And then were each going to say a few words about our quite different roles well, nathan and i have the same role. Hes trying to steal the 20th century from me and doing a pretty good job of it, but we all have relatively different roles and backstory. We are going to talk about that a little bit. And then we are going to open it up to your questions. Just for starters, this is not what it looks like behind the scenes at backstory. In fact, were rarely in the same place at the same time. I had to Google Nathan to see what he looked like, for instance, even though i talk to him every week. So introducing myself, im a professor at the university of virginia, i cohost backstory and i direct the National Fellowship program at the jefferson scholars foundation. My cohost nathan connelly, of course, is known to most of you as an outstanding scholar. He is the Herbert Herbert baxter adams chair of history at the Johns Hopkins university. He is the author of a 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 thats right. A fair description . Yes. And its called four daughters and its a five generation history of one working class 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 youre laying out the landscape of red lining in the United States. Joey thompson graduated from the university of virginia about 12 minutes ago and his dissertation is titled sounding southern music, militarism and the making of the sun belt. This is i will say it publicly one of the best cultural histories that i have read in 35 years of advising graduate students, his adviser was, i should say, grace hail. He has fired all of us. Because 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 for backstory for two years. So if you really want to look behind the scenes at backstory what you will behind are firstrate scholars, joey thompson, monica blair who always sits right up front is our current researcher and is a ph. D. Candidate at the university of Virginia Department of history. Joey, monica and several other outstanding scholars have done the research that really powers the intellectual connections in backstory, 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. Do you remember that, joyce . Youre going to tell everything about no, thats it. I stopped right there. Joyce is the James Duncan Phillips professor of Early American History at harvard university. Her most recent works include roundabout the earth circumnavigating image land to orbit. And with Allison Bashford the new world of Thomas Robert mouthace rereading the principle of population. Joyce has been kind enough to be a guest on backstory three times. Three times. And shes going to talk to us a little bit about what it is to be like dropped 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 has done it masterfully as a guest three times. So let me take five or ten minutes and just give you a brief history of backstory, considering that were four historians, myself, nathan, Joanne Freeman at Yale University and ed ayers president emeritus at the university of richmond, considering that were four historians we know nothing formally about our own history. We cant tell you exactly when we started, we have no archives. I guess since you are all historians none of this comes as a great surprise to you. I actually did some primary research, meaning i went back to the oldest emails i had and there is an exchange in 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 that lasted about three minutes, i think. The show started when a man by the name of Andrew Wyndham who worked for virginia humanities, which we are still housed in and they still support us, Andrew Wyndham suggested to ed ayers and peter oniff that it would be fun to do a radio show on history and apparently peter responded saying two things, number one, we dont know enough history, we need somebody in 20th century. Number two, we are not very funny, so nobody is going to be interested in this show. But andrew prevailed on ed and peter oniff, they came to me, i said thats 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 its because we have all made separate attempts to burn this demo. We circulated that to ten or so directors of public Radio Stations. Our notion was eventually if we hit the big time we would be on one or two public Radio Stations. Originally the show was a callin show, we took calls from people and we discussed a specific topic that went across three centuries. We were undeniably three dead white males. We really took pride in owning our own centuries, one of our most frequent troupes was, oh, my century is better than yours, my century is worse than yours. That was you know, that was one of the formats that we used again and again. We got training by appearing on live radio shows. I will never forget we were on a radio show in norfolk. We all were sitting in a studio, but we were on this show live in norfolk and a caller called in and asked whether william and mary had been founded on pirates booty. Im pointing at peter, peter is pointing at ed, we are all going you take this one. Ed is googling furiously, wikipedia is 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 universitys station, thats how we got our start, and very fortunate eventually to expand to roughly 200 public Radio Stations around the country. We had some good good in terms of audience stations. A public Radio Station in chicago probably reached the largest audience of any station that we were on. 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 wamu in washington, d. C. , i think we were on at 7 00 in the morning on saturday morning and i want to tell you that we were incredibly popular with cab drivers all over washington. Im assuming some of them had passengers, so at least more than one person was listening to us in washington, d. C. Roughly about three years ago we made two very important decisions, one of them was triggered by peter oniff, 18th century guy, deciding to retire both from the university of virginia and step down from backstory and we were very fortunate that we were able to reach out to Nathan Connolly and to Joanne Freeman and they joined us and their perspectives, their interests, 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 make a kind of take a deep 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 that we go to podcast even though i didnt know how to find podcasts 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 so im in love with my cohosts. Im in love with our researchers, in love with our sizable production staff. We have averaged staff overall full time of 7 or 8 people. So we are still aiming for a sound and im amazed, people keep coming up and think we just get together and sit around a table and shoot the breeze. And we are aiming for that. But in fact it is a costly production, it is a complicated production, and if it sounds good, its because of the incredible cohosts i have and because of the amazing staff we enjoyed now over ten years. So im happy to answer a lot of questions in question and answer, but im going to turn it over to nathan and ask a question ive never asked like what did it feel like to just come into an existing podcast with at least two old white guys. Had to resuscitate right away. So it was with the benefit of having appeared on backstory that i took this move and stepped into this platform, having done a show, i think we did one on booker t. Washington and black middle class. I will be honest and say up front i had a certain amount of trepidation about taking this move into doing media work in large part because of where i was in my career, as an assistant professor, with all kinds of expectations about timetable, clock, and early associate professor. We had conversations where i am agonizing how to do work like balance 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 trying to understand genre. So backstory was a phenomenal way to really begin to engage how senior scholars think about big, expansive, complicated ideas and distill them down in extraordinary compelling ways. One of the things brian wont take a lot of credit for or ed or for that matter whos the other guy, peter, is that they have the benefit of being able to take a field at a glance and look at it and come at something very complicated with an x trord necessarily grounded anecdote. Thats a skill i have to do a fair amount of learning. As much as i want to complexify things, it is showing the complexity in the details. Learning from these folks has been wonderful in that regard. I will say that the show itself was going through, this was all happening back stage, its own agonizing conversion from broadcast to podcast. A lot of the process of creating a show for the radio had to do with basically approximating the sound. It had to do with getting the show to sound like theres a lot goes into how many times one reads a script, whether to do a retake on jokes that come off and get that magic who happen for take two and three. And thankfully we arrived in terms of our own legs in podcasting at a less varnished sound that i think is more honest as a listening experience goes. Were in an environment last i heard this may have been two month old data which had gone up by 100 . There were 400,000 podcasts out there. Having backstory that exists in the top 1 of podcasts, still something people wanted to tune into, that means a challenge of coming up with compelling topics and finding the news topics. Some ways the most exhausting thing the first year on backstory is it coincided with the arrival of the Trump Administration in january of 2017. So we spent week after week after week with no shortage of things to offer deep contextual views of, muslim bans, transgender bans, border walls, environmentalism. I want to say, nathan, im the one that said we have to do a show not about donald trump. And i came up with a great idea. The history of hair. And everyone looked at me and said hair, donald trump . Never mentioned Donald Trumps hair on the history of hair. And shortly thereafter did a history of ufos which i loved as well. Suffice to say one of the things we have been able to do well, i will close my remarks here i think is find a way of balancing two things. One is in a field where we all would like to imagine ourselves as being effective collaborators, theres a lot that goes into structuring productive collaborations. Sometimes when youre on a Conference Program committee, want to coauthor something, theres no shortage of opportunities to step on each other where thats concerned. I think one of the things that makes it easiest to work on backstory, juggle my own work life stuff, think about the showss own perfect engineers produce, producers to produce. And we will often times balance intellectual questions off engineers and producers and theyll help us arrive at things. It will help with script work as needed on the fly. In that sense you get new and fresh content, from deep levels of expertise across various staff positions. That i think is really important and was really useful to learn how to do that. The other thing i would just say is i think it is really critical to think a lot now about how we are electing to engage the public. I know theres a lot of for me personally, i do the kind of work comes out of a left orientation, the kind of questions i ask are grounded in material questions, grounded in antiracist work i have been doing a long time. Doing that work in a space thats been opened up in a way that maybe some npr audiences may not be amenable to is also really important. How does one do antiracist work in a liberal media atmosphere. This is a basic question. Were having a lot of conversations about who is electable, whats acceptable political discourse. Backstory provided me with an important platform for experimenting, figuring out what some of the middle ground and yet still radical perspectives can be, and the fact that it is grounded in extraordinary research and our own deep rigorous historic sensibilities allows us to feel more confident when we step out and push the civic debate in ways we think is necessary an important. Thats been immensely rewarding. Can i task you with one more job . Sure. Can you say a few words about our regular gig on here and now . So another one of the things that came with the new podcast format was a partnership with the folks on wburs here and now. We have been doing basically every other week appearances on here and now. For those that are less familiar, has about a million listeners. A million and a quarter. We get about nine minutes to entertain the million and a quarter listeners. Often times it is on topics that are again right on with the news cycle, so it is a compressed timetable to get our hand around the issues in ways that are again 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 but also one that can be i have done 20, almost 30 now here and now appearances. The first 19, 20, i was very self annihilating as i left the booth. Oh my god, i could have said this, i should have said this. I will read some of the texts he sent me. They all come off sounding great, and it is all wonderful, but it is also one of those things where the early going, we were trying to figure out do they want us to be analysts or talking with pedia pages. What exactly is our relationship with this other entity. There are things we said that they decided might have been too polarizing for their audiences, we make our own calculations going forward. But i will say it is a relationship that i think is mutually beneficial. We have i think still to figure out a little bit of tweaking whether or not we get the chance to be personalities. Great thing on backstory, you build a relationship with the host as people. And i think here and now, we are content providers. Another round of evolution to spare with that relationship to make it possible to feel as if were active personalities on the show. I think it is a very important civic space that again allows us to be piped into audiences we may not be able to access because we may not have an i device or search. I think my first appearance on here and now within a couple hours was called out on the Rush Limbaugh show. That suggests an audience i dont normally reach, whether when we were on terrestrial radio as it is called or podcasts. Over to me. Okay. Thanks for being here and brian, thanks for asking me back. It has been a little over a year since i was actually the researcher, so round of applause or maybe not. Nod to monica who is the current researcher. Monica blair. Monica blair, yes. Brian asked me to come here and talk a little about what goes into creating a prep for the show and then to reflect a bit about the way this influenced my time as a graduate student. I was doing this while i was writing a dissertation, how it influenced my scholarship and most importantly for if there are grad students out there, my job prospects. Ill start by saying one of the most exciting and sometimes anxiety producing parts of being the research for backstory is being handed a topic you know absolutely nothing about. This in fact was the case for the Climate Change episode that were going to reflect on a little bit. I am not an environmental historian, never had a course in it. How do you wrangle the history of something you dont know about, write 10 to 20 single space page prep. With picture of a polar bear standing on what looked like by then an ice cube. I think it had been a shelf of ice. Humor is the only way to get through Climate Change. To write this substantial prep, suggest interesting stories, identify authors that might make interesti