In this episode, Kate Carpenter interviews Dr. Anna O. Law, a political science who retrained herself in historical methods to write her new book, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship. Anna is a professor of political science and Herbert Kurz Chair in Constitutional Rights at CUNY Brooklyn College. In her new books, she takes a close look at which parts and levels of government in the United States have controlled people's ability to move around and across borders throughout the country's history. It's a history that is especially pertinent now, as we await the Supreme Court's forthcoming decision about the Trump administration's attempt to end the right to birthright citizenship protected under the 14th amendment of the constitution.

Anna and Kate talked about what it meant to think like a historian as well as a political scientist. She also divulged her decidedly analog research tools, the feedback she asks colleagues to give on her drafts, and her advice for any writer deciding on a press for publishing a book.

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• Anna O. Law's website
• Anna Law, Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship
• Anna Law, The Immigration Battle in American Courts
• Metal page darts
• Sarasa gel pens
• Anna Law on BlueSky
• Anna's blog post about writing the second book
• Episode 102: Gautham Rao
• Megan Kate Nelson, The Westerners: Mythmaking and Belonging on the American Frontier and The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West (and my first and second interviews with her)
• Lucy Salyer, Laws Harsh As Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law and Under the Starry Flag: How a Band of Irish Americans Joined the Fenian Revolt and Sparked a Crisis Over Citizenship

It's not every day that I find myself so invested in the characters of a history book that I stay up way past my bed time to find out what happens next, but that's exactly what happened when I read the new book by today's guest, Dr. Charlotte Brooks.

Charlotte is a professor of history at Baruch College, which is part of the City University of New York, or CUNY, system. She is a scholar of race, immigration, and urban history, and is especially known for her work on Chinese American history. She is the author of four books. Her first three books were more aimed at an academic audience, but for her fourth book she wanted to try something a little different. The book that resulted is The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution. It's a group biography that tells the stories of six siblings, born to Chinese immigrant parents, and how they challenged the limitations and racism they faced in the United States, how many of them sought opportunities in China, and the ways they navigated the tumultuous world in which they lived in both countries in the first half of the 20th century.

They are fascinating characters, but Charlotte uses them to give us a window into the history of an entire generation of Chinese American families that many Americans know little about. I talked with Charlotte about what finally motivated her to write the book that she had been dreaming about, as well as what it was like to work with the Moy descendants, how her narrative makes the siblings so compelling, and why it was still a tough sell as a trade book.

Sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter for updates on the show and more.

Note: Bookshop.org links are affiliate links. When you buy books through these links, Drafting the Past receives a small percentage of the purchase price. Thanks for helping to support the show!

• Charlotte Brooks, The Moys of New York and Shanghai: One Family's Extraordinary Journey Through War and Revolution
• Charlotte Brooks, American Exodus: Second-Generation Chinese Americans in China, 1901-1949
• Charlotte Brooks, Between Mao and McCarthy: Chinese American Politics in the Cold War Years
• Charlotte Brooks, Alien Neighbors, Foreign Friends: Asian Americans, Housing, and the Transformation of Urban California
• Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA)
• Ellen Wu
• Mae Ngai
• Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency
• Virtual Shanghai Project
• Historical Photographs of China
• Gwulo: Old Hong Kong