Kristi Noem

context feels like it's a drag.

And so when I write, I always try to like, it's still got to be a narrative, right?

We still got to move through it.

We still got to put ourselves there, but context matters.

Well, interestingly, it goes back to this question of both context, but also sources.

So the question of what is normal in a given moment, right?

So people would write back in the day about the, you know, the end of slavery and, you know, how few people were actually standing against slavery.

It was kind of, you know, everyone was, everyone kind of accepted slavery.

But when you actually go back and you look in the record, no, that's not true, actually.

A lot of people were against slavery.

There were sides to take even then.

There were positions to take even then.

And so you kind of test yourself always like, well, what would the other side have said?

And you try to find that other perspective and you try to make sure that you are painting an accurate picture of the zeitgeist of that moment by making sure you've heard from everybody, frankly, like looked at all of the, like you mentioned earlier, like there's the black press and there's the white press in New York.

Well, we need to look at both if we want to have some sense of how this case was being understood at the time.

That's just an example.

But I think that you as a journalist, myself as a historian, we are constantly aware of, oh, let me stop.

Let me think about that.

How am I writing that sentence?

How am I understanding what just happened?