funny because I read so much, and then I was like, "Wait, who do I like? Like, who am I?" And so it was, it was a very interesting sort of journey thinking about this. But I would say one thing I do is I read a lot of 19th-century novels. So my household has like an entire Austin Bronte shelf situation that is expanding into Hawthorne and Elizabeth Gaskill, and you know it's it's there's a big 19th century novel situation here, and so that's a lot of what I read kind of in my free time, but I think it informs. Like I'm reading Hawthorne's House of Seven Gables right now, and the textile stuff in it just leaps out at me. You know the kind of importance of the whiteness of what's his name, the daguerreotypist's shirt, and you know there there are sort of you can read textile stories out of it. Another book for that project that's really important to me is The Pocket. Is that have you read that? Oh, it is remarkable. The Pocket: A Hidden History of Women's Lives, 1660 to 1900, and it is from the phase when pockets were separate from garments, and so women would wear, generally women would wear pockets on bias tape, basically around their waists under their skirt. So there'd be like a slit in the skirt that you could then reach into the pockets, and they could be made of leather, of wool, of linen, of cotton, and sort of dependent on what you were putting in them. And one of their amazing sources for information about these pockets was ads for lost pockets because sometimes the knot would come undone and the pockets would fall and you wouldn't notice. So they would list the contents of the pocket that had been lost, and it would be like two knives, scissors, money, medicine, like all of these, you know, little like thread and needle, all the things that you'd be carrying around in your pockets, keys. That is the book that was the seed for my research on textiles. Because as I was reading that, and they they're amazing photographs of surviving pockets, and so I really started thinking about the fabric itself, like especially with the linen ones. Like, how did this? Who wove this? And just if you start looking around yourself and asking who wove this, that is a very expansive question. And you know, with contemporary textiles, I mean, you can also we we all wear and use a lot of things that have been knit rather than woven. But either way, it's like who crafted this textile, and and so that asking that question in that book, which they do not really address at at length, but thinking, you know, where did the original fabric itself come from? Who made that? That was the seed for my new textile research.

Kate Carpenter
Fantastic! I think I'll just close by asking you what what's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?

Jennifer Jordan
I am very influenced by Max Weber in Science as a Vocation. He talks about how both art and science require inspiration and frenzy, and then he describes like these ways of getting at kind of inspiration and frenzy or creativity that require stepping away from your desk, stepping away from either the the bench in the lab or your scholarly desk or your easel and so he talks about like the value, the creative value of smoking a cigar on the divan and I do not smoke cigars on divans but the metaphor of that, of stepping away from the writing. And then he also talks about Helmholtz, I think a philosopher in Heidelberg who did his best thinking walking on a slight incline. So the thinking didn't happen downhill; it happened uphill. But I think that it's so scary and hard to step away from the laptop, to step away from your desk. But I think that that is sometimes where some of the best. And I know, I know, I'm not alone in thinking that. I think a lot of people find, you know, that the second you step away, the ideas start to come. And so, but it's really hard to build that into your practice because that feels like not writing. But I think really a lot of the time it is writing.

Kate Carpenter
Fantastic, Dr. Jennifer Jordan. I loved reading Beer Ghosts. Thank you so much for joining me to talk about your writing process and and your process of research and everything else.

Jennifer Jordan
Thanks so much. It was great talking with you.

Kate Carpenter
Thanks again to Dr. Jennifer Jordan for joining me on the Drafting the Past podcast, and thanks to you for listening. You'll find links to Beer Ghosts: In Search of Lost Hops and the Women Who Grew Them, and the other books we mentioned in the show notes. You'll also find a link to sign up the Drafting the Past newsletter, so you can get more of our fantastic nonfiction history book coverage directly in your inbox. That means weekly book reviews, podcast updates, and sneak peeks of bonus content for our paid subscribers. You can also sign up and check out everything we've been up to at draftingthepast.com. Recently, for example, we published a review of a new biography of Eugene Debs and a first-person essay about what it's like to be a book prize judge. Find it all at draftingthepast.com. And until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.