In this episode, Dr. Christopher Hodson and Dr. Brett Rushforth join Kate Carpenter to talk about their new book, Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution. It was a book two decades in the making, and when you read it, you’ll understand why. It’s absolutely packed with research and fascinating stories, and it makes a persuasive argument that, when you look beyond its official accounts, France played a much bigger role in the colonization of the Atlantic world than historians have assumed.

Chris is an associated professor of history at Brigham Young University, and Brett is editor in chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly. They bring a dry wit and a spirit of joyful curiosity to their work that comes through in the book and in this interview. You’ll hear about the varied ways they researched their new book, not just in written archives but with visual culture, artifacts preserved across the world, and even at archaeological sites in order to write a history of France’s influence in the Atlantic world that focuses not on the accounts and experiences of officials, but on the daily lives of sailors, indigenous peoples in both North America and West Africa, nuns, smugglers, and much more.

Note: Links to bookshop.org are affiliate links.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth, Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution
• Christopher Hodson, The Acadian Diaspora: An Eighteenth-Century History
• Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France
• Laurent DuBois
• Feathered Tupi-Guarani Cape, held by the Musée de Quai Branly
• Foldable ivory spork
• Brett and Chris’s newsletter, Beyond the Ocean
• Garamond Agency
• Huntington Library Quarterly

This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about how

historians write history, and I'm Kate Carpenter. In this

episode, I'm joined by not just one but two great historians,

Dr. Christopher Hodson and Dr. Brett Rushforth.

Thanks for having us.

When Brett emailed to tell me about their

new book, Beyond the Ocean: France and the Atlantic World

from the Crusades to the Age of Revolution, I was hooked right

from the subject line. "Hodson and Rushforth sniff bear

grease." That's a pretty solid introduction to their sense of

humor and the spirit of joyful curiosity they bring to their

research. But it also introduced me to the varied ways they

research their new book, not just in written archives, but

with visual culture, artifacts preserved across the world, and

even at archeological sites where they sniffed the

aforementioned bear grease. Together, they wrote a history

of France's influence in the Atlantic world that focuses not

on the accounts and experiences of officials and rulers, but on

the daily lives of sailors, indigenous peoples in both North

America and West Africa, nuns, smugglers, much more. It was a

book two decades in the making, and when you read it, you'll

understand why. It's absolutely packed with research and

fascinating stories, and it makes a persuasive argument that

when you look beyond official accounts, France played a much

bigger role in the colonization of the Atlantic world than

historians have assumed. Chris is an associate professor of

history at Brigham Young University, and Brett is editor

in chief of the Huntington Library Quarterly. They talked

to me about how they worked together over time and distance

to tell this story, and some of the adventures they encountered

along the way, from a West African spork to using Eminem,

yes, that Eminem, as motivation, to switching presses after they

had already signed a contract. Here's my conversation with

Christopher Hodson and Brett Rushforth.

I will just have you guys start by maybe each of you telling me

a little bit about the trajectory of your career as a

writer, and maybe Brett, you could you could go first.

It's interesting. I don't really

think of myself primarily as a writer, even though I am, of

course, and now I'm an editor full time. But I think the, my

path to writing was rocky, and it didn't come naturally for me.

I love reading. I love poetry. I love fiction. But when I write

myself, I'm tortured, and this it wasn't helped by I think what

helped me the most actually was something that didn't help

initially, is I got two early bodies of feedback, one from a

professor in my master's degree and one in my PhD. The first was

a draft of my master's thesis that I sent in, and I was proud

of it. I felt just like this is one I've shown just how

brilliant my writing is, and I get back a letter, printed

letter that said, "In the future, please refrain from

submitting work that is in such a preliminary state of

preparation." It was devastating, of course. And I

remember these words 25 years later. And then my first paper

to my mentor advisor came back, and at the bottom of my first

paper, it just says "platitudinous and lacking in

substance." Of course, now as a grown-up editor, what I would do

is I'd mark out "and lacking in substance" as being unnecessary

and redundant, and I would have handed it back to him, but

didn't have that option then. And so that was two moments

where I had to learn that I didn't write as well as I

thought, and that what felt natural to me had to be

something that was much more conscious, had to be chosen, had

yeah, they could perhaps learn a little diplomacy

to be learned, and they were both doing me a favor in their

own cruel ways.

in in their good feedback.

You're not wrong. You're not wrong.

Chris, How about you?

Yeah, I had a a kind of similar experience when

I was doing my bachelor's degree and ultimately my master's

degree. I too didn't really have a sense of what being a writer

meant. I didn't know what the practice was like. I was a

first-generation college student, so I spent a lot of

time in my early 20s being really pretty confused about

most of what was going on. And I had a really excellent

undergraduate mentor in Len Rosenband, who was a historian

of of 18th century France and a historian of of labor, and he

gave me really great feedback, very very encouraging. Like,

look, you've you've actually got something. You're doing a good

job. And then the next thing that he returned, he would just

kind of smoke me for overwriting, for being overly

precious, for sort of a variety of things, and as I got to know

Len, I came to realize in part why he was doing that. And Len

had done a PhD at Princeton with Robert Darnton. It was all very

fancy. He probably deserved a better job than Utah State

University where he was, but we were very glad that he was

there. But when I knew him, which was in the mid 1990s,

because I'm so so old now, he had congenital eye problems, and

so in the period between his hiring at Utah State and when I

started to know him, he had essentially gone blind, and I

had to watch what he did to write, and the labor he had to

do was so shocking, like his reading had to take place right

in front of his face. It was incredibly laborious and time

intensive. He took extensive notes on yellow legal pads and

then drafted everything that he wrote by hand because his eyes

couldn't process a screen. He couldn't get close enough to see

the contrast and so on, and so the writing was incredibly

laborious, and that's one of the things really taught me. Like,

look, this is writing is many things, but one of the things

that it is is a craft, and it demands attention. It demands,

like Brett said, intentionality. It demands real commitment, and

that lesson I think has kind of stuck with me in a lot of ways

that have been really, really important.

Before we get into the book itself, I want to

know a little bit about the nuts and bolts of how you guys work.

So, when and where do you like to do your writing?

So, I write whenever and wherever I can find

a spare moment and a quiet place. I have to have silence

when I write, and I need to have a space where I can be

ridiculous. I tend to talk to myself. I read my sentences back

to myself out loud. I pace. I do frustrated gestures. I probably

curse quite a lot more than ends up on the page. In practice,

because I have four kids who are now adults, and when I began

this project with Chris, the oldest was-I mean, well, the

youngest was only four years old and is now 23. So during all

those years, I just had to find whatever time I could, and I'd

write a lot late at night. And somehow, when the world is

tucked away and my obligations are quiet for the night, and I

don't feel the pull of wondering: Is somebody needing

me? Is there a is there an obligation I'm letting go? Is

there something I'm forgetting to do? That's when I felt free

to really lose myself in my thoughts, and so I did a lot of

writing late at night for this project, but the other piece I

think for me that's something I learned just in the last few

years is I listen to my writing and I listen to Chris's writing

and I listen to a lot of things through a screen reader, and

I'll do that when I walk away from the computer. I'll go on a

hike. I'll go on a walk. I'll you know even a drive, a

commute, and hearing the things that I've written actually

changes the way I see the structure, because I'm not so

lost at the sentence level. I'm not so lost in this sort of

clever turn of phrase, but I can actually sit with a larger piece

of writing and see where the narrative works well, where it

falls apart, and so it's really kind of a clumsy process of

finding a minute, finding an hour, finding two hours, three

hours, ideally, and then really taking the time to redo, redo,

redo. And lately, that's taken a lot of listening.

I have to say, you know, Brett revealed to me that

he was listening to our writing kind of late in the process, and

I wish I had known earlier because that would have been

some pretty good practical joke fodder. But in terms of thinking

about writing, it's funny you ask. I'm a tennis fan, and

there's a really good Netflix documentary that's just come on

about Rafael Nadal, and Nadal famously has, let's be generous

and call them routines, but they are very precise routines that

he does physically when he plays tennis. His water bottles have

to be arranged at his seat with the labels facing a particular

way. There's all this stuff that he does, and in the documentary,

the host asks him, "Well, did you ever try to just like stop

doing those things? And he said, "Oh yeah, I I tried and did stop

doing those things, but after I did that, I thought to myself,

'Well, I need these routines because they make me feel safe."

And funnily, I'm not at home right now. I'm I'm in

Providence, Rhode Island. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, but I'm

in Providence, Rhode Island, on a fellowship right now, and so

I'm not in the context, the physical context where I usually

do my writing, and I'm very lucky to have a home office, and

that's where I typically do my writing. And I've found myself

kind of trying to write little things while I've been here-not

nothing major like the work we did for the book-and kind of

sitting down in a non-my office context and sort of panicking

and getting sweaty for reasons I didn't quite understand,

precisely because I wasn't in the kind of same almost

ritualistic environment where I'm used to doing the writing.

So I've come to appreciate maybe Rafa a little bit more now, but

also. So the kind of the habits of engaging in the craft of

writing that I guess I wasn't conscious I was really doing,

but in their absence you realize that they're really pretty

important and meaningful to me.

So I do have to tell the story of when I

finished my last book, I was on a tenure clock and I had to

finish it by a certain date, and there was a lot more to do than

I thought I could really do by that date. And I had a daughter

who had a before school program that needed she needed to be

dropped off at six a.m. So I'd drop her off. I'd go to my

office at William and Mary, and I would sit down, and my version

of Nadal was to put on my noise canceling headphones and listen

to Eminem's "Lose Yourself," and I, I would. It was the same

every morning, and I would, you know, blast that, and it's like

this is going to pump me up. This is exciting. This is my

chance. And then success is your only option, we'll say, for the

radio-free version of that. And there was something about that

that was both sort of comical, and I knew it at the time. It

was comical. I knew it was absurd, but there was something

about it that gave me some routine and also a bit of an

adrenaline boost that I desperately needed at six a.m.

I love that, and I also have to say that you were

the first academic ever to tell me that Eminem plays a crucial

role in their in their writing process.

Well, you're welcome.

Aside from that, what what systems do you have to

keep yourself organized?

You know, for me, I'm, organization is

definitely my weak suit, and one of the things for our book

together that helped us enormously, at least from my

perspective, is that we figured out during a crucial fellowship

year from the ACLS, we got a collaborative research

fellowship in the very early stage of this project, and we

were able to spend a year working together through a very

detailed sort of book outline, chapter outline. We had great

help from our agent Lisa Adams, who's just a remarkable human

being, and that process allowed me to create a or allowed me to

create sort of a filing system that was around the chapters.

And then once we had that, I had a much easier time. But I still

just use Word documents because I find the search function is

almost sort of foolproof. If I know I've written something, I

know there's some, you know, place that I'd written about

this parrot who testified in court in the 1530s, for example,

in the Basque country. I knew somewhere there was a note about

that, and so I just search Basque parrot whatever, and I

always find it. So there are people who have software they

use. There are people who are much more sort of just

intuitively organized than I am. But for me, the key thing was

figuring out a structure, even though we knew it would evolve,

but a structure that I could hang the organization of my

files on. And then even to this day, I still go back, you know,

and know where I can find something based on the fact that

I was working on it for Chapter Three or was working on it for

Chapter Seven.

Yeah, I do the same thing. I really am way more

analog in that way than than maybe even I think I am. So I

have the same system that Brett does. Basically, the the larger

challenge in many respects has been the transition that that

Brett and I have both kind of lived through in our careers,

beginning as graduate students and then to to this point to

digital photography as a way of capturing archival images. In a

lot of respects, that's the more challenging kind of

organizational problem. But Brett's right; we were very very

lucky to kind of build out a framework for the book that, as

we've been talking about it since you know the book's been

completed and so on, the framework actually really held.

And and the great thing about the overall framework holding

was that within each chapter, within each specific topic of

research, then once we had the framework in place, the research

could kind of blow our ideas up in our face. But we still had

this kind of operating system that could function for the

whole of the book. So that kind of initial set of conversations

and so on that really proved pretty enduring. It was really

really critical to actually producing a what what we hope is

a is a coherent book that covers in effect a millennium of of

history.

And it wouldn't have been possible had we not

also each written our first books about topics that are

covered in this broad chronology. You know, French

colonialism, empire. You know the ways that non-elite people

were both implicated in and affected by, and transformed

through the process of empire building, and so the we knew

enough about what we wish we had in a book like this. That it

wasn't just that we came up with a set of ideas at the beginning

and then stuck to it, as if we had sort of like decided

beforehand this is going to be our structure and we're going to

stick to it either way. It's that through the many years of

writing the first book, we had developed these ideas, and then

together over the course of a year, we did how many drafts of

that proposal? Seven, 8, 10.

I've I've blocked all of that out.

Yeah, I have too. My therapist tells me it's

the best idea.

Yeah, smart.

Tell me the story of how you decided to

write this book together.

Chris. Yeah, is this yours?

Yeah, sure. I can start, and then you can jump in

when I tell an an outright lie. So interestingly, Brett and I

are actually sort of from the same place. So Brett and I both

come from from northern Utah, and we actually attended at

least one of the same schools. We both attended Utah State

University at slightly different times for our master's degrees.

And when I was doing my PhD in the early 2000s at Northwestern,

I began to hear kind of rumblings from the west of this

guy at UC Davis who was working on this really incredible stuff

about indigenous slavery. He's working on New France, really

doing all this interesting work that I needed to engage and

wanted to engage, and we finally wound up I think meeting for the

first time I think at a a an interview where I was

interviewing for a postdoctoral fellowship and Brett was on the

committee because he he had had that postdoctoral fellowship and

notwithstanding the fact that I got absolutely annihilated in

that interview, Brett and I became, we started having

conversations because you know we're sympatico. We're kind of

from the same place. How weird it is that there are these two

guys kind of working on these French colonial issues coming

out of northern Utah of all places, and we just kind of

figured out that the way that people talked about the French

Empire in the early modern period, just did not match the

dynamism and connectivity and kind of deep interest that we

were sort of seeing in the archives and so on. And so the

idea for the book actually emerged well, of course, before

we finished our first books, out of a series of conversations

that we had when we were pretty young people, kind of emerging

into a field, French colonial history, that was just then, I

think, picking up a fair amount of interest in the broader kind

of discipline of history period and in early American history

generally. Brett, what do you remember?

No, that's exactly right, and you know, I

do remember that interview, eviscerated, I think it's a

little too strong, but maybe not entirely too strong. But it was

not that you were eviscerated. It's that the there was one of

the interviewers who had a style of engagement that was

intentionally combative, and her style was to do that and see how

people responded, and she ended up being my editor. And I, I did

write a Substack post recently about our interactions, about

our my introduction for the first book. So I had a chance to

think about her a bit. But so it was really just out of pity, I

think, that I just decided to wrap Chris in my arms and hold

him for a bit after that interview. No, but the the thing

is, is that part of that that interview was that I read the

entire dissertation, and so very early on, I could see that this

is someone who approaches sources in a way that I

understand and find exciting. He also knew so much more than I

did about things in France, about the political economy,

about sort of ethnographies of the state-you know, this

literature on early modern state building-it was just because I

was coming at it from a Native Americanist standpoint. I just

did not know that material at all, and I had not had any

training in French history, and I was so impressed by the depths

of not just Chris's sort of command of the field, but the

way that it appeared in his analysis of the sources in his

dissertation, which of course only became more complex in his

first book. And so it was honestly admiration that led me

to sort of seek Chris out and say, "Hey, I I'm frustrated by

these things in the field." And he says, "Well, guess what? So

am I." And then we had this naive idea that we could just

knock out this synthetic. Let's see what this field is. Let's

take a snapshot and just see what that snapshot looks like.

So we're I don't know what are we? 14 and 15 years old, or

something like that. And I mean, we were just we were young, we

were naive, and we thought this was going to be a project that

we could knock out fairly quickly, and but it came out of

a shared process of research and writing our first books, where

we felt the field was missing something really important. And

in each individual region, there's really sophisticated

work, and we talked about that, but when it came to the sort of

broad level, what would happen is someone would do this

incredibly sophisticated work on New France, you know, Canada, or

on the French Caribbean, or on you know Senegal in the 18th

century, or Haitian Revolution, which of course has become this

incredibly rich field, even more so now. But even then, it was

one of the leading areas of research, and you know Laurent

Dubois' book had just come out. So we'd find this this really

rich, sophisticated scholarship that was place based and time

based. But anytime people kind of zoomed out, it would become

so flat, and it would just revert to the easy narrative

that was stitched together by elite administrators, by

bureaucracy, by the stories of warfare and whatever people sort

of used to tell histories in a very traditional way, and so we

were both frustrated by this and thought, well, let's fix this

real quick.

And how many years ago did you real quick

decide to write this?

This was, I mean, this conversation was

2004, 2005.

I was gonna say like 1971, but I think--

That's just what it felt like to work with

me that long. You're learning something. This is hurtful, but

no, I think it must have been early 2005, right? Early 2000.

That's right, early 2005, and then we drafted

the first, we we wrote the first draft of the proposal for the

book in a car as we drove between Salt Lake City and

Denver, stopping in Moab to hike at Arches National Park, and you

know that was that was in 2007. So it's it's been a lot of

years.

Aside from writing the first draft of the

proposal in the car, what what's the practical process of writing

a book together? Did you split things up? Did you were you just

constantly collaborating?

Yeah. So we definitely split things up. So

one of the things that was really attractive as we started

to flesh out the proposal and so on is that we felt that our kind

of interests and expertise were complementary in a nice way.

There are things Brett can do and things Brett knows about

Indigenous history, the history of slavery and enslavement that

I simply don't know and can't can't replicate. And I have a

certain amount of expertise, like Brett said, in kind of

metropolitan French history and so on that I try to weave into

my own thinking about colonial history, and so as a result, we

sort of felt like we kind of covered the bases of the story

we wanted to tell in hopefully what was a really productive

way. And so yes, we did split up the writing of the chapters.

However, we were really, really lucky, and early on in the

process, to get a fellowship from the ACLS that enabled us to

spend really a full year, kind of having conversations with

each other and actually doing research together and visiting

sites together. So, just as an example, we traveled together to

the southern United States, went to all sorts of French colonial

sites in the southeast, from Fort Toulouse in Alabama all the

way over to New Orleans and Natchez, and actually just kind

of being present in at least some of the places where the

things we were writing about took place was really, really

formative, and helped us think in new ways about material

culture. So we actually got to handle objects and so on. So the

splitting up kind of took place along what we thought of as

pretty natural lines on the basis of what we wanted to do

and and where our expertise lay. As far as kind of the process of

writing and co-writing, I think that we were always pretty

present in each other's minds, but things being what they were,

there were points when we sort of had to cut each other loose,

and the other had to allow, I had to allow Brett, of course,

to do what he was expert at doing, and he had to do the same

for me, and that required a certain amount of trust and a

certain amount of a level of common sensibility about what

writing was, knowledge about what the argument was as we went

forward. So yes, we did do things individually, but I felt

like on the basis of our early experience working together on

the proposal and actually going to the archives together,

visiting sites together, we were really sort of on the same

wavelength the entire time as writers of the project.

One of the earliest experiences, in

addition to this trip through the southeastern United States,

was a trip to France. The colonial archives in France are

in Aix-en-Provence. It's really hard to do work there.

So difficult.

Tough sledding.

Yeah.

But we were fortunate to have some grant

money, both from BYU for Chris and from William and Mary for

me, to bring some students with us, and we brought five

students, and then there was a sixth student who was at the

university. Florida, who had been an undergraduate student at

BYU, and joined us there to do his research, and we we made a

deal essentially where we would pay for their travel, pay for

their lodging, their food, all of that. So the entire trip

would be covered for about I guess it was about two weeks in

France, and then they would divide their time in the archive

between doing work for us, you know, photographing documents

and things, and then doing their own work. Of course, with some

mentoring from us, because you know they were they were

students. We also chose the work to assign them that would be as

close as possible to their own dissertation and book research.

And as we went through that, it was it was also a process of

discussing every evening, you know, as we wandered through the

streets of Aix, or as we went at ridiculously early hours for

dinner and got made fun of by the French for walking from the

archive to dinner at 5p.m. But those conversations created a

dialog that was at first physical and verbal, and then

sort of lingering in our intellectual memory with echoes

of. So I think even when we weren't aware that we were sort

of writing to and with the other, we were because we had

sort of had these formative experiences of being in the

archive. And there's something about taking a text, let's say

an archival document, that's really difficult to to decipher,

and working together to think: Is that an S? Is that, what is

this? You know, what is this little scratch that we see?

Figuring out the context that really requires a depth of

analysis. That had we been thinking incompatibly, it would

have really come out early, and we would have found that this

probably isn't a good idea. But in fact, it sort of reinforced

our initial sense that things were, things were going to work

both when we were physically present together, thinking and

speaking together, and when we were cutting each other loose

and sort of trusting each other.

I'm struck that the book has a really consistent

voice. I don't, I don't know that, except for knowing your

areas of expertise, I don't know that I could guess who wrote

what. And I have to imagine that part of that came out in sort of

the editing and revision process, also smoothing out the

seams. What was that process like of editing each other? I I

can tell from this conversation that you have similar senses of

humor, which I have to imagine helped in the process. But how

did you approach that?

I many years ago, the musician Jack White did a

song with Loretta Lynn, the great country singer, and

someone asked him in an interview, "Well, like, how did

you go about you know working with Loretta Lynn in the

studio?" And he kind of looked at the interviewer and was like,

"Well, I'm, I'm not going to tell Loretta Lynn how to sing a

song. I'm just, I'm just not going to do that." And working

with Brett was, it was a great experience for me, in part

because of the relationship that we have, you know, personally.

He and I are very good friends, and that you'd better be good

friends if you're going to do something like this. At the same

time, I am a huge fan of his scholarship and his intellect,

and I knew that I could always count on Brett to produce

incredibly clear thinking. So while I would never, and I think

Brett would probably say the same about about me. I would

never. I'm not going to tell Brett how to write, and I'm also

not going to try to imitate Brett's writing if that makes

sense. And the reason I think I can was able to do that during

the process of writing the book is that we started from a

relatively similar place. Just as far as writing goes, we are

both big believers in the discipline and the hard work of

archivally grounded history. We both believe that the thick

description of kind of banal events, you know, that ordinary

people engage in, is intrinsically important and was

fundamental to the argument about the evolution of empire

that we were trying to make, and so as a result, I found myself

kind of thinking about Brett as I was writing, not not in the

sense that I was trying to kind of match him or organize my

thinking or my paragraph structures to align with his,

but more in the sense that I wanted to emulate the the

clarity, the the spareness of the prose that kind of drives

home his arguments, and so I myself had very little interest

in trying to edit Brett, and I don't think he had a ton of

interest in trying to edit edit me. But at the same time, I

think over the years we became so familiar with each other's

writing that it was a pleasure and it was inspiring to kind of

engage with the other people's kind of prose, the other

person's prose discipline. So that's how I tended to think

about that process as we were moving forward.

For me, there was one moment early on in the

process where my writing tends to be serious. I'm too serious,

and I have a hard time being a little bit more relaxed or loose

doesn't come naturally to me because I overthink everything

and and I I overedit myself and I want to make sure it has just

the right sound of gravitas. I don't actually, but there's

there's a bit of that honestly, and I found Chris's writing very

fluid and very engaging and fun in some ways. He's got a little

smartassery in there, and there was a moment I remember very

clearly early in the process when I'm writing and I'm trying

to write like Chris. I I don't know if I ever mentioned this to

you, Chris, but it was this sort of moment of insecurity where

I'm like, man, I wish I could do that, and so I tried to do that,

and I was bad at it, like really bad at it, because there's a

think a book that has, let's call it,

reason that I gravitate towards seriousness, because like I just

couldn't do the other. So I have this set of notes. It's in fact

the text that gave us the title of the book. This Marc Lescarbot

wrote the the first history of the French Atlantic. In 1609, he

published this, and he had been in the territory that Chris had

ultimately written about in Acadia, and he came back and he

wanted to advocate for the expansion of the French Empire,

and he wrote this book where he talked about the people out

there are begging for the French crown to join them beyond the

ocean, and so this is where the title came from. But I was

writing a description of Lescarbot's book, and I was

trying to do it in the clever Chris way, you know, things

like, consider Marc Lescarbot. That phrase shows up, and then

it's like these like fragments that are very intentionally

interrupting the flow of long sentence, short sentence, long

sentence, and I was just in my head about it, and it was awful.

It was awful as an experience, but it was also awful in the

result. And I found myself just getting tied up in knots, and I

finally had to like really convince myself, okay, I'll

never quite write as well as Chris. I'm going to bring

something else to the project, and you know, in the end, that's

really not the right way to think about it, of course,

either. But I had to let go of that imitative attempt because

it just I wasn't being myself, and in the end, without really

honestly trying very hard, we ended up producing a book that

you'd think that there had been a lot of editing required at the

end to sort of meld the voice together. And there are times

when I have to think: Did did I write that, or did Chris write

that? But that was not as invasive or transformative a

process at the end, as you might think, and nor was it as sort of

intentional as we wrote it, except that one very failed experiment.

1.2 voices, that actually didn't wind up requiring that much kind

of major surgery at the end to kind of align the prose that we

each wrote.

Well, okay, I want to talk a little bit more

specifically about how the book came together. Chris, you

mentioned a little bit ago, you know, one of the one of the

things that is most interesting about this book and part of your

argument is that you are telling this story of sort of the French

Atlantic world and exploration, not from these like official

voyages, state-sponsored actions, but through kind of

these more like everyday people, sailors, West Africans, Native

Americans, traders, other people who aren't well known, which is

fantastic. It's also challenging archivally. So, how did you go

about trying to find and tell those stories?

I think number one, it became clear to us

pretty quickly that our initial sense that maybe we could sort

of pop this book out really quickly, that it might be you

know somehow synthetic and kind of reliant on existing

literature and so on. It became clear really quickly that if we

were going to actually tell the story we wanted to tell and make

the argument we wanted to make, the book had to be archivally

based. And I think Brett did the counting because I'm not very

good at that, but we did wind up visiting between us well over

100 different archives and repositories of all different

kinds over the years we spent doing this this book, and I

think those archival visits were really revealing for many many

reasons. One of those is that there is this tendency among

folks who have worked in the past on French colonial history

to be really, really reliant on the language of the state and

the information provided directly by the state to kind of

frame the history of French colonialism, and the moment we

got at any depth into the archives that we were starting

to to use, we realized that that was simply a non non starter,

and that what we were seeing was that the kind of workaday

activities of a whole host of Atlantic peoples from West

Africa to Brazil. Brett wrote incredible material about Brazil

in the 16th century. That's really sort of field changing, I

think, to the Caribbean to North America. These kind of everyday

commercial, religious, sexual relationships that develop among

the actors that are engaged in French colonial history-they

drive the story forward, and they provide-and Brett used this

phrase earlier-they provide us with a kind of ethnography of

the development of the colonial state. So the archives helped us

tell the story kind of inversely to the way it's traditionally

been told, and I think that we mostly just allowed the archives

to kind of tell the story for us. Like we we didn't impose our

will or some kind of state sensibility on the archives. We

just let the archives do what the archives were doing, and

those really rich stories emerged directly out of that

process.

Yeah, and to that, I guess what I'll add is

that you know when Chris says we let the archives tell the story,

that includes the archival silences, right? It includes the

archival violence that's done to colonized people, and that's

also visible in the archive. It's visible through those

silences. It's visible when we hear, for example, slave traders

talking about the the process of human trafficking that was

really so central to the development of the early modern

French Empire. We hear how they talk about it. We see it, but

then you have to make a conscious choice to realize that

on that same ship there are many, many more people than

share the view of that person who produced that source, and

their experiences are echoed in those sources. But sometimes

they're silenced. Sometimes they are distorted. They're often,

maybe almost always distorted, and so one way I thought about

this is maybe the most boring way, the most serious way. This

is going to illustrate the difference here. I thought about

this in terms of statistics, not really, but really, the

statistical mode became my way of thinking about this, and that

is that if you think about, you know, the various ways of

figuring out the prevalence of a set, or the prevalence of a

number in a set, or the prevalence of a set within a

group of sets. There's the median, right, which is half

above, half below. There's the mean, which is to take them all,

add them all up, divide them by the number, and you get the

average. Is what we think of it usually. But then there's the

mode, and that's the one that appears most often. So if we

were to think about the early modern French Atlantic, the

early modern French Empire, even a little bit more broadly, the

mode of historical experience was absolutely not French. The

mode of that experience was West African. It was Indigenous

American. It was Portuguese. It was you know Spanish. It was all

of these other things, and so the the very most common

experience of being within this world was absolutely not the

experience of the person producing the sources. In very

very few cases is it true that you have a source from people

who would represent the mode of historical experience. So that

became kind of a way of me reminding myself that when I'm

in a group of sources, it's absolutely true that the

archives don't support a reading of this history that is top

down. It just doesn't support, even the archive produced by the

administrative state itself. It just doesn't hold up because

then they start explaining all their frustrations and they

start explaining what people they're trying to control or

profit from. They start explaining the people below them

or aside from them that they can't even get a read on. They

don't even know where they are or what language they speak or

how to communicate with them. So even in those archives produced

by these people, it doesn't support that story. But it does

take a conscious willingness to look for those other

experiences, and so I think that for me it began sort of as an

ethical project in some ways of saying like we really need to

tell stories of the people whose stories have not been told, and

you know Chris has done this in the later chapters, especially

for the Haitian Revolution, and of course the literature there

is really rich, but even so, he has found you know these

incredible new archival documents that people have not

actually known about or or read, and then in those these

incredibly rich revealing stories of West and West Central

African people who are both leading the history by their

actions and choices, and encapsulating the historical

processes in their narrated stories, and so those are the

kinds of things I think that we really were committed to. But

then, what became absolutely clear was that that commitment

was not just sort of a precious anti-colonial stance, which I

mean, there was an anti-colonial stance. Let's be clear, but it

was not this sort of imposed, forced reading. But you actually

can understand how the big story works without understanding the

mode of historical experience, and the just one one quick

example.

Maybe this is going on too long, but one example that I think of

in in my own discoveries is looking at the establishment of

the colony of New France, and it's generally thought of as

this 17th century phenomenon. If you read books about Semu de

Champlain, for example, he's this great genius who's going

out in the middle of nowhere. No one knows what's out there, and

he's just got this vision for humanity all getting along and

singing "Kumbaya" in French, and you know, eating eels. He talks

a lot about eels. That's a different story, but you know

the the story of that. What you don't realize is that if you

have attended to what happens in the 16th century, and you

realize that there are all of these engagements in trade, in

transatlantic travel, there's a slave trade that's already going

on well before that anybody is really acknowledged in the

French literature, and the people who are the first

generation to establish the French colonies in New

France-they're the third generation often of people

involved in Atlantic commerce. You know this famous nun, Marie

de l'Incarnation, who is an Ursuline, goes and establishes a

school, teaches Native girls. She is brought to New France, a

land she saw in a visionary dream as great wilderness that

no one had seen before. She's brought there by a guy who's

been there seven times, a guy who is a slave trader. He's been

raiding English slaving ships in Senegal. He's been trading ivory

and pepper and other things on the West African coast. He's

been to Brazil. He has an invested interest in the island

of Saint Christophe, where they're developing plantation

slavery already. And this is the guy who brings her on his ship.

And you start putting it into this context, and you don't

understand what's happening in the big story if you don't

understand the mode of historical experience.

I also, you know, another way that you are

able to tell these stories and get around some of those

silences or get through some of the silences is that you also

relied a lot on material culture, I know, on objects and

visual culture. Talk to me a little bit about how how you use

those things and how they translate then to text.

Yeah, that was a really fun part of the project

for me. And most of what I did involved visual culture. I did

some you know material culture stuff, especially in the 17th

century. But I got really interested in visual culture,

and specifically, kind of thinking through the ways in

which Atlantic commerce, Atlantic commodities manifested

themselves in, for example, France in the age of Louis the

14th. And one of my favorite visuals from the book is a

series of engravings that commemorated this really weird

event that took place in 1662 in Paris called the Head and Ring

Race, which is a weird, goofy name for something. I understand

that, but in any case, it was this sort of quasi-medieval

knightly competition that was held in honor of Louis the

14th's beginning to rule personally, so he became the

monarch. He said he was going to rule without a kind of primary

minister, and so on. And he, so he becomes kind of the core of

the government. And what the head and ring race involved was

this bizarre competition where there are five teams that Louis

the 14th and his ministers establish, each of them with a

high, high, high French nobleman at their head, and then they

they made like literal teams by assigning them a historical

epoch. So Louis the 14th, obviously, he's in charge with

his own team, and and they're the Romans, and so they wear

these just deranged, like gaudy diamond encrusted Roman costumes

and so on, and there's a team for the Indians from India,

Persians, and there's a final team that's headed by this guy

named the Duc de Guise, and they are the Americans. So the Duc de

Guise marches into this purpose built arena to hold this head

and ring race, dressed as the king of America, so there's this

incredible engraving of what he looked like, and and obviously

there's going to be some exaggeration in the engravings.

I don't want to pitch that this is sort of true to life or

whatever. It's not a photograph, but he's wearing this kind of

like heron feather headdress that in the image is like about

four feet above his head. He's got these kind of skull-shaped

shoulders on his uniform, and they're vomiting out his

sleeves. And he's being-he's marching into the arena. There's

a Bengal tiger for reasons unknown right next to him. So

it's great. There are, and this is more serious. There are men

who are dressed as enslaved people of African descent who

are also chained to monkeys and bears as they are marching into

the arena, and all of these is all of this is depicted in this

incredibly rich set of engravings. And what I loved

about I love the head and ring race for many many reasons. It's

such a Louis the 14th thing. He's projecting on the one hand

his ability to domesticate the scary French nobility that had

rebelled against him as a kid; those are the guys in the race,

and he's making them do this. And he is also projecting

himself as one-upping the Romans themselves. So he's saying, kind

of like, well, yeah, I understand that the Romans gave

civilization, etc. to the peoples of Europe, including the

Gauls, who are now French people. But I'm going to do one

better. I'm going to be the king of West Africa, of America, of

this kind of broadening Atlantic world. So it's this incredible

depiction of all of his ambitions, kind of rolled up

into this one kind of weird spectacle passage, and what I

loved about the images, and there are many, many of these

associated with this event, is that they were so not static.

They were in; you could feel the motion of the images because

they were depicting this process that involved movement and

engagement and social relationships and tension and

all this other kind of very absolutist politics being worked

out on this stage, and so I kind of fell in love with sort of

writing about kind of pictures in motion and the way that they

revealed a set of relationships that I found totally

fascinating, and that were sort of inaccessible in a funny way

via just sort of textual descriptions. So those images,

to me, engaging with those that particular set of images, that

was a real kind of like moment of realization for me about what

visual culture could do and how visual culture might be received

by the people who are viewing it.

Yeah, it's it's a wonderful set of descriptions,

Chris. I really enjoy that. It's in chapter six. You know, for

me, the I I did end up writing about some of the physical

objects. One in particular that comes to mind is a feathered

cape that is right now in the Musée de Quai Branly in Paris,

and it's one of these objects that ideally will be repatriated

at some point. It's produced by Tupi-Guarani people. We don't

know exactly where it came from, but its provenance is you know

messy and unknown. But what we do know is that it was a 16th

century production, and it was made in Brazil. They have done

enough analysis that they know what the fibers that constitute

the underlying lattice structure to which the feathers were

attached, and the feathers we know they came from scarlet ibis

and the certain other kinds of birds, so we can get a pretty

good analysis. So trying to narrate that actually is pretty

difficult. But one of the things I want to do, and that we did

throughout the book, was to try to show the ways that even at

the merchant level, even though these were not state actors,

their process of extraction of exchanging goods at a you know

coastal exchange point, bringing them to France. It would

intentionally strip these goods of their local context, of the

context of their production, and especially of the people that

are often silenced in French histories, as they are in all

early modern histories, and I suppose history in general. And

that is indigenous women, West African women, and they are the

producers of these capes. And so it was important to try to

narrate the structure of this cape rather than just describing

it. Here is a cape. It has feathers. It has a lattice of

these strings. It's narrating the process of making it,

narrating what these women would have been doing. We know this

from, you know, ethnographic literature. We know it from lots

and lots of descriptions pieced together over years of how these

things are made, but also then the sort of scientific analysis

of where the birds came from and all of that, and then showing

how that created a sort of political and metaphysical

investment in this relationship with these visiting colonizers,

and how when those relationships were betrayed, it was more than

just a bad deal. It actually broke something that was much

deeper and more important. And that when they're displayed in a

very condescending, parady sort of way in a French port city by

some dude, always a dude. It's not just insulting in the sense

that it's you know taking something that was sacred in its

original context and parading it in an unsacred way, but it's

also an act of colonizing those objects and of portraying power,

so that the process of this merchant colonialism was taking

goods produced by indigenous and West African women, and often

putting them through the lens of French women who maybe would be

dyeing fibers with red dye from Brazilwood trees, or whatever.

So describing those processes was as important, maybe even

more important, than describing the objects themselves as sort

of physical artifacts.

I have very good memories of Brett's research

into, especially 16th and 17th century kind of material culture

in West Africa and the Americas. I have this memory, and I'd have

to scroll through my texts to see if it's accurate. But of

getting a text one day while I was at work, and the text just

said something like 16th century West African ivory spork, and

that's all the text said. And I was like, oh, should I check on

him? I mean, is this an autocorrect? What? And then the

picture came through, and in fact there is a West African

ivory spork that looks exactly like a KFC spork that was

crafted in just the same way he's describing, and that kind

of, it's one of these objects that again allows for this like

much wider history of production and consumption and colonial

relationships. That again, it's it's it's difficult to access by

text, but by the object you can.

There's a lot going on in this book. I mean,

it's just absolutely packed. There are so many wonderful

stories and details that are in it, but it it also has

incredible analysis, a strong argument, and and it's a long

timeline. You know, it's it's 400 years of history, and as

we've we've talked about here, it's not just a synthesis. You

know, there's a ton of original research in this book. Despite

all that, it's it's not a short book, but it's you know it's not

1000 pages long. How did you think about organizing that,

wrangling all of that?

Yeah, the process of choosing to cut

things was was really hard. You know, the "kill your darlings"

sort of thing is such a trite thing to say, and there were so

many darlings, just so many. I, just speaking for myself, the

hardest chapter for me was chapter three in the Brazil

material for the 16th century, and when I did the first draft

of that chapter, it was 100 pages, I think. It was like

37,000 words or something like that, and you know it was as

long as many two chapter sequences. But it had a

coherence to it as well because many of the same people were

involved, and they were going to, from these same places in

Brazil and the Caribbean and Canada, so cutting out, I ended

up having to cut out of that particular chapter something

like 14,000 words. So the chapter three, as it exists now,

is a still the longest chapter in the book, but it's it's also

just feels so thin to me because there's all of these stories and

all of these illustrations. Forgive me if I'm going to go on

too long here, but this actually was one thing that shifted our

book from being a sort of narrative history in the sort of

standard sense. But you know, we were first offered a contract

for this book by Basic Books' legendary editor Laura Heimert.

We were so honored. She's a brilliant editor. She's a

wonderful, thoughtful, and incredibly skilled editor. And

she wanted us to write a book that was the kind of first book

we had imagined, which was sort of a synthesis. It was

narratively driven. It was argument driven, and it would

focus on throughlines that could be pulled from A to B to C to D,

and that's a completely fair thing to want for a Basic book.

And in fact, it's what we had committed to writing. And then

when we got into it, we realized we can't tell that story if what

we want to do is highlight non-elite, non-white French

people who weren't elite white French and mostly men, and we

couldn't also tell a new story about, say, West Africa or

Brazil without the inclusion of a bunch of these sort of short,

self-contained stories that would then add up in sort of

like a pointillist sort of way, where you step back and you see

all these little points. You're like, wow, that's very different

than we thought. That doesn't, it doesn't lend itself to the

kind of dramatic narrative that you might want. And so in the

end, it worked out that we parted ways with Basic. This is

not in any way a critique of either the editor or the press

because they had asked us to produce a certain thing, and we

decided we couldn't produce that certain thing. And thank

goodness that we had our agent Lisa Adams at the Garamond

Agency, and that Susan Ferber at Oxford saw that this could be a

useful book and a valuable contribution, even though it

wouldn't have that sort of very clean, very artificially taught

narrative. So it ended up being shifted where Oxford bought out

the contract from Basic, and I tell that story only to

illustrate the fact that it wasn't a shift from a book that

was meant to be accessible to a book that was meant to be

academic. It was from a book that was meant to be shorter and

more narratively driven, to a book that was actually going to

require this kind of density of storytelling, in order just to

persuade people that we're not making things up. The fact that

there are many, many, many, many French people in 16th century

West Africa or 16th century Brazil, and that this is a

really important part of this story of globalization that's

told and told and told in every textbook. But when we want you

to tell a different story now, we can't just say that in a

narratively interesting way and expect people to say, "Oh, we've

been wrong all along. We're persuaded." And so the kind of

intervention that we ended up wanting to make wasn't possible.

So I think that's a telling reality because it's, it tells

us a little bit about what we learned as we did the research,

and also how a book can evolve, not from one that we mean to be

readable by anybody to read a book we want to be readable only

by academics. We stayed committed, absolutely, I want my

dad, who is 89 years old this year, but a reader and an

engineer, so like doesn't know anything about the topic. I want

him to be able to read this book and understand every bit of it.

But at the same time, I thought it was really important, from my

perspective, that we, and Chris, I know, agrees with this. You

know, we tell the story that's going to be more persuasive and

more transformative than the one we initially thought we were

going to tell.

Yeah, I would just add that one of the sort of

interesting organizational challenges that we wound up

having to confront in the book is that there are really

critical elements to the narrative and the argument, such

as the one Brett just described, where he's done all this

remarkable work to kind of demonstrate the a sort of

massive French presence in West Africa and the Americas in the

16th century. That's been undervalued by scholarship

forever and ever. There's that work where there really is no

historiography. Like there's there's no historiography to

kind of go on. And then, on the other hand, we had to sort of

contain that in an argument that also encompassed, for example,

the Crusades and the French Revolution. And it turns out

there's been a lot written about the Crusades and the French

Revolution, and so kind of navigating that that those set

of that set of. Sort of building an argument that encompasses

histories that haven't been told at all, and also encompasses

things that people are really quite familiar with, like the

the construction of the absolutist state, for example.

We sort of told that story many times before. So thinking

through, like, how do we navigate that set of

historiographical kind of peaks and valleys was daunting, and I

think in the end, kind of interesting as a as a part of

the project.

Perhaps related to to how much you are doing

here, you you have also been writing a Substack, which Brett

you alluded to earlier, which I've really been enjoying, and I

I imagine that part of that was just trying to find a home for

some of the stories that you could not include in the book,

but I will link to it in the show notes because I think that

listeners will really enjoy reading it also. But I wondered

what what prompted you to want to share those stories in that

format.

I think the initial was sort of it was it

was a lifeline for our darlings that we were drowning and we

just we regretted immediately throwing them overboard, but no.

The other piece of it for me, and Chris will have his own take

on it. But the other piece for me was that this book exists on

lots of levels. We've tried to make it accessible for my dad,

who's a a reader, but not a historian, not even a really

avid consumer of history, although he reads a fair amount

of everything, and we wanted the super specialist to be able to

pick this up and say, "Oh, everything I thought is

different." And narrating that level, it's really, really

difficult to sort of maintain accessibility, maintain

argumentative innovation without getting bogged down, and that

just meant there was a lot that was set aside. So one of the

things we can do in the Substack is to take, say, an object or an

event like the creation of the slave code, the Code Noir, which

remarkably was just finally repudiated by the French

government a couple of weeks ago, and talk about how this

process can help us see bigger things and explain in some ways

that there is an interpretive investment here, without having

to say there is an interpretive investment here, and so that's

part of it. Then also, I think that it's we think about

students who I think are are going to be able to learn quite

a lot about the process of writing, about some of the

frustrations. You know, maybe even a graduate student who's

finding writing hard, and then you know, if we've worked so

hard to get this thing to be fluid, and then they read it and

they're like, oh well, this is this this is hard. They need to

understand that it's hard for us too. They need to understand

that there are lots of failed drafts. They need to understand

that what happens in those those discouraging moments when you

have to kind of pick yourself up against those the I don't know.

Those are some of the things I was thinking about.

Yeah, I I agree with all of that. I think too

it's it's useful for people to kind of look a little bit under

the hood and see how the process actually works. I mean, you

know, for example, in doing the chapter I did on the 17th

century, I got really into 17th century French cosmetics, which

is, you know, it lines up with my personality, I suppose, on

some level. But what I wound up doing, like I was just kind of

thinking through ways, like how do I kind of map out the way

that the Atlantic world registers in 17th century

France, and just wound up reading a chemistry book that

included a section on cosmetics, and it turns out that this was

authored by authored by a really remarkable female chemist, a

woman named Marie Murdrac, and it turns out that all of the

cosmetics had colonial commodities in them, and so this

really, actually, really critical element of the

spectacle associated with absolutism and court culture,

and so on, it was also this artifact of colonial modes of

labor, of enslavement, of exploitation, and so on, and all

of that, of course, gets washed out. The the people who use

these cosmetics are thinking in those terms, but I think it's

useful for people, especially students, to say like, okay, you

know, you've got a problem you want to address. There are

probably some straightforward ways into that problem. There's

some benefit to taking like a sort of off kilter approach in

some respects, and that's one of the things Substack allows us to

kind of expose to people.

We've covered a lot of ground, and I don't want

to keep you too long, but I would like to know what is the

most influential writing advice that you have each received.

For me, the one that sticks out the most was one

that I got from an editor on the Western Historical Quarterly at

Utah State, where we both did master's degrees, but did not

meet. And I was an editorial assistant on the journal, and I

received two things from a woman named Ona Sapporin on on a day

that was kind of a hard day for me. I was I was leaving to drive

to my grandma's funeral, and Ona gave me a warm, fresh-made loaf

of challah bread, and then she also gave me back a draft I'd

been working on-not my writing, but for the journal-and she had

circled every verb, and she said, "This is something I do

with my own writing. It's something I do when I edit. Is I

circle every verb, and I don't circle verbs with the intent of

doing anything in particular. Just it's a step of identifying

what the verbs are." So I started doing that with my early

drafts. Is just I wouldn't try to think about it while I was

writing, but when a draft was there, I would go and physically

print it out, physically circle with blue ink every verb, and

sometimes it was really revealing to see that I'd use

the same verb many times. That I tended to use weak verbs,

passive verbs, or that I tended to sort of revert to verbs that

would favor a certain perspective, whatever it was.

And so that, to me, was I think the best piece of advice. It

just really got me thinking about how I could do a very

small thing that anybody can do, and I would learn something

immediately from doing it.

I did my PhD at Northwestern, and my advisor was

the historian T. H. Breen, Tim Breen. One of the first,

actually, the first quarter I was in graduate school. I took a

methods seminar from Tim, and it was rough. Basically, he made us

read primary documents from the foundation of Massachusetts Bay

Colony, so just stuff from 1630 to 1642, and then each week we

had to write a paper, no more hard limit of 500 words, and it

was that each sentence mattered. It was all. It was all like the

pressure was on, and I have this horrifying memory of he he

dropped on us the Dorchester town records, and one week we

were supposed to read them, and the assignment was to determine

the system of land distribution in Dorchester between 1630 and

1642, and my memory is is as Tim was sort of walking out of

seminar, and he said, "Oh, by the way, it's obviously the 500

word limit. You may not use adverbs or adjectives. We'll see

you next week." And that was a bad. It was a bad week. That was

a bad week. But the same thing to Brett's point about about Ona

circling the verbs, that has stuck with me. I self traumatize

every time I use an ly adverb. It feels transgressive and bad

because of that experience, but it helped me think about kind of

writing in a tight and spare fashion, which is always what

I'm I'm aiming for.

Those are both great. What's next for you both?

Are you embarking on another project together? Do you have

anything that you are are looking toward next?

We are not, as far as I know, writing another book

together at this point.

I think you'd know.

Yeah, I think I think I would know. Yeah, given

our track record, we'd probably be be dead by the time we got

anywhere near completing. So I'm working on a couple of projects.

They're actually, you know, were born out of the process of doing

the research for Beyond the Ocean, and that deal more

specifically with the Haitian Revolution. During our archival

research, once at the British Library and once at the Newberry

Library, I was lucky enough to encounter two different, very

long-form eyewitness accounts of the Haitian Revolution that are

really unusual and really remarkable. And I'm publishing

along with my-it's another co-authored project with my

friend and colleague Manuel Kovo. He and I are publishing a

translation and annotation of one of those for the Omohundro

Institute. Should be next year, and then I'm working on a the

early stages of working on a book about the other, which is

the narrative of the Haitian Revolution written by a military

surgeon. And so I'm just beginning. That's what I'm doing

here in Providence, and I'm starting the archival research

process on that project.

And for me, I've kind of shifted a bit. I I

also have things that are waiting for me if I get back to

the the writing business. But right now I've shifted into

publishing, and so I took a job a couple of years ago at the

Huntington, where I had been a long term fellow, research

fellow, as I was finishing my part of this book. And there is

a journal, an early modern studies journal, the Huntington

Library Quarterly, and an opening came to edit that

journal and be part of the research division here. So I get

to engage with the fellows, and I get to engage with other

people's work. I get to be a support for other people's work.

I find that really rewarding. It's a good stage for me to do

that, and so I hope to be doing that for quite a long time, I

really enjoy the breadth that I get to engage a bunch of topics

I don't know especially well. I get to enjoy the sort of process

of helping authors make their work the best thing they want to

make it. So not making it what I want it to be, but trying to

help them achieve what they really want out. And that is

something that's really liberating quality to that for

me. So that's what I'm invested in right now.

Fantastic. Dr. Chris Hodson, Dr. Brett

Rushforth. Thanks so much for joining me on Drafting the Past

and be willing to talk about your writing process.

Thank you so much for having us.

Thank you.

Thanks again to Dr. Chris Hodson and Dr. Brett

Rushforth for joining me for this episode. You can find their

new book, Beyond the Ocean, in the show notes, along with links

for everything else we mentioned in this episode. Thanks for

being here and for listening. There are big, exciting

announcements about Drafting the Past coming very soon, so stay

tuned. And in the meantime, remember: friends don't let

friends write boring history.