In this episode, Kate welcomes historian Dr. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal. Nathan is a professor history at the University of Southern California. His first book, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution, came out in 2015. His new book just came out this month, February 2024, from Basic Books. It’s called The Age of Revolutions and the Generations Who Made It, and it tells the history of the revolutionary era from 1760 to 1825 across multiple nations and many individual lives. Nathan and Kate talked about the merits of messy outlines, how historians could borrow the techniques of fiction writers, and why his new book was a bit like making cheese – you’ll just have to listen to find out what that’s all about.
Mentioned in this episode:
- Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It (Basic Books, 2024)
- Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution (Belknap/Harvard, 2015)
- Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
- How It’s Made: Blue Stilton Cheese (video)
- Brian J. Distelberg, editor at Basic Books
- John Dos Passos’ U.S.A. Trilogy
- Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
- The New Yorker, “The Mysterious Disappearance of a Revolutionary Mathematician,” by Rivka Galchen
- Richard Powers, The Overstory
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter:
Hello there. I’m Kate Carpenter, and this is “Drafting the Past”, a podcast all about the craft of writing history. In this episode, I’m excited to welcome historian Dr. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal.
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
Thanks. It’s wonderful to be here.
Kate Carpenter:
Nathan is a Professor of History at the University of Southern California. His first book, “Citizen Sailors: Becoming American in the Age of Revolution” came out in 2015. His new book just came out this month, February 20 24 from basic books. It’s called “The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It.” And it tells the history of the revolutionary era from 1760 to 1825 across multiple nations and many individual lives.
Nathan and I talked about the merits of messy outlines, how historians could borrow the techniques of fiction writers and why his new book was a bit like making cheese. You’ll just have to listen to find out what that’s all about. Here’s my conversation with Dr. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal.
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
In a sense, I think I may have been a little bit set up for this. There are a lot of books in my genealogy, so to speak. My great aunt, my grandfather’s sister was like a pretty prolific author. She did cookbooks, she did children’s books. She did YA books. My grandmother published books. On the other side, my grandparents didn’t publish books, but they did write them, but they left them in drawers.
My father is a writer, my mother is an author, so I don’t think it’s… You don’t inherit these things, but there was certainly the idea all around me that you might publish a book. It turns out it’s a lot harder than just they make it look. So that was, I think I grew up in a family that had lots of writers in it, and I suppose I always thought it was interesting to try to write for the broadest audience possible, whatever that might be.
I mean, in my high school, it meant writing for trying to write for lots of my peers. And in graduate school it meant trying to write not just for my two friends, or not just for my advisor, but maybe trying to have a wider audience. And I love the discipline of trying to find a way to communicate as a scholar what are often pretty abstruse, pretty esoteric ideas as much as possible in a fairly accessible way.
So I think in a sense, I’m not sure there’s a trajectory. It’s just like, I think this was what I wanted to do from the start. Maybe I’ve gotten better at it. I feel like it’s always the same struggle in some way to try to take what is in my mind and the insights that I think I might’ve had or the things that I feel like I’ve discovered and try to convey them in a way that other human beings can understand. Yeah, so I don’t know if that’s a trajectory there. It might just be a kind of idée fixe.
Kate Carpenter:
Well, let’s dig in first to just practical questions. So when and where do you like to do your writing?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
In theory, I like to do my writing in the morning when I’m fresh and I sit down and I write a page or two. In practice, I spend two hours staring at a blank page, and then I go to a cafe. And then in 25 minutes, I do all the writing that I supposedly was supposed to do before. I’m definitely a person who works best with the kind of background noise.
It also depends what kind of writing I’m doing, like drafting, I think, or first drafting is often best with some kind of stimulus or an hour to do it. And just what can you get on the page. When it gets to editing, especially the last, let’s say 10%, there I feel like I need to be in a cork lined room and left to myself for an indefinite amount of time. And so for me that’s always the… Getting it to 75% I find pretty easy. Getting to 90% is hard and then the last 10% is like a blood sacrifice basically. Every time I write something, every time, every single time.
Kate Carpenter:
How do you like to organize your sources and your work?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
So I’m a real primitive, I’m sorry to say. I mean, I have so many friends with such beautiful databases and they use so many of these different tools that have been created and I am still using Word documents. I just love the simplicity of them. So I’ll tend to just organize sources chronologically. I will often, if I’m working through an archive or a collection, depending on the size, I’ll either just create one Word document that has transcriptions and notes in it, or I’ll create multiple ones for individual volumes.
And in my defense, because it does sound like why not use note cards? Why not carbon paper? I do think that the search functions that have been built into laptops are so powerful now that basically everything you make on your computer is a database. And so what I often end up doing is leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for myself so that I can find the things that I’m looking for using keyword searches or spotlight.
But then often I’ll end up reorganizing all of the sources that I’ve taken notes on in chronological order or in regional, but I’m pretty primitive when I do research I really am. I’ve tried. I’ve tried making databases, and actually the reason that I don’t do it, I don’t know, maybe this is getting ahead of ourselves, but the reason that I… One of the things that I don’t like about making databases, and again, maybe this is just my limited understanding of databases, but because you have to decide what the fields are at the outset, I always feel like you then approach the sources with a particular set of presumptions about what you’re going to find.
And I like the free play that you get with just taking notes on what’s there, which is not to say I’m not claiming that I sit down in front of the sources like a child and let them lead me, but I do think I have more of a… I feel like there’s more free play when you’re just taking notes as you go and not trying to figure out how to fit things into a rubric. I’m waiting for the day when I say that to someone and they explain to me why I’m totally and utterly wrong. So if one of your listeners would like to send me an email and explain that to me, I’d be delighted.
Kate Carpenter:
Is there a point in the research process where you like to start writing?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
Oh God, this is another one of these. What I do in theory, what I do in practice questions. In theory, as I always tell graduate students when I’m talking to them, it’s really good to start writing maybe even a little bit before you think you’re ready because you want to see… I think the writing, at least for me, helps me organize my thinking.
So if you start, you don’t want to start too early, but you don’t want to be done with unquote done with the research before you start writing because how do you know what the research is going to consist of? So that’s sort of in theory, I think that’s what you should do in practice. I think the way it usually ends up happening is either decide that there’s some conference I want to submit a paper to and I’ve got to write something up, or I get an invitation to give a paper, and I do that unwise thing where I think, “Oh, this would be a great opportunity to write up X thing.” And then six weeks later I’m slamming my head against my desk thinking, “Why did I say yes to this?”
Kate Carpenter:
Every time.
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
I write something up. Right, every time, this is apparently going to be my leitmotif as I never learned. But yeah, I mean, I always think that there’s a kind of iterative or cyclical process where you research, you write, you research, you write. I think the more you’re able to do that, the better. Because if you’re really engaged in a process of discovery, which is I hope what we’re doing most of the time, you shouldn’t know exactly where you’re going to end up until you really get in there and even until you try to write it up.
I remember Bernard Bailyn in one of his… He has this little book of where he’s being interviewed about his writing process, and he describes Bernard Bailyn, the great ’60s, ’70s historian of the American Revolution who recently died just a few years ago. He was being asked about his magnum opus, the ideological origins of the American Revolution, and he describes someone asking him to see the outline he had written, and he brings out the outline and it’s this tape together thing with lots of notes on it, and he’s pasted over things.
And so even this book, which for any if you’ve read it or if your readers have read it, I mean your listeners have read it’s just of an elegance and economy of argument and evidence that’s astonishing. And the outline for this apparently is just like a complete mess. So I think there’s some real truth there that even or maybe to arrive at that kind of economy, you actually have to go through a phase that’s just an explosion of paper. At least that’s what I’m going to keep telling myself.
Kate Carpenter:
No, I like that. So then do you use an outline when you approach drafting?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
Yeah, I do do outlines and I tell students to do it as well for sure. I tend not to do very detailed outlines, and I suppose I owe an apology to Ms. Meeker, my eighth grade social studies teacher for being so resistant at the time to learning how to do outlines with all the proper bullet points, because probably if I had paid closer attention, this would be a lot easier.
But I think definitely I try to think about the broad headings that I’m going to deal with and how I want to move from subject to subject. When we talk about the process for the book that’s coming out, I can say a little bit more about how it was different from the first one, and part of it is about the outlining. But the other thing that I sometimes do, and I always recommend this to students and sometimes even colleagues who are lost in the wilderness, is reverse outlining, which I actually think is an amazing practice.
So where you start with whatever you have written and you try to figure out what the outline of that thing would look like. It can be an amazing discipline if you just… You know something isn’t working, but you cannot figure out how it’s not working. Just that discipline of going back to an outline format, I think can be very powerful. And I definitely have done it a few times with both books. I think there were bits where I felt like I needed to work backwards to outlines, try to figure out what it was that I thought I was doing or what it was that I was trying to accomplish and what was missing.
Kate Carpenter:
I feel like that touches on this question a little, but what does your revision process look like after you’ve drafted?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
I have a lot of trouble letting go of things, which is I think part of the explanation for that bloody last 10% of the project. So again, the roughing in, I don’t find all that difficult. And I would say my first drafts are usually pretty clean. I mean, they’re fairly readable, fairly coherent generally. I mean, not always, but I just can’t write something that it just doesn’t come out unless I’m writing something that follows to me. Hence, I suppose also that two hours spent in the morning where I don’t actually write anything that I was talking about before.
But then I often will reread and think, no, this whole section either needs to be somewhere else, or actually this needs to be much longer than it was before. So it’s not uncommon for me to do a pretty significant revision of some substantive part of an article or even a book. And then there’s further rounds of refining language and jiggering with transitions and first and last paragraphs and the mechanics of sentences.
I have the disease where I keep trying to do it until much later than I should. So every time I’m in proofs, there’s always some sentence that needs to be written and proofs, which you’re not really supposed to do. And so far, I’ve always had good luck with managing editors and the like who’ve always been like, “Okay, just this once.” If they knew that I had done it with every other piece of thing that I had written, they might be more resistant.
But I don’t know. I think it comes from a desire to not for perfection since perfection isn’t achievable, but a desire to be as clear and as precise and as convincing as possible. And I think every time at least I read over my own work, I feel like I read it with slightly different eyes, and there’s something else that I feel like usually I need to be convinced of or I need to make it as persuasive as it can be. There’s always this urge to jiggle it a little more.
Kate Carpenter:
Is there someone you rely on to step in and say, no, Nathan, this is good enough. You need to let this go?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
That’s a good idea. Are you volunteering for the job? No, I think in the end I feel like I have to be satisfied myself so that the copy editing stage, which is the last opportunity to rewrite sections, basically, I really feel like that always takes me a long time and I’ve got to whatever. I just have to expect that I’m going to feel frustrated and worried about it and say to myself, I have X amount of time. I’m going to do the very best I can in this amount of time. But no, I think I’m afraid that my technique is more I’m going to take every last minute that’s on the clock. Yeah, it would be good to have someone who could step in and say, I think that’s enough.
Kate Carpenter:
When I was preparing for this interview, I was struck to learn that your first book was not your dissertation or not evolved out of your dissertation, which seems unusual for a historian. Why did you decide to go with a different project?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
Well, I mean, the first thing to be said is I’m very glad that it worked out, but there was an eminent historian of my acquaintance who I saw her a couple of years after my first book came out and she said, “Oh, Nathan, I’m so glad it’s worked out for you because what I heard you were doing your first book as your dissertation.” And she just drew her finger across her throat silently, and she’s a good friend.
And so I took it in the spirit in which it was offered, but it was somewhat risky, and I was really lucky to have people who were willing to take that risk with me in the university among the publisher, et cetera, et cetera. So why did I do it? I mean, I did it for two reasons really. One was that my dissertation, which I think did something important and useful, it was still a dissertation and it had to do things in a dissertation-y kind of way.
It had to show that I knew how to read sources and could make a convincing argument and could respond to every reasonable objection. And the scope of project that I wanted, the kind of scope of argument that I wanted just wasn’t possible in the scope of the dissertation. And I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to have time between that and the beginning of the tenure process to really turn it into the kind of book that I wanted.
And I really thought it would benefit from sitting to the side for a little while and letting my thinking about it mature and develop. And then I had this other project, happily, which was somewhat advanced, and which I thought this is a good moment to do this book. Also, Maritime history was having a moment which maybe is still going on, and I thought this is a good project to do first. So that’s why I decided to do it that way.
And I guess as we’re talking about this, I guess it actually comes back to my unwillingness to let things go. In some ways the dissertation felt, I mean, it was complete. It was a complete dissertation, but it was not the complete project that I had wanted to do. I mean, I don’t know, maybe we don’t ever do the complete project we want to do, but it was far enough from that that I wanted to give myself more time, and this seemed like a way to do that. So that’s more or less how I ended up doing that.
I mean, this new book is not exactly, or in fact at all the development dissertation. There are bits and pieces of the research from the dissertation that are in it, but it’s a pretty small fraction, maybe 10% of this book. Some of the thinking is definitely in there, but again, really transformed and not just transposed and not just expanded.
Kate Carpenter:
How did your writing and research process change between your two books and perhaps even between your dissertation and then the two books?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
Well, I think the biggest jump was probably they were each jumps. At the dissertation stage, I had more or less, the dissertation is about letter writing practices and political organizing in the late 18th century, three 18th century, late 18th century revolutions. And I had a pretty clear idea that I was going to write about private letter writing and that I had these three revolutionary targets.
Source collections were pretty clear. There wasn’t expansive, but not endless source bases. And so I worked through those fairly comprehensively. For the first book for “Citizen Sailors”, the source base was potentially much, much greater. There was no way that I was going to be able to work through it absolutely comprehensively. And so there was much more of a process of selection, much more of a process of thinking about, here are the arguments that I think I want to make.
Here’s the arc that I see, what kinds of sources, what kinds of bodies of sources can I go to, to see if these claims are true or not, and how they fit together? And so I would say there was a bit more of an argument-driven research strategy with the first book. But in terms of the writing, the writing I would say was pretty similar from the dissertation to the first book. In each of them, I would write chapter length treatments of a body of sources/a problem or a claim.
This book, the new one, “The Age of Revolutions: And the Generations Who Made It” was very different because it’s quite capacious in terms of its geographic and also to a lot certain extent chronological reach. There was absolutely no way that I could even imagine doing comprehensive research. I mean, it wouldn’t even mean anything exactly.
From the beginning the idea was that it had to be a book that was a hybrid of synthesis of existing scholarship, which is voluminous itself and a primary source grounding that I thought was really, really important and really important that he carried through the book. I didn’t want to have parts of the book that were kind of rooted in primary sources and other parts that were just secondary source based because I felt that would make for a very disequilibrated book.
So I really had to think about what the overall argument would be, how I was going to go about making the central claims and where I could find exemplary and persuasive illustrations of that point or of those points. And what it ended up being, both of the research and the writing process were very different. It really started out almost pointillist.
So I actually wrote a lot of the book, this new book in sections of about 2,000 to 3,000 words initially. They would be these smaller kind of research dents usually, although sometimes they were just summary or synthetically dense readings of secondary scholarship. In my mind, they were all connected, but there were several stages during the writing process when I started putting them together.
And I got a lot of comments that were like, “I just can’t understand how this makes any sense.” And I would say, “No, no, no, it makes perfect sense and here’s why.” But of course, that wasn’t on the page. There would be these incredibly abrupt transitions from one part of the Atlantic world to another or from one topic to another, and readers rightly would sort of, “What are you doing?” So in many ways, the process was more… It was like trying to get… Well, it was like inoculating a cheese.
I was inoculating the cheese with lots of these little stabs like roquefort or something where you inoculate it with these little stabs and then the mold grows out from those stabs. You could still see the stab marks in some cases, but then it permeates the cheese, whereas the other ones were much more putting a block on top of a block. So the process of writing this book was really very, very different. And researching it as well was very different.
Kate Carpenter:
You indicated earlier that related to the question of outlining. Did you reverse outline to try to figure out how the mold was growing?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
Yeah, sometimes I had to do reverse outlining. I would say more that this book, I had to do a lot more outlining of individual sections and of little pieces. And so I did end up doing a lot. I think I ended up doing a lot more a number of versions of an outline of the whole and a lot of individual versions of outlines of smaller pieces.
Again, because I was trying to make all of these pieces come together as much as is possible. I mean, part of the claim is that these pieces are disparate and you don’t just want to smush everything together into homogeneity. That’s American cheese, not good French cheese, but you want it to still be a solid and not soup or bits and pieces of fragments of things.
And so I think outlining was actually more important to me in some ways in this project than it was in previous ones where I really felt like I had to keep telling myself, here’s what I’m trying to do. Here’s the story that I can dimly perceive. What are all the pieces that need to be there for this story that I feel like I can perceive dimly or with increasing certainty? How can I make that apparent to someone, not me, for instance,
Kate Carpenter:
To better understand how this process of narrative inoculation worked out in the finished book, I asked Nathan to read an excerpt and answer some questions about it for me. Here’s Dr. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal reading from chapter one of “Age of Revolutions.”
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
“Even for the best positioned and most talented, the road to success in the stratified world of the mid-18th century was long and uncertain. Louis-Augustin Busque, born in 1759 to a moderately well-off family was about 17 when the lit de justice of 1776 took place. The first decades of his life illustrate the steep challenges that his family and millions of others like it encountered as they tried to rise in the unequal societies of the late old regime.
Busque’s father Paul and the energy of a man on the make. Before Louis-Augustin was born, Paul had already become a minor figure in Paris savant circles, publishing regularly with scientific academies and societies. The recognition he gained came slowly at an insufficient quantity. He felt his essays and experiments were ignored, slighted.
In 1769, perhaps tired of seeking entry to the inner circles of Paris science, he accepted an offer to helm a new glass manufacturer near Saint-Flour in South-central France. While his father sought to advance, young Louis-Augustin ran wild quote-unquote at the home of his maternal grandmother. At the age of 10, he was sent to a boarding school in Dijon, though the school was run by monks, the half-Protestant Busque found it welcoming and accommodating.
His teachers did not insist that he appear at Mass, and they allowed him perhaps even encouraged him to read books by deists and skeptics. The school too was an element of his father’s strategy because his maternal grandfather had been an artillery officer. The young Busque had a leg up on entry into the artillery corps. This called for a scientific and practical education founded on mathematics. Latin and Greek might be fine for poets, but geometry and chemistry were what made the cannons fire. This did not keep Busque from imbibing great draughts of 18th-century polite culture. Anyway, lessons in how to carry himself and converse.
Kate Carpenter:
One of the things that you do so well in this book and that this section shows is how you use the lives of a few people to give readers a window into these much larger events happening in their world. What goes into crafting a few paragraphs like this kind of mini biography?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
So I mean, maybe I should just say a little bit about the book broadly to contextualize the question. I mean assume everyone of your person listening to this has already bought several copies of the book and offered them to all of your friends, but if for some reason you haven’t yet, here’s what you need to know.
So this is a narrative history of the Atlantic age of revolutions from the 1760-1820s to the eighteen-twenties, North America, South America, Caribbean, Europe, basically making the case that there is a revolution as a generational process in the Atlantic world with very distinct characteristics before and after 1800, the revolutions before 1800, really being captained by or piloted by or organized by a first generation born and grown up during the old regime and a second wave of revolutions after 1800 that are staffed by, if you will, or led by a second generation, that really is formed in the chaos, the excitement, the disruptions of the first revolutionary generation.
So for me, it was enormously important in taking on a topic like the Age of Revolutions, which has been my dream for a long time. And that’s part of what I was saying about the dissertation. I think I was trying to get to the scale of the age of revolutions and just realized really couldn’t do it in that format, in that context.
Part of the mission, in a sense, in getting to this second book was to think about how to operate on this big wide scale. But it seemed to me absolutely essential that it remain grounded in ordinary lives, in everyday lives and in human experience. I think one of the things that’s most challenging about working at this kind of scale is that historians, I think are fundamentally where students of human beings, human life. And when you operate at the kind of scale of revolution, I think there’s always a danger that you lose track of the individual life, the individual lives, the individual ground-to-ground experience.
And I would insist that underground experience isn’t just about ordinary people because even political leaders have everyday lives and everyday experiences. And so I really felt it was essential to keep connected to that. And that’s part of why, as you suggested, threaded these biographical filaments through the book.
So what goes into paragraph, a couple paragraphs like this, and that was three paragraphs you had me read. Well, the first thing that goes into it is that it was in the first draft that I wrote of this. It was probably three times as long because I knew so much about it. I had so much to say. I read Paul Busque’s asks essays and thought about what he had to say about things and saw how grumpy he was and had a lot to say about that and wanted to put all that in. And I showed it to readers and they said, “Why are we hearing all about?” He said, “Do we really need to know this much?”
And of course, they were right that they did not need to know that much. And so I had to reduce and reduce. But so these three paragraphs, it’s actually a good selection because it includes both a bit of secondary reading. So Busque’s somewhat, he actually has universal name recognition in the United States, even though nobody knows it. He’s the namesake of the Busk pair. Yeah, actually everybody knows his name. It was named after him by another botanist.
So there was a little bit written about him, some secondary literature, nothing very substantial. Then there are published sources, his father’s works, which he actually edited, and then there’s a manuscript basis to this as well. Some of this information came out of the Bosque papers, which are in the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Library of the City of Paris, which is an amazing place, an amazing, amazing place, has incredible collections and beautiful place to work, 17th-century building, et cetera, et cetera.
So yeah, for me, when I read those paragraphs, I always think of the Ashapin and working there with the Bosque papers. I think actually some of this stuff actually came out of… He wrote up A, and if not these paragraphs than other parts of the biographical study of Bosque, he wrote up a sort of autobiographical statement in the early 19th century with the 18 teens probably, which is in these papers, which is an extraordinary resource and gives you some of the access to the interiority that one wants in a kind of biographical statement. And that’s often missing, I would say.
Kate Carpenter:
Fantastic. Another thing I really admired in this book is that you move so smoothly between scale. As you mentioned earlier, this book goes from this massive scale of the Atlantic world down to the individual. You also mentioned that in earlier drafts there was a reaction that some of what you’d written felt quite abrupt, and none of that comes through in the final thing. It moves so smoothly, it’s remarkable. So I guess my sad question is how do you do that? I mean, how do you make that flow well?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
Well, first, thank you. I mean, because it certainly is. That was, I would say, one of the big challenges. And I think the success or failure of the book, at least as an attempt to do this kind of thing depends to a great degree on its ability to move up and down the ladder of scales. I would say in a sense, this is the drama for any historian what [inaudible 00:31:54] called the game of scales, where you’ve got to move up and down in levels of generality and levels of scale, as you say, from the individual to the social to maybe the planetary, depending how far you want to go.
The interplanetary, unfortunately, I don’t think, or maybe fortunately there’s no magic solution. I think it was a matter of trying over and over and over again to get from one scale to another to try to get from this individual to the collective. And in a way, I think what I actually found the hardest, and this was feedback that I got a couple times at a fairly advanced stage, was that the thing that was the kind of middle term, in other words, that the individual wasn’t so bad and the kind of biographical and the depicting of the world around an individual that was, you were working out from the individual that was okay, and the scale of the national or the Atlantic or the transnational, that was also, I think whatever that felt pretty organic to me.
And the scale that felt really difficult was the one between them in a way, the scale of let’s say the social group, the scale of a caste group or a class group, and linking the individual lives to those intermediate groups, and then from those intermediate groups to the larger, the higher scales.
But I mean, you could pick any passage in the book, and I can probably show you how I had to cut or add or both cut and add. I mean, I will just cop to the fact which I, is this proud, is this shame face. I don’t know. In the later stages of writing, I ended up at one point adding 30,000 words and then cutting another 20,000 words. And this was after the manuscript was already roughly the length that it is now.
So there was just a lot of filling in, a lot of filling gaps and then taking out a lot of things where I had warmed to my subject as one does. Because I mean, you fall in love with the people, fall in love. Sometimes you really, really hate them, but you become interested in, you become intrigued by the people that you work on.
And I happen to have some of the people that I chose to spend the most time with in this book, the sort of more biographical subjects I did for the most part, really like them and find them fascinating and likable, maybe not, but engaging and vivid. And so I just wanted to go on and on about them, but sometimes the reader doesn’t really need you to, so yeah, I mean, I think it really is, it feels like a cop out, but I think the answer is trial and error.
But I guess also, maybe I should say one other thing that is I think we haven’t talked about or you’ve talked about a little bit, but the question of readers and comments, and that was one of the things that I most relied on readers for, both other scholars, a couple of non-scholars, several non-scholars read it as well. I really wanted their help figuring out, where am I just going on, where can you not follow what I’m doing? Where is the jump too high? And that’s, I think one of the things that you can really get from a reader.
Kate Carpenter:
In another episode of this, Dan Bauch said that he likes to give readers a draft manuscript and say, “Just mark wherever you get bored.” Which I thought was brilliant.
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
Oh yeah, definitely. Definitely. I mean, I’ve never had the guts to actually say that to anyone because I don’t want to know. But yes, I mean, I always wonder when is it that you get tired? When is it that you lose interest? Definitely.
Kate Carpenter:
Who Do you rely on for that kind of feedback?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
I mean, I was really fortunate with this book. I mean, I can say something about this book and then say something more general about feedback. But this book, I was really fortunate to have really generous colleagues who spent a lot of time reading. One particularly astonishingly generous colleague sent me something like 14 pages of comments. I had some two manuscript reviews where the colleagues were super duper helpful, really were encouraging, but also tough on a lot of things. And that was incredibly, incredibly helpful.
And I also really benefited from my editors. This book is coming out with basic books, a trade press. And one of the real reasons that I wanted to work with my editor there, Brian Distelberg, is he has a well-deserved reputation for being an excellent reader. And he just read through it and he basically said he tried to read it as a non expert, as a person standing in for the eyes of the non-specialist reader.
And he said, here, I don’t know what’s going on. Here I feel like you’re going on for too long. Here I don’t fully understand where the argument is going. And that was so helpful, so enormously helpful. So I felt like for this book, the thing that most helped me was having readers who were willing to plow through the whole messy manuscript or large segments of it.
There were also lots and lots of people, and they’re all thanked in the book or many of them are who read individual chapters. And that was also, especially for… Because some of this stuff is pretty far outside of my home turf as a scholar was so, so helpful to be set right on all sorts of factual and interpretive matters.
In general, I would say I have a handful of people who I consult pretty regularly when I’m writing most things. I have a pretty small group of people, a writing group, and we’ve been sharing stuff pretty regularly for a number of years, five or six years. And that can be really helpful for almost any piece of writing. But yeah, I think just the fact of bouncing it off other people, it almost doesn’t matter whether they’re specialists, it doesn’t matter whether they have a huge amount of time to look at it.
Just having someone who can say, I mean, it’s always great if it is a specialist and they have a huge amount of time, that’s even better. But just having someone who can look at it and say, “This just doesn’t hold together.” I mean, I distinctly remember my graduate advisor once saying to me, his only comment on an essay that I’d spent a month on, his basic comment about it was, “This is very interesting, but as it is, the structure defeats the argument.” I mean, he was completely right and that it ultimately turned into a published article in responding to that. But I think feedback doesn’t necessarily need to be exhaustive to be extremely useful.
Kate Carpenter:
Yeah, absolutely. Are there people you like to read for inspiration as a writer?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
With this project, I spent a lot of time thinking about two things in two phases. It make sense in retrospect in a way that it didn’t at the time, probably. When I was working up the project, I spent a lot of time thinking about how you write the story of something that’s too big to get your arms around it. How do you tell a story that’s at a scale where you just can’t do everything right? Coming out of the dissertation and write the dissertation mode that we’re taught is, I will know everything about this subject. And I was just sure that this was not going to be that kind of book.
And so some of the things that I found most… Two books that really were always in my mind in some way or another were John Dos Passos’ “U.S.A. trilogy”, which is this attempt from the 20s, 30s to kind of do a panoramic history or account of the United States in the beginning of the 20th century. And there’s just no way that he can do everything. And so he does has these biographical chapters. He has these chapters that are fictional narrative.
And biographical, I mean, he’s biographies of famous people, fictional narrative that’s broken up across the book. And then of course, probably most famously, he has these sort of prose poems made of newspaper headlines. And there are a couple of other types of chapters, and he’s very in this thing called Camera Eye, which is these almost stream of consciousness. And he actually wrote… At the time, he was asked, “What is the purpose of this?” And he explained each of these is designed to give a different angle on the period. And so I thought a lot about that as a way of, again, it’s hard to translate I think to history because you can’t make things up.
Unfortunately, I feel very jealous, I have to say, of my friends who write fiction. I’ll talk about that in a second, the ability to write the ending you want. But his idea of putting together incommensurate parts to be more than individual pieces, that the whole was more than the sum of its parts I found very compelling.
The other book that I thought about a fair amount coming into writing this book or working on this book was a completely different kind of book. It’s “The Golden NotebookNovel” by Doris Lessing, which again, it was a very different kind of book. It’s about a different kind of thing. It’s about a woman’s inner life or maybe her soul, I don’t know. But again, it’s something that’s ungraspable on its own terms. And I had this very vivid recollection of reading this book as a teenager.
And I mean, I was so taken with it that I created my own four notebooks to take apart my thoughts into different categories and then try to bring them back together. But again, the idea of fragmentation to create a larger whole, I think that’s the common thread there. And that seemed to me the possible solution. I also got a very important insight from bizarrely an article about a mathematician in the New Yorker that I once read on an airplane. And the mathematician said, “When I have a really difficult problem…” This is a guy whose name I’ve now forgotten who lives in a recluse.
And he said, “when I have a really difficult problem, there are two ways of thinking about it. You can think of it as like a nut, and you’ve got to try to crack it and crack it and crack it, or you can just put it in water and let the whole thing soften and then it opens up by itself.”
Or there’s a metaphor of what if you have to cross a barren wasteland with lots of sharp rocks and you could stumble across it, or you could…. Again, this is assuming a kind of godlike control of the landscape. You just raise the water level and then you can cross smoothly in a boat. And so I think the idea again, is if a problem seems unresolvable, you’ve got to go around it or outside of it, rather than trying to just plow through it.
So you don’t try to write a comprehensive narrative of the age of revolutions, the way you would write a comprehensive narrative of, I don’t know, the coming of the American Revolution itself, a fairly capacious topic. You’ve got to find some other way of going at that. So those were things that I was thinking about as I went into the project.
And once I was in it, there were a number of… Then I felt like everywhere I looked, when I read anything fictional, I was very interested in the ways in which fiction writers very often will have threads of stories that don’t quite intersect or intersect much later. I remember as I was working on the book reading Richard Powers “The Overstory”, and thinking, “Wow, for the first 200 pages of this book, you have no idea how these stories are going to come together.” None or only a very dim sense of it.
And if I remember correctly, I mean this is now several years ago, but it’s not until three quarters of the way through the book that you really have a sense of how at least one of the narratives that’s being threaded together actually intersects with the others. So that also, I found some encouragement in that. I don’t know if I wasn’t going to be able to do anything of that sort, both because I don’t think I’m that kind of literary writer, but also I don’t have the ability to make things happen in my sources and the way that he does.
But again, the idea that you have these disparate lives coming to a similar or a set of similar points, that struck me as really useful. And I think it’s unusual for historians to do that. I mean, I think our way of writing history is, and there are exceptions, I think you’ve interviewed a bunch of the people who are exceptions on this podcast, but the vast majority of what’s written doesn’t take advantage, I think, of the kind of possibilities of bending chronology or of intersecting narratives or of layering in different ways. And I’m not trying to be dismissive at all.
I mean, I think I have pure admiration for, well-done history of all kinds, but it is striking how few historians seem to want to experiment or feel comfortable experimenting or allowed to by committees or publishers or what have you, with the possibilities of writing. So yeah, I think our friends over in the world of fiction have maybe a lot to teach us. If we’re able to listen and able to use it, which I don’t know that we are, but I think it’s pretty… That was certainly what I found most engaging and useful in some ways when I was working on this new book.
Kate Carpenter:
What’s the best writing advice you’ve ever gotten?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
I think I would have to say my undergraduate advisor… Well, I don’t know if this is the best writing advice ever, but I’d certainly the best scholarly writing advice, my undergraduate advisor who was just an extraordinary mentor, she said to me at one point, “Nathan, you have to listen to what readers say to what they say is wrong, but you don’t have to listen to how they think you should fix it.” I think it’s just incredibly sound advice.
The reader is always right in the sense that when they say, “I don’t understand this.” There is no point in arguing with that point. But I think the burden of figuring out how to fix it is always on the writer, not on the reader. Anyone who’s published a scholarly work of any kind, including an article, has experienced reader B, who thinks that everything you’ve done is terrible, and also here’s how to fix it. And I think it requires… I always have that advice in my ear that reader B may be right, that something is wrong here, but you don’t have to listen to what they think is the solution to that problem.
And in fact, reader B is probably not the person who’s best equipped to figure out how to fix it. And I can give you a couple of examples from this new book. I mean, even I mentioned the extraordinary advice and feedback that I got from my editor. There were a couple of times where he would say, “The beginning of this chapter isn’t working at all. It’s not clear what you’re doing.” And I would read it over again, and I would think you know, and he would make recommendations about how to fix it. And I would read it over and I would say, “No, actually, I think the actual problem is the end of the previous chapter.”
And is that a brilliant insight? No, but the point is, I mean, I think you cannot argue with the person who reads and says, “This isn’t working.” But figuring out what it is that needs to happen to fix it, I think is very much the writer’s job and the writer’s responsibility. And you need to assume that responsibility. I mean, it’s both a privilege and a responsibility.
And I think I always feel like yeah, it’s kind of liberating to say, thank you. You’ve told me what doesn’t work, and now I’m going to figure out how to make that better. And hopefully you can. I mean, that’s always the other problem is sometimes it doesn’t seem fixable, but mostly it does.
Kate Carpenter:
Before I let you go, is there anything you’re working on now that you’re up for talking about?
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
Yeah. I’m in France this year, and I’m working on a new project about prize law, so a global history of maritime prize law. So this is the law that governs captures of ships and cargoes at sea. And basically, I’m interested in the ways in which prize law functions across really the whole early modern period from the 16th century through even the end of the 19th century, as a way of both constructing and deconstructing empire through the medium of private property and private property relations.
And in some ways, it has… I mean, I think of it as a global history, and I really do intend for this time to get to South Asia and in the Pacific, and I have sources that take me there. So in that sense, it has the scope of the… Or even a greater scope than the Asia Revolutions book. What’s different though, is I’m really working with prize law with prize cases, and that’s a very esoteric, but very well-defined body of sources, but which gets you everywhere, all around the world.
So it’s been an interesting experience to be reading case after case, after case after case, a very different experience from writing “The Age of Revolutions” and researching “The Age of Revolutions” where I was sometimes slamming as I was doing the research from one kind of source to another, from one body of sources to another. This is much one coherent body of sources and gigantic but coherent.
I mean, I have a colleague who said, “I think every project should give you a new challenge, a new adventure, that that’s what this metier, that this profession is all about.” And I really agree with that. And so yeah, this is my new challenge, I guess. And the new fun thing that I’m trying to do is to figure out how to tell this connected global story out of this very dense, very somewhat abstruse, but I think really with tentacles in every corner set of sources. So yeah, I’m very excited about it.
Kate Carpenter:
Sounds like an excellent challenge to me. Dr. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal, thanks so much for joining me on “Drafting the Past.” It’s really been a pleasure to talk about your writing process.
Nathan Perl-Rosenthal:
Thanks so much for having me. This was really great.
Kate Carpenter:
Thanks again to Dr. Nathan Perl-Rosenthal for joining me on “Drafting the Past.” Thanks to you for listening. This show would not be possible without your support, whether that’s listening, sharing episodes with your friends, or donating to keep me going. I’d love to hear how you’re using the show too. Don’t forget to check out draftingthepast.com for show notes and more, including links to all of the books we talked about in this episode. Until next time, remember that friends, don’t let friends write boring history.
