Tv, back story host brian tran brian balogh and Nathan Connolly give a behindthe scenes look at their weekly podcast. They were joined by a former staff member and a regular guest. This is part of a twoday Purdue UniversityConference Call remaking american political history. Welcome to the 10 45 panel called Something Like behind the scenes, back story maybe. Just so you know, youre not in the wrong place. I am brian balogh. I have been a cohost for back story for over 10 years now. I am going to introduce the panel and then we are each going to say a few words about our quite different roles. Nathan and i have the same role. He is trying to steal the 20th century for me and is doing a pretty good job of it. Will have relatively different roles in back story. We are going to talk about that a little bit. And then we wanted to open it up to your questions. This is not what it looks like behind the scenes at back story. In fact, we are rarely in the same place at the same time. I had to Google Nathan to see what he looks like for instance even though i talked to him every week. So, introducing myself i am a professor at the university of virginia. I cohost back story and i direct the National Fellowship program at the foundation. My cohost, Nathan Connolly of course is known to most of you as an outstanding scholar. He is the Herbert Baxter adams chair of history at the Johns Hopkins university. He is the author of the world more concrete real estate and the remaking of jim crows south florida. He is also hard at work on a book that is really a deep transnational family history. Is that a fair description . And it is called four daughters, and it is a five generation history of one workingclass family whose travels and travails took them between the caribbean, europe, and the United States. Nathan is also an overall good citizen and as part of his good citizenship he has been involved in a project that a number of you out there are working on called mapping inequality where you are laying out the landscape. Joey thompson graduated from the university of virginia about 12 minutes ago. And his dissertation is titled sounding southern, music, tourism and the making of the sunbelt. I will say it publicly, this is one of the best cultural histories that i have read in 35 years of advising graduate students. His advisor was a great sale. He fired all of us. He is on to a job as an assistant professor at Mississippi State university. Joey is here because he had the misfortune of being a researcher on back story for two years. So, if you really want to look behind the scenes at back story, what you will find our first rate scholars, joey thompson, monica blair who always sits right up front and our current researcher and is a phd candidate at the university of Virginia Department of history, and joey, monica and several other outstanding callers have done the research that really powers the intellectual connections in back story if there are any. And Joyce Chaplin who i met at the Johns Hopkins university when we were both in graduate school together, i prided myself on being the first person to the Library Every morning. There was only one person who was there always before me and that was Joyce Chaplin. You remember that, joyce . Are you going to tell everything about it . I stopped right there. Joyce is the James Duncan Phillips per vessel professor of Early American History at harvard university. Her most recent work includes round about the earth, circumnavigating magellan and with allison bassford, the new world of Thomas Robert, rereading the principle of population. And joyce has been kind enough to be a guest on back story three times. And she is going to talk to us a little bit and she drops into a show where people know each other pretty well and bring scholarship to bear on a topic that we hope will reach a broader public. Not an easy thing to do and joyce is done it masterfully as a guest three times. So let me take five or 10 minutes and just give you a brief history of back story. Considering we are for historians, myself, nathan, Joann Freeman at Yale University and ed ayres, president emeritus at the university of richmond, considering we are for historians we own nothing formally about our own history. We cant tell you exactly when we started. We have no archives. Since you are all historians, none of this comes as a great surprise to you. I actually did some primary Research Meeting i went back to the oldest emails i had and there is an exchange from 2005 about possibly doing a show. It has had many horrible names. The one i remember best is the one i suggested, history hotline. That lasted about three minutes i think. The show started when a man by the name of Andrew Wickham who works for virginia humanities which we are still housed in and they still support us, Andrew Windham suggested to ed ayres and peter otis that it would be fun to do a radio show on history and apparently peter responded saying two things. Number 1, we dont know enough history, we need somebody in the 20th century. And number 2 we are not very funny so nobody is going to be interested in the show. But andrew prevailed on ed and peter otis. They came to me. I said that is a ridiculous idea. Nobody is going to be interested in this and we spent about a year and a half doing one demo. Which was truly horrible. If it doesnt exist it is because we have all made separate attempts to burn this demo. We circulated that to 10 or so directors of public Radio Stations. Our notion was eventually we hit the big time we would be on wanted to public Radio Stations. And originally the show was a call in show. We took calls from people and we discussed the specific topics that went across three centuries. We were undeniably three dead white males. We really took pride in owning our own century. One of our most frequent tropes was my century is better than yours, my century is worse than yours, that was one of the formats we used again and again. We got training by appearing on live radio shows. I will never forget we run a radio short in norfolk. We all were sitting in the studio but we work on this show live in norfolk. A caller called in and asked whether william and mary had been founded on pirates booty. I am pointing it peter, peter is pointing it at and we are all going, you take this one. Ed is googling furiously. Wikipedia, next to monica and joey that was our major Search Research engine. And peter answered the question and i have no idea how he answered. We were fortunate enough to air as a monthly show on local public Radio Stations. Meaning Central Virginia also wtju. The university stays in and that is how we got our start. Very fortunate eventually to expand to roughly 200 public Radio Stations around the country. We had some good in terms of audience stations. The public Radio Station in chicago probably reached the largest audience of any station that we run. It was a good time. We were also on alaskan public radio. I cant remember what time we were on in alaska. I know that we were on in washington dc. I think we were on at 7 am on saturday morning and i want to tell you that we were incredibly popular with cabdrivers. And i am assuming some of them have passengers. At least more than one person was listening to us in washington dc. About three years ago we made two very important decisions. One of them was triggered by peter otis, an 18thcentury guy deciding to retire both from the university of virginia and step down from backstory. We were very fortunate that we were able to reach out to Nathan Connolly and Joann Freeman and they joined us and their perspectives, their interest, their life experiences, their own experience in Public Engagement i think has really changed the show. I love the old backstory, but i also really love the current backstory. At the same time we decided to take a gulp decision. We pulled off of 200 public Radio Stations and went to a podcast only format. At the time i didnt know what a podcast was. Thats not entirely true. I urged we go to podcast even though i didnt know how to find podcast on my phone because of two things. We wanted to reach a much more diverse audience and we wanted to reach a much younger audience. We lucked out. The podcast turned out to be very successful. On our 200 public Radio Stations the estimates, and they were really hazy, the estimates were that we were reaching roughly 40,000 listeners. We currently are downloaded by roughly 100,000 listeners every week. And i should have mentioned about eight or nine years ago we went to a weekly format and we continue that weekly format on podcasting. So, i am in love with my cohost. I am in love with our researchers. I am in love with our sizable production staff. We have averaged a staff overall fulltime of seven or eight people. So, we are still aiming for a sound. And people keep coming up and they think we just get together and sit around the table and shoot the breeze. And we are aiming for that. But in fact it is a costly production, it is a complicated production. If it sounds good it is because of the incredible cohost that i had and it is because of the amazing staff that we have enjoyed for now over 10 years. So, i am happy to answer a lot of questions in questionand answer but im going to turn it over to nathan and ask a question i have never asked, d feel like to kind of just come into an existing podcast with at least two old white guys . Resuscitate right away. So it was with the benefit of having appeared on back story that i decided to take this move and step into this platform having done a show, i think we did one on booker t. Washington or the black middle class it might have been, and i will be very honest and say upfront that i had a certain amount of trepidation about taking this move into doing media work, in large part because of just where i was in my career, right, as an assistant professor with all kinds of expectations about timetable and clock and even then as an early associate professor. Brian will be the first one to tell you, you know, we have conversations agonizing about how to do work life balance. I have three young children, two manuscripts in the pipeline and a podcast were doing, and the process of imagining my own calculations and tradeoffs has a lot to do with really trying to understand genre. And so back story was a phenomenal way to really begin to engage how senior scholars think about really big expansive complicated ideas and in extraordinarily compelling ways. One of the things im sure brian wont take a lot of credit for or ed or for that matter whos the other guy . Peter. Is that, you know, they have the benefit of being able to take a field at a glance and really look at it and come at, you know, something very complicated with an extraordinarily grounded and intimate look, oftentimes a compelling anecdote, and thats a skill that ive had to do a fair amount of learning about. I mean, really understanding as much as i want to complexify, its about trying to show the complexity in the details. Ill also say that the show itself was going through and this was all happening backstage its own kind of agonizing conversion from broadcast to podcast, so a lot of the process of creating a show for the radio had to do with basically approximating that npr sound, and so the strategies in the booth had a lot to do with getting our show to sound like this american life, prairie home companion, car talk, right, theres a lot that goes into how many times one reads the script, whether or not you do a retake of jokes that might have come off extemporaneously and try to get that magic to happen again for take two and three. And thankfully weve arrived in terms of our own legs in podc t podcasting at a much less varnished sound that i think actually is much more honest as a listening experience goes. Were in an environment now where last i heard, you know, this may have been like twomonthold data which has probably gone up by at least 100 , there were 400,000 podcasts that were out there. Having a back story which exists in the top 1 of all podcasts will still be something that people want to tune into means that there is a challenge coming up with compelling topics and really finding the news cycle, and in some ways the most twausitwau exhausting thing about that first year on back story was it coincided with the arrival of the Trump Administration in january of 2017, and so we spent week after week after week with no shortage of things we had to offer deep contextual views of, whether it was muslim bans, transgender bans and border walls and environmentalism. I just want to say, nathan, im the one who said we have to do a show thats not about donald trump. Yeah. And i came up with a great idea, the history of hair. Yeah. And everyone looked at me and said, hair, donald trump . Thats going to get us never mentioned Donald Trumps hair on the history of hair. It was shortly thereafter that we did a show on the history of ufos which i loved as well. Suffice it to say unof the things weve been able to do really well and ill close my remarks here is find a way of balancing two things. One is, you know, in a field where we all would like to imagine ourselves as being really effective collaborators theres a lot that goes into structuring productive collaborations and i think sometimes when youre on a Conference Program committee or you want to coauthor something, theres no shortage of opportunities to step on each other where that is concerned, and i think that one of the things that makes it easiest to work on a back story, to juggle my own work life stuff to think about the shows own permutations because of the team that we have, theres a really clean division of labor that allows engineers to engineer, producers to produce, host to host ask theres a great deal of humility. We will bounce intellectual questions off engineers and producers it and theyll help us arrive at things. And well help with script work as needed on the fly. In that sense, you know, you get really new and fresh content, but from deep levels of expertise across those various staff positions. That i think is really important and was really useful to learn how to do that. The other thing that i would just say is that i think its really critical to think a lot now about how we are electing to engage the public and i know theres a lot of for me personally, i do the kind of work that i would say comes out of a very left orientation, the kinds of questions that i ask are grounded in material questions, grounded in antiracist work that ive been doing for a very long time, and so doing that work in a space that has been, you know, opened up in a way that maybe even some npr audience might not always be amenable to i think has been really important. How does one do antiracist work in a liberal media atmosphere, right . This is a very basic question. I know were having a lot of conversations about whos electable, whats acceptableable kind of political discourse, and its provided we a platform for experimenting, figuring out what some of those middle ground and yet radical perspectives can be and the fact that its always grounded in extraordinary research and, you know, our own deep rigorous historical sensibilities allows us to feel more confident when we do decide to step out. That has been immensely rewarding. And can i task you with one more job. Sure. Could you say just a few words about our regular gig on here and now . Yeah, yeah. This is actually and youre welcome to be honest. So another one of the things that came with the new podcast format was a partnership with the folks on wburs here and now, and we have been doing basically every other week these appearances on here and now. Here and now for those who might be less familiar, it has about a million listeners. Million and a quarter. And we get about nine minutes to entertain those million and a quarter listeners, and it will oftentimes be on topics that are, again, you know, right on with the news cycle and so its a very compressed timetable to try to get our hand around these issues in ways that are really directed at trying to take advantage of our expertise as scholars. This is a relationship that i think has been great for the show. Ive done now over 20, almost 30 now here and now appearances, and the first id say 19 to 20 of these i was, you know, without exception very selfannihilating as i left the booth. It was like oh, my fwod, i could have said this. I should have said this. Im going to read some of the texts that you sent me. And through the magic of editing they all come off sounding really great, and its all wonderful, but its also one of those things where, especially in the early going, we were trying to figure out do they want us to be analysts, do they want us to be talking Wikipedia Pages . What exactly is our relationship with this other entity, and there have been things that we have said that theyve decided might have been too, you know, polarizing for their audiences and we make our own calculations going forward, but i will say its a relationship that i think is mutually beneficial. We have, i think, still to figure out a little bit of the tweaking about whether or not we get the chance to be personalities. The great thing about back stories is you build a relationship with the host as people. I still think for here and now were primarily content providers. Theres another round of evolution we can spare with that relationship to make it possible for us to feel as if were more active personalities on the show. I do think its a ve