Episode 102: Gautham Rao Completes Each Vacation with an Archive Trip

In this episode, Kate Carpenter is joined by a scholar who can never pass up a good archive, Dr. Gautham Rao.

Gautham is a historian of American law and politics and is an associate professor of history at American University in Washington. He's the author of two books: National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State, and his new book, White Power: Policing American Slavery. White Power is a history of the laws that enslavers used to police enslaved people from 1619 until the Civil War, and how the violent legacies of those laws and practices have reverberated throughout American history and life. In addition to his books and journal articles, Gautham has also written op-eds, contributions to Supreme Court cases, and a Substack newsletter called "The State of the State." I was especially interested to hear how Gautham grappled with organizing and using the evidence he collected from many locations over more than two decades. You'll also learn how he writes and rewrites to make himself clear, and how an offhanded remark from a well-known colleague set him on a new publishing path.

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Mentioned in this episode:

• White Power: Policing American Slavery
• National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State
• Gautham's Substack
• reMarkable tablet
• Ibram X. Kendi
• Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction
• Jessica Pishko, The Highest Law in the Land: How the Unchecked Power of Sheriffs Threatens Democracy
• Omohundro Institute book series in early American history
• Samantha Seeley, Race, Removal and the Right to Remain: Migration and the Making of the United States
• Sarah Gronningsater, The Rising Generation: Gradual Abolition, Black Legal Culture, and the Making of National Freedom
• Emily Conroy-Krutz, Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations
• Rebecca Brenner Graham, Dear Miss Perkins: A Story of Frances Perkins's Efforts to Aid Refugees from Nazi Germany (check out my interview with Rebecca in Episode 60: Rebecca Brenner Graham Gives Us the Publicity Behind-the-Scenes)
• Dani Segelbaum, Gautham's agent
• Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America and Queer Career: Sexuality and Work in Modern America
• Mae Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America and The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes, Chinese Migration, and Global Politics
• Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception
• Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, which includes his essay "Theses on the Philosophy of History
• Sally Hadden, Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas
• Michael Willrich, American Anarchy: The Epic Struggle Between Immigrant Radicals and the US Government at the Dawn of the Twentieth Century