Shane White Is An Avowed Completist

Kate Carpenter 0:01
Welcome back to the Drafting the Past podcast. I'm your host Kate Carpenter, and in each episode, I interview a historian about their research and writing process. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr. Shane White, the Emeritus Challis Professor of History at the University of Sydney.

Shane White 0:17
My pleasure to be here. No one calls me doctor.

Kate Carpenter 0:21
Shane is a historian of U.S. history, especially African American history, and has written or co-written six books. His newest book is A Moment in the Sun: Black Manhattan Before the Civil War and it's the product of decades of thinking and research. In it, he details the world of Black men and women in antebellum New York, bringing to life characters and moments that might otherwise be overlooked. As you'll hear, it's a book that emerges out of Shane's incredibly detailed and intimate knowledge of one dense body of sources in particular, the district attorney's records in the Municipal Archives of the City of New York, hundreds of thousands of files that date back to the 1790s. It was a pleasure to talk with Shane about his dogged approach to research and his reflections on a career as a historian of the United States who lives and works in Australia. Here's our conversation.

Shane White 1:19
I often, I listen to most of your guests, actually, and I actually that calling oneself a writer, I never have. I'm I'm I'm a historian. Somehow, to me, a writer is a slightly higher category than a historian. I was the first person in my family to finish school, but then the Whitlam government made universities free. Otherwise, I wouldn't have gone to university, and I went to university, and I was doing a combined arts and law degree, and did an honors year in which I wrote a 20,000 word thesis, and then the government offered me a scholarship to do a PhD, so I dropped the— I carried on with the law for a while, but dropped it. That was where I found my intellectual feet, writing a 20,000 word thesis on slavery in South Carolina, at the time when the writing of the history of slavery was the most exciting history anywhere, and I was thrilled by that, and so I started writing. And it's a bit different in being in Australia, in that in that I went to the University of Sydney, and very few members of staff had published books, so that I didn't really associate writing with a book, writing a PhD with a book, and but then I, as I immersed myself in writing the PhD, was when I sort of self-educated that if I was going to do this, it was going to be a book, and so I, in a way, one's careers are often a matter of luck. I— halfway through writing my PhD, I actually got a contract with a publisher in America, so I submitted my PhD, and the same day I mailed the manuscript off to the publisher. So there's no difference between the PhD and the book, other than the the book, doesn't have a bibliography because I always figure bibliography is a waste of space. Well, all the information's in the footnotes if you, if you're interested. So that's the only only difference. And as luck would have it, you know, the book did all right, and I actually managed to secure a job, which was about the first job in American history in about 15 years in the whole country. So I lucked in, and just to highlight the luck, I was, I think, in over 30 or 40 years, I was the only PhD from the University of Sydney to be hired by the department. They used to, the favorite hire was Oxbridge, shifting to Ivy League as we became more Americanised. So I was very lucky, and I managed to luck into getting a large amount of government funding over my career to pay for my research trips to America, so I kept on writing and have published a few books as as a as a result.

Kate Carpenter 4:33
Well, let's, as you know, I like to start with kind of the basics of how people work. So, when where do you like to do your writing?

Shane White 4:40
For the first couple of books, I would like to write often at night into the early hours of the morning. I haven't drunk alcohol in 50 years, so I could go out and then come home and write from 12 till three, and would often would often do that. Then once I had a child, that got thrown out the window, and I tried to write during during the day. So the last four or five books been written during the day. I live in two places 500 miles apart, and in both, like often your interviewees are at the beginning of their career. I'm at the end. I am much more comfortably off. Own two houses, 500 miles apart, and in both there is, I've got a study. The one in Sydney has got 3000 books in it, and beautiful bookshelves and what have you. This one there's fewer books on up at Brunswick Heads, which is up near Byron Bay on the easternmost point of Australia on the beach, basically. And I think, I was thinking about this today. I've probably written all but maybe 10 pages of the last six or seven books in these two offices, I can remember going to New York once to get away from work to write a couple of weeks and maybe writing five or 10 pages. But that's about the only time I haven't been in those two places writing. So I have my desk, my computer, my trusty thesaurus, and you always know I'm in a good mood when I've got, the thesaurus is open there, because it's part and parcel of the way I write is looking at the words I've used, looking up the meanings of the words, looking up alternatives and stuff like that as they as they go along, and that's, I often joke to people who are walking through that. That's my happy place when the when the thesaurus out, and I'm that means I've written and I'm now sort of polishing, and that's probably my happy place.

Kate Carpenter 6:57
Do you have a routine? Do you try to write every day?

Shane White 7:01
Actually, I haven't written for months. Actually, because I've been waiting. I've just had a book just come out, and I've I've been waiting for—I finished it two years ago, and I sort of, I won't sign a contract for a book until it's mostly written because I can't guarantee that I can deliver what I say. I'm actually one of the one of the very few people who actually delivers on time. I have never delivered a book manuscript — like, I delivered a book manuscript to Beacon, which had been going for 150 years then, and they claimed, I don't know if they were joking, that we were the second historians ever in their history to deliver a manuscript on time. Historians' have a reputation for handing manuscripts in late. I've always handed manuscripts in on time, but I have, it tends to go in fits and starts with me. So I'll write and then sort of run out of steam. At the moment, I'm, I should be writing the next book, but I've been well postponing it till I could get this book in my hand. Actually, it just didn't seem right.

Kate Carpenter 8:14
How do you—I think we're going to talk more about this too—but how do you organize your sources? Are there tools that you use?

Shane White 8:20
You're talking to someone who has been doing this for a long time. So I started off with index cards. Now I have individual documents for newspapers, New York newspapers. Like there's one for the New York Sun, one for the Herald, and I sit down and I type out what I see. And again, this is going to be way before you born, but there was a scandal at Princeton in in the 1980s, the David Abraham affair, where a left scholar was crucified, witch hunted out of the profession because he took, basically he got caught putting quotation marks around notes, and then putting them into the book mistakenly as a quote. And there were just a couple of instances of that. He was a Marxist, and his critics were not. And this was written up extensively in radical history in the 1980s, and when I was a young graduate student, and it had a almost a traumatic effect on me, in that I don't take notes. I will only take, I put quotation marks at the beginning and the end, and I type out word for word whatever the document is. Now, what's helped me is that what I write about is African American history, and mostly my sources are fragmentary. They tend to be only two or three sentences long, but even when they are, you know, a page or two long, I will still type them out word for word. So I have individual documents, and then I also, with the municipal archives material, the cases, I initially xeroxed and then later on photographed and then scanned the material, and so I've got about six or seven filing drawers full of material. So whenever I want to write something, if I'm writing something about fortune tellers, I will then read through everything I have on New York in the first half of the 19th century, and take out again word for word every item about fortune telling, and put them into a document which will probably be it'll probably only be 10 pages long, and then that is what I use to write the chapter on fortune telling. But I I don't outline at all. I'll actually sit there and become almost fetal in that I I'll sleep an enormous amount of time. I can actually get to the point where I'm sleeping 17 or 18 hours a day rather than writing. I'm thinking about it, but nothing actually happens until I get to the point of, it sounds dramatic, but sort of self-loathing to the point where this is ridiculous. You've got to sit down and start writing. And then I'll start writing, and again, the joy of a computer. And again, I used to write before I had a computer because they weren't that common. It does, you don't have to write from A to Z. You can actually jump in. So I'll jump in to the point. The imagery I often use is is a boil waiting to be lanced. It's some point that I I really feel very strongly about what I want to do, or it's a great story, or whatever, and I'll write that, and then I'll keep on going, or I'll go back and write to that and do stuff like that. So it's it's very very archival or source driven, what I'm, what what I'm doing. It's and so and the books I write, with the exception of the sort of biography of Jeremiah Hamilton, don't tend to go from A to. They're not in a time sequence. They tend to look at different subjects, be it different types of sound, or actually, I suppose the the gambling book is sort of chronological too. But but mostly I I don't. So with this book, the one that's just come out, it's there's chapters on courts, streets, the underground, and they're not chronological at all. I'll use material from everywhere to illustrate whatever point I happen to be using. Some people find this really irritating, so I, you know, you should never look at comments on online writing, but but a few people have—I think my writing is simple and clear. There are a few people out there who'd argue the point on that one.

Kate Carpenter 13:13
Okay, I I need something explained to me then because you mentioned ahead of time to me that you don't do drafts, that you write very few words that are wasted or cut, and I assumed as a result that that must mean you sort of outlined extensively so that you could just dive right in. But you've just said you don't outline. So how how do you write so effectively then?

Shane White 13:36
That point I was making about sleeping, I I actually think what I'm doing is I'm working out what this chapter, what this article, whatever is about, and lots of people would look at me and think, like my wife, for example, look at me and think, you know, what the hell are you doing? Why don't you just sit down and do it? But I actually do think I'm thinking through, yeah, like that's an interesting story. I can use that to, that would be a really good point to end on, end the stuff on, and so bits and pieces like that. But I just have never thought about outlining and have never sort of done it. So I think possibly in my head, I'm outlining, I suppose, but it's never—I suppose, I suppose I sort of, like, when I was writing the proposal for this last book. I'd written most of the chapters, but I sort of, I knew enough to write a four line summary for the, for my agent flogging it to the the presses to say what this chapter would be, so I sort of know where I want to go, and I sort of know what the argument was, like the argument about street life being and being this incredible explosion of street life in the 1820s and 1830s, and I just want to illustrate that in different ways. I knew about the importance of music. I knew that was absolutely fundamental importance, and that freedom was actually to quite a remarkable extent danced, and it's that important in in the life. And I had the material to show it. It was just a question of looking at my 10 pages of quotes about dancing and and drawing out and looking at it and reading it and thinking. So there's an awful lot of inactivity in my writing, and it's the same when I I I wouldn't even use the word revising, which you often ask about how do you revise. I don't really revise, it suggests rewriting, and as I mentioned to you in an email, I think I can quite happily spend two hours reading a chapter and change four words. Instead of bumped into, I'll say touched. It'll be it. It'll be like that. Change—and think, walk away from it, thinking, "Gee, that was a good morning's work." I like, I continually tinker with the prose like that, but there's an awful lot of staring at the screen in that two hours, and nothing much happening if you're an outsider looking on. So there's an awful lot of thinking about what I'm, what I'm doing. So one of the things I really enjoy about writing is stealing other people's work, so that I don't know if you like, there are probably 100 examples in the book, and no one's going to get, most people won't even notice any of them. So, the obvious example is chapter three begins ripping off Dickens. It was the best of times. Whatever the quote is, or I have a reference to somewhere in the somewhere in the universe, the machinery changed. That's playing off Eldridge Cleaver in Soul On Ice, or there are, using the similar sentence structure to Norman MacLean's, the conclusion to, A River Runs Through It. I'll play that there and use it, or I'll read a phrase somewhere. It's a bit of a cliche, but was like writing with white ink on a white page. I saw that somewhere and thought, I like that, and I I use that in the chapter on lawyers on some writing about lawyers, and so it's not plagiarism; it's stealing because I'm making it, I'm making it my own. I'm not, I'm not just borrowing. I'm actually literally stealing ideas and structure from writing because, though I don't claim to be a writer, I love writing, and so when I see something that takes my fancy, I tend to literally write it down with a sort of a scrapbook type, a notebook, and then try and use this stuff when I'm writing. So that's part of the joy of writing, if you like, is to play these sorts of games. And most people are not going to get that.

Shane White 18:19
The same as I always figure I'm allowed to use one word in every chapter that you're going to have to need a dictionary to look up one word, using slightly unusual words or using words in a slightly unusual way to just sort of grab the, hopefully the attentive reader's attention as you, as you're going on. So, though I don't claim to be a writer, there is a certain preciousness to the way I do. I will admit that.

Kate Carpenter 18:52
I want to ask you. You have this great line in your book. You talk about how your research begins the moment you step off the plane. As someone from Australia who researches U.S. history. What is that experience like to be an Australian who researches U.S. history?

Shane White 19:07
On the one hand, it certainly is. There's a certain, there seems to be a certain novelty to it. On the other, if you go to you know your department, half, at least half of the historians there don't write about America and write about France or England or Africa or wherever. So it's just within America and with the American within the U.S. historians that it seems slightly unusual, and it it's very easy to be condescended to, particularly like when I first started out, and would come to America, and I was working on slavery in New York. And if you are a professional historian in America, you've got a PhD and you've done coursework, and I would expect you to be vaguely knowledgeable, and but. I had any number of historians at OAHs or what have you come up to me and, "sure you got that right? Like there wasn't slavery in New York," and get explanations of, you know, America is different. We've got a, like you you get some unbelievable condescension. I can remember a very famous female historian commenting on one of my papers, and I don't, one of the very few times I've talked at the OAH saying, "It's really terrific that you foreigners are doing this history, and you've got to expect to get things hopelessly wrong, and you shouldn't shouldn't feel at all shy about coming up and asking for help." As she hit me for something that she said I was wrong, and I wasn't. She was wrong. It was, you can get any amount of condescension, but I got to say that was early on. Now, for the most part, I get sort of taken reasonably seriously, reasonably. The interesting thing is that Australian historians have had have batted above their better than their above their weight. So Rhys Isaac won the Pulitzer Prize, and people like Ian Tyrrell, Mike McDonnell, a whole bunch of people are well published in America and are well known in America. So there, there is that. Often it's it's non-historians that the the surprising comments, like cab drivers or the guys guarding LAX airport early in the morning, and they're the ones who are somewhat taken aback by the idea that a non-American is writing about American history. The point about learning about America from the moment I get there is that unlike many historians who write about America who live outside of America, I didn't go to university in America. So I've been to New York 65 times, but they're three or four week trips. The longest I was I was two months in America, but other than that, it's always like four week trips. So going to a baseball game, I can, being jet lagged in hotels in the days when it was television rather than cable, being absolutely gobsmacked at 3 o'clock in the morning watching evangelical television in America, things like like you arrive in New York and you go walking down Broadway and people walk on the wrong side of the pavement. There's a, so you're constantly bumping into people because I use, you walk on the left hand side. Americans don't. So there's little like little things like that, and if you read my stuff, it's those little things, it's little details like that that I can find in the sources are the things that I hone into when I'm writing. They're the things I love and like to see highlighted and something made of them in the writing, but everything's an education. I mostly go to New York. That's where publishing is concentrated, so I can talk to editors. I can talk to my agent. I can I can talk to other historians. So you're probably going to ask about people reading my writing as I'm writing, mostly I get a few people to read it, but they're not-they're not American historians, so they're reading more for prose and style on whether this is buyable. I can't remember the last time I had a New York historian reading my work before it was published. I don't usually, I don't usually do that.

Shane White 24:05
So being in America, going to an OAH, which is the one I usually, I went to like 25 OAHs in a row before COVID hit. I would go there every year and talking to historians. That's also part of being in America, talking to people who actually know what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the end of slavery in New York City, or I can talk to them about their work. So that's all part of the education of being a historian of America.

Kate Carpenter 24:34
I want to talk some about your newest book, A Moment in the Sun, because in many ways, you even write about this in the introduction, but this is almost a sort of a culmination or a capstone of work you've been doing for decades in your excellent career. Is that how you saw it when you were writing it? And I, that seemed to me like it would add an extra layer of pressure, like bringing this to fruition. Did that do that for you?

Shane White 24:59
It wasn't pressure. A number of times, people would ask what I'm writing about, and I would say everything I ever thought about 19th-century African Americans in 19th-century New York. So yes, it was. There's a grant system here, and getting grants is—the classic American career of three books, the PhD converted into a book, the book for tenure, and then the book at retirement, the capstone, that's impossible in Australia because of the grant system. You have to keep on delivering. So I was always going to deliver a book on this because I have had two grants that in part payed for it, and I was I I would deliver on that. I always, like I've published stuff in articles, but I always feel somewhat to the side of the way most historians have written about the end of slavery in New York City, because I actually emphasize the cultural thing much more than the political thing. I'm not particularly interested in black churches, black voting, and stuff like that. I'm more interested in this cultural side, and I wanted to write a book that would have some sort of an impact and make people at least acknowledge, like you know, the 200th anniversary of the end of slavery in New York City next year. When that comes around, I would like it to be acknowledged that it wasn't just, it was, freedom involved this cultural convulsion that occurred, and it was about dance. It was about parades. It was about theater. It was about the black newspaper. It was about all of these things, which people sort of know individual, but put them all together, and it becomes evidence. A couple of reviewers have stated it more boldly than I would, but it's a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance. The Harlem Renaissance is different in form, but it's similar. This black convulsion that occurred in the 1820s, 30s, and just into the 40s, and that has been ignored. The general tendency is to say slavery ended in New York, and then poverty followed, and we're just hanging around waiting for the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s. And I'm trying to change that narrative a little bit and suggest that there were things. You know, tap dancing was being invented. First black theater was was going on.

Kate Carpenter 27:43
I also want to ask about your sources because I know a key source base for you has been the municipal archives in New York, which you have worked with for decades. You mentioned having having many many copies at home. You also mentioned though that they've been largely overlooked by historians. Why is that?

Shane White 28:03
Well, they've been, they're used. Like you'll often, well, you go to the reading room of the municipal archives, you'll find any number of genealogists, and you'll usually find a historian or two. And maybe there's more PhD students working on it now than there used to be, you'll find people historians using it. If someone is doing something on, you know, some case in 1895, they'll use the archives. You can go in and look at the cases, find the case you want, and then move on. I have read or skim read every case from 1796 to 1851. So that's 1000s and 1000s of cases. You don't get people being stupid enough to do that. There's, there's, but people will say, haven't you heard of sampling? And sampling never has never appealed to me in terms of so I'm a completist, if you like. When it comes to reading newspapers, I don't want to read just one newspaper. I want to read every newspaper I can lay my hands on in the 1820s, 30s, 40s, into the 50s, and the same with the court cases because you you never know what you're going to find. That's apparently quite unusual, you know. So maybe maybe more people are using it to write dissertations. I don't, as I commented on the American. I don't read an American dissertation unless someone's paying me to do it, because they usually take seven years to convert it into something fit for human consumption in a book. I'm not current on what American students at Columbia or NYU or Yale are actually doing. But for the most part, I gave a talk at Yale to a whole bunch of students, and I can still remember one coming up to me, and I was saying how wonderful these the source was, and how no one was using it. And the woman was writing a dissertation on Italian and African American women in the 1890s, or something, something like that. And she said, "So I can go along there, and there'll be a whole bunch of cases, Italian cases, that will be there in a sort of a box. And I said, "No, you'll actually have to go through all of the cases, and you're actually-- and she said, oh, and just sort of walked off, leaving me standing there. And to me, that's sort of representative of the way people have used, have looked at these sources. It's like too much hard work to do that. I'll let someone else do it, and they haven't, they haven't been used because there, you know, no city's got a set of records like it. There's there's hundreds of 1000s of files, and there's nothing like reading manuscript pages that haven't been looked at in 150 years or 200 years or whatever it is, and every now and again, like you find stuff in there that should have been taken out by the people who are accessioning it in the municipal archives, but someone forgot or didn't. So I have found I have literally had fall into my lap several murder weapons, knives, just literally fall into my lap. A huge bunch of keys that a safe breaker was using, and an abortion implement from the 1920s. I'm looking at this thing. What the hell is this? And then looked at the case to discover this thing was used for abortions. So you you can get genuine surprises, and that's often when you're doing research. It's you know you say I'd like to find stuff on X, but it's not X that often is interesting when you're dealing with sources. It's sources that completely surprise you. You think, "What the hell is going on here? That's the the intriguing thing, and that's the joy to me of historical research. Like that's sitting down in the New York Historical Society. Now it's the New York Historical, reading bound volumes of papers, smelling and touching newspapers that's 150 years old and being totally surprised by stuff is one of the joys of being a historian.

Kate Carpenter 32:51
Yeah, that makes me think of, you talk about, you know, the value of reading newspapers, not just the article that is related to whatever you're looking for, but sort of the whole context, the whole paper, and getting that full, complete sense, and that obviously there are great things about digitization and access, but that when we are just keyword searching, you lose out on that kind of experience in the archive.

Shane White 33:16
Yes, no, I agree. Though the digital searching is getting better and better now, so that you can get not just the article but the whole page. But that's—the old way of doing this is, it's not just the page; it's 40 minutes of thumbing through a newspaper and finding nothing at all, and then suddenly seeing something that you know you're looking for fortune, black fortune tellers, but you suddenly see a confidence trickster in this thing, or the the case that I would another case I use is the Jeremiah Hamilton. I came across him and really noticed him for the first time in a case in which this guy called Jeremiah Hamilton was defrauding someone of $50,000, which was a staggering sum of money in in the 1840s. It's so staggering that I initially thought this guy's got to be white, but it turns out, I had material, and it turned out he wasn't, and so I ended up writing a book about the guy. But it was a sort of one of those chance moments of coming across him, finding a story that just didn't fit with my conception of what was going on in New York at the time.

Kate Carpenter 34:37
How do you turn all those fragments, all those bits that you find, into a compelling narrative and text?

Shane White 34:45
I don't know. It's a question of sitting down and looking at it and thinking about it, and then putting the words on the page. Like it's difficult. It's difficult to. Explain how it happens. Sometimes, when you're reading a newspaper or a court case in situ, and you come across something, it's so striking that you immediately you can see where this fit where this is going to fit. So there are a couple of things on my last research trip to New York, when the book was pretty much done, where I found new material and I could think, "Gee, this this is a really great example of oyster cellar fight that will, because it involves a woman running the place will really help amplify what I've already written. So stuff like that you can see. In terms of when you start, I don't know. I just, as I said, I go to the bit that I that I feel strongest about, that is the strongest material, and then just let it flow from there, which is a, it's a very unsatisfying answer. It's sort of like asking you know a baseball player how he hits the ball. Like how do they just do it? And I sort of feel this the same way. I certainly don't do it by writing out an outline. I do know that.

Kate Carpenter 36:23
Okay, so here, here's something I'm still trying to figure out. You have all these files of records, and say you want to look for black fortune tellers. Are you going through all of them every time? Do you have a way of of finding things, or just a spectacular memory

Shane White 36:42
I've got a pretty good memory. I can, annoyingly, I can I can remember there was a case in 1841, early 1840s, and I get the details right, but it turns out to have been in 1833, which just makes fun. No, it doesn't. It doesn't take that. The book, in a way, actually delivers a good portion of what I found. There's not, so, you know, my notes on the New York Herald single spaced point 12 would probably be 85 or 100 pages. The Sun about the same. Other newspapers will only be two or three pages of material. It doesn't take you that long to go through these cases because you open, you look at again when I xerox a case I xerox the whole case, not part just part of the case. You look at the front page, and it's a counterfeiting case. Well, the chances are it's not going to involve someone who's a fortune teller. So it doesn't take that long to go to go through, and that's—so for the different chapters, I would tend to go through everything, and it took me a couple of days, and that that's where you begin that process of thinking. How that have I got enough material? Can I write a chapter on this? And also, how are you going to? How am I going to write that chapter? That's where you start thinking. So you're immersing yourself into this world, and hopefully, you can come out the other end.

Kate Carpenter 38:20
With everything you accumulate, is it hard to figure out what to include and what to leave out?

Shane White 38:24
Not really. Mostly, like you know, I've got many more. So there's a chapter on burning. All right, I've got many more cases of burning. The ones I've used are the ones that illustrate whatever point I was making at the time as to how this confidence trick works, and it was, you know, easy enough to leave out more mundane examples. It just helps that I know that there were dozens and dozens of examples of this that I don't use. It wasn't just two people doing this. It was a a plague of confidence tricksters in New York in 1837. So no, I don't think it's that difficult to leave stuff out. Though I do, like I've sacked the material for 19th century New York. I was thinking about that the other day, thinking I'm not going to write anything more about 19th century New York, and I was actually quite saddened by that because I have an excuse to go into the New York. I'm going to New York in April. I don't have an excuse to go and sit down and read the Sun newspaper for 1851. It would be a complete utter waste of time, because I'm not going to do anything. And that was so. But I, in a sense, it's the bookend of my career, and it finishes off the 19th century. I still have thoughts on the 20th century, but he 19th century is now done and dusted, as far as I'm concerned, which is sad.

Kate Carpenter 40:06
You worked on this book for decades with many other projects interrupting in between. Was it a different book that you wrote now than you would have written, say, two decades ago?

Shane White 40:17
Okay, I've been thinking about this actually, because one of you often ask, you know, how have you changed from your first book to your last book? I don't think I've changed at all in terms of the way I write. I think the way I write the first book is pretty much the same way. Perhaps there's a bit more license for authorial voice in the last one than there was in the PhD slash verse book, and I pretty much like it was probably 20 years ago that I, 30 years ago, that I knew dancing was going to be really important. I always knew, 20 years I've known fortune telling was going to be important, and confidence tricksters and the courts and stuff like and underground. So no, I don't think it has changed that much at all. If at if at all, it would have changed in little bits and pieces depending on what material I had. But again, what I write is so heavily source driven, that so that that would have you know that would have caused some changes, but mostly no. It's pretty much the way I envisaged the book 35 years ago, which is scary in a way. So that sort of suggests I'm boringly predictable, but.

Kate Carpenter 41:42
Well, who else do you turn to feedback on your work? You mentioned that you mostly get feedback on the writing rather than history.

Shane White 41:50
I've got a couple of friends in, at university, and one of my collaborators, Stephen Robertson's at George Mason. So people like that. Like I've had an interesting relationship with editors. I've often viewed editors as the enemy. Again, it's unlike many Americans. I don't view an article or a book as a collaborative effort with me and the editor. I'm really not interested in their— like, there's, once I, once it's sorted for me, there is a total arrogance, and I really don't care what other people think. And so, and I had like editors who are, an editor at Harvard University Press was editing within the quotation marks, was changing prose. Editors have done some, really had really stupid ideas, but I have to say that the editor at Liveright, Haley Bracken, she's less than half my age. She was terrific. I I really enjoyed working with with her on this, and it's been completely different from every other of my experiences of of dealing with editors. So she was she, didn't try and get me to rewrite the book, which I wouldn't have appreciated, but she just made these little changes here and there, and like, I hate repetition. And she picked up a couple of repetition. Like in all my books, you'll probably find 10 times where I use successive sentences starting with the, for example, because it actually that actually affects the rhythm of the prose, and I just avoid it like the plague. And a couple of, actually a couple of times, I had tied myself in knots avoiding having the next sentence start with the, and she had said, "You've got to be kidding! Use them," and it breathes much more cleanly than than the convoluted construction you've got. So she was, I really enjoyed working with her. She was at Liveright. Now, about two days after she finished editing my book, moved onto Penguin. This is publishing, but she was she was terrific. You know, my first book, I sent it in, and I got back a—and again, how arrogant can you be? Even though I was a simple foreigner, I got a 30-page commentary from someone on the on the book, and and I had to respond to the University of Georgia Press, and and like they paid me in advance for the book. I knew they were going to publish it, and I just said, "You paid money for this?" Was my response to the 30-page g—I just, I, I just was not was not interested. Okay, it's an incredible arrogance, but it's my book. Got my name on it, and I take the I take the blame if there's errors or mistakes or what have you.

Kate Carpenter 45:08
Are there other writers who you look to for inspiration for your writing?

Shane White 45:12
I read the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Wall Street Journal book page, not the rest of the thing, and the New York Times, and believe you me, I'm glad I'm retired. Keeping up with that really takes a lot, but that's the stuff I like. One of the questions you were thinking about asking me was a book that you recommend, and I'll echo some other of your authors. The one I love because it's it's just so different from my work is Robert Caro and his Lyndon Johnson and the Robert Moses book. And I've recommended that any number of times. I haven't read it. I've listened to it on with the earphones on, probably three times, and that's hundreds of hours of listening to it. And there's a point where Caro is writing, and Johnson's coming into Congress, and he knows when he put his foot on the first step, he was smiling. His sources are that good, and he's writing—and when I was writing about Jeremiah Hamilton, there were five-year periods I had no idea where he was, whether he was smiling or stuff like that. The sources that he uses and the way you know Caro's account of electrification in Texas is like 150 page—It's just beautiful the way he, the way he writes his account of Kennedy's assassination. I know what happened, but it it's a page turner as you do it. His ability to do that is just unbelievable, and I look forward to the last volume. So I when I'm in New York, I'm usually on the Upper West Side near the New York Historical Society, and he's certainly the only historian I've ever seen on flagpoles with banners, Robert Caro, all over all over the place, and that too is a good thing.

Kate Carpenter 47:13
What Wthe most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?

Shane White 47:18
I can't remember who gave it to me, but and it's sort of a bit ridiculous, given I'm talking to you. But it was well before you were even born, and that was, don't be boring. And I used it. I used to lecture on my work, even though I was writing the PhD, in a course in Black history. I was teaching, and my line was always, I would just hate someone to be able to write on, he was a, on his gravestone: He was a historian and he was boring, because to me history is not boring and it shouldn't be on the page either. So don't be boring would be my advice, which I don't need to tell you that.

Kate Carpenter 48:01
Well, I love that, obviously. I know you're trying to figure out what the next book is, and were waiting till you finished this one. But it sounds like you're done with the 19th century New York. So, are are you moving on to 20th century New York next, or do you have?

Shane White 48:16
Yeah, no. But I've done most of the research, I'm going to write a book called Harlem, 1935: Year of the Riot. So any number of people that have written books on 1914, 1857, or whatever. This is 1935, but it's about Harlem, and it's not. It's everyday life in Harlem. It's looking by using, I've read every surviving court case from 1935 and black newspapers. So it will be looking at everyday ordinary ordinary people, everyday life, in which there happened to be the biggest riot in Harlem's history within March, I think it was. So that will be part. So it'll be 12 chapters, one for each month. Introduction, conclusion. So that's the, that's the aim. It's again trying to use the same sort of approach I used in the 19th century, but in 20th century history. The other thing, again, I don't know if someone told me this or I worked through that myself, but I my idea of hell is having sources talking back to you. I want my sources dead, like, many of your guests who do oral history, I have no interest in doing oral history. I think I write a very democratic, egalitarian sort of history, but it's my history. I'm in control of it. I don't want people arguing back. So I'm thinking, like 1935 is getting close, but really, I'm going to be a bit unlucky for someone to say I was there in February 1935, and you got the weather wrong. Or, again, my idea of hell.

Kate Carpenter 50:15
Well, I look forward to seeing what you do with it. It sounds great, Shane White. Thank you for joining me on Drafting the Past. Thanks for talking about your your research and writing.

Shane White 50:26
Thank you very much. Was a pleasure to be here.

Kate Carpenter 50:30
Thanks again to Shane White for joining me for this episode, and thanks to you for listening. You'll find a link to A Moment in the Sun in the show notes. Visit DraftingThePast.com for even more great nonfiction history book coverage, including book reviews, interviews with authors, and new book releases. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.