Maybe. Just so you know youre not on the wrong flight. Im brian balogh and ive been a cohost for backstory for over ten years now. Im going to introduce the panel 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 connolly, 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 i in a project that a number of you out there are working on and mapping inequality where you are branching out the landscape in the United States. Joey thompson graduated from the university of virginia about 12 minutes ago. And his dissertation is titled militaryism and the making of of this is one of the best cultural histories that i have read in 35 years in advising graduate students, his adviser was grace hale. Hes onto a job as an assistant in the state of missouri. Joe is here because he had the fortune of being a researcher for babackstory for two years. What you will find is monica blair who always sits up front, hes our current researcher and phd candidate at the department of history. Joey and monica and several other outstanding scholars have done the research that really powers, the intellectual connections in back zstory if there are any. Joey chaplin who i met at the joh john hopkins university. The only person that was always there and that was joey chaplin. You a you are going to tell them everything . No, i stop right there. Shes the professor of early American History. Her most recent work includes ground about the earth. Circumnavigatiing magellan to orbit. And joyce has been kind enough to be a guest on backstory three times. Shes going to talk to us about what it is to be dropped in a show where people know each other pretty well and bring scholarshi scholarships on a topic that we hope will reach a broader topic. Let me take five or ten minutes to give you a berief history of back story. It airs at the yuuniversity of richmond. We are four historians, we know nothing about our own history. We cant tell you exactly when we start it. We have no archives. I guess since youre all historians, none of this comes as a great surprise for you. I did some primary research meaning i went back to the oldest emails i had. There is an exchange in 2005 about possibly doing a show, it has had many horrible names, the one that i remember best is the one i suggested history hotline, that lasted about three minutes, i think. The show started when a man named Andrew Wyndham who worked for humanities which we are still housed in and still support us. Andrew wyndham suggested to air and peter onus that it would be fun to do a radio show on history. Peter responded saying to things, number one, we dont know enough history. We need somebody in the 20th century. Number two, we are not very funny so nobody is going to be interested if the show. Andrew prevailed on a, and peter came to me. I said thats a ridiculous idea. Nobody is going to be interested and we spent about a year and a half doing one demo which was truly horrible. If it does not exists, we all made separate attempt 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 times, we would be on one or two public Radio Stations and originally the show was a college show. We took calls from people and we discussed specific topics 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 trophs. That was one o f tf the formats used again and again. We got training on a live radio show. We all were sitting in the studio. We went on the show live. I called in whether william and mary had been founded on pirate booty. I was pointing at peter and peter is pointing add ed. Ed is googling furiously. Wikipedia is next to monica and joey. That was our Major Research engine. 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 fortunate to expand roughly to 200 public Radio Stations around the country. We had some good in terms of audience, stations, public Radio Stations in chicago, probably reached the largest audience of any stations. We were also in alaskan public radio. I know we were on washington, d. C. On 7 00 in the morning, we were incredibly popular with camp drivers. I am assuming some of them had passengers. At least more than one person was listening to us in washington, d. C. Roughly about three years ago we made two important decisions. One of them was triggered by peter onof. 18th century guy deciding to retire both from the university of virginia and stepped down from backstory. We were fortunate to reach out to nathan connerly and Joanne Freeman and they joined us of their lives of experiences and their own experience of public engage. Ment. 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. I urged to do the podcast even though i didnt know how to find a podcast on my phone because of two things. We wanted to reach a much more diverse audience and we wanted to reach much younger audience. We lucked out. The podcast turned out to be successful. On our 200 public Radio Stations, the estimates were hazy. The estimates were, we were reaching roughly 40,000 listeners. We are currently downloaded by roughly 100,000 listeners every week. I should have mentioned about 8 or 9 years ago, we went to a weekly format and we continued that weekly format on podcasting. So i am in love with my cohosts. I am in love with our researchers and i am in love with our sizable production staff. We have averaged staff overall fulltime of seven or eight people. So, we are still aiming for a sound and i am amazed people keep coming up and they think we just get together and sit around a table and shoot debris. We are in. But, in fact it is a costly production and it is a complicated production. If it sounds good, it is because of the credible cohosts that i have and it is because of the a amazing staff that we have now over ten years. So i am happy to answer a lot of questions and questions and answers. I am going to turn it over to nathan and ask a question that i have never asked. What did it feel like to kind of just come into an existing podcast with at least too old like that, ed . Like this. Resuscitate right away. So it was with the benefit of having appeared on babackstory and having done the show, we did one in washington. And i will be honest and say up front that i had a certain amount of trepidation of 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 and clock and Early Association professors and brian will be the fe fe first one to tell you and agonizing how to do Work Life Balance of three Young Children and manuscripts in the pipeline and the process of imagining my own calculations and trade offs had a lot to do with really trying to understand generres. The back story was a phenomenon way to begin to engage how senior scholars think about really be expansive complicated ideas and extraordinary compelling ways. One of the things i am sure brian wont take a lot of credit for or ed or for that matter, whats 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 it of complicated extraordinary grounded and thats a skill that i had to do a fair amount of learning about. You really understanding that as much as i want to complex things, it is about trying to show the complexity in the details and learning from these folks have been wonderful in that regard. I will also say the show itself was going through, this was all happening backstage. It is own agonizing conversion from broadcast to podcast. A lot of the process of creating a show for the radio had to do with basically proximating mpr sound. The strategy in the booth had a lot to do getting our show to sound like this American Life or prairie on companion and a lot that goes into how many times one read the script. It may have come off contemporaneously and try to take two and three. We arrived in terms of our own podcasting at a much. We are in an environment where last i heard this may have been twoold data. There were 400,000 podcasts that were out there. Top 1 of the podcast means something people want to tune in, means there is a challenge, coming up with topics and finding the news cycles and some ways the most exhausting things about that is first year on backstory was the trumps story of january 2017. We spent weeks after weeks with no shortage of things we had to offer with deep contextual views. I am the one that says we have to do a show not about donald trump. I came up with a great idea, the history of hair. The he is industistory of ha. Suffice to say that one of the things that we have been able to do very well is find a way of balancing two things. One is in a field where we all like to imagine ourselves as being really effective collaborator. There is a lot of going into structuring productive collaborating. Sometimes you are on a committee or coarthuring something. I think one of the things that makes it easy for us to work on backstory and think of the show, because of the team that we have there is a clean division oaf labor that allows engineers to engineer and producers to produce. Well often times bounce, actual intellectual questions off of engineers and producers and theyll help us arrive at things and so well help of the script work on the fly. You will get new and fresh content but from deep levels of expertise. It is really important and really useful to learn how to do that. The other thing that i would say is that i think it is really critical to think a lot now about how we are engaging in the public. I know there are a lot of, for me personally, i do the kind of work i do come out of the left orientation and the kind of questions i ask are grounded materialist questions and antiracist work that wi have ben doing for a long time. Doing that work in a space that has been opened up in a way that maybe some npr audiences may not always be how does one do antiracist work in a liberal media atmosphere. I know we are having a lot of conversations now about whos electable or what is acceptable or discourse and i think the back story provided me with an important platform for experimenting figuring out some of that middle ground and that still radical perspective could be. It is extraordinary research and our own deep historical sensibility allowed us to feel much more confidentab when we d decide to step out and push the debate. Can i ask you one more job . Can you say a few words on our regular gig on hear now. Another one came with the new podcast format was a partnership with the folks at hear now. We have been doing basically every other week appearances on here now. It had about a million listeners. We got about 9 millions to entertain those listeners. And oftentimes being on topics with the news cycle. It is a compressed timetable to get our handson issues in ways that are directed at trying to take advantage of our expertises expertiseexpertis expertise as scholars. The first i would say 19 or 20, without exception, very self eye n annihilating. I should have said this or that. I should have read the texts. It it is all would feel but especially the early going, we were trying to figure out do they want us to be analysts or talking wikipedia pages. There are things that we have said they decided it may be too polarizing for their audiences. It is a relationship that i think is mutually beneficial. We still figure out a little bit of a tweaking about whether or not we get the chance to be personality. The great thing about back story is that you have been in a relationship as the host with people. I think there is still another round of evolution that we can spare with that relationship to make it possible for us to feel as if we are more active personality on the show. I think it is an important civic space that allowed us to be piped up into audience. We may not be looking for it with our usual podcast. Yeah, i think it was my first appearance here now within a couple of hours, i was called out on on tthe show. Thats an audience that i dont normally reach. Thats when i stop reading comments. Okay. So thanks for being here and brian brian, thank you for asking me back. It has been a little over a year since i was researcher. A round of applause, or maybe not. Now to monica whos a researcher. Brian asked me to come here and talk about what goes in creating a prep for this show and reflect about the way this influences my time as a graduate student. I was doing this while i was grinding the dissertation, how it influenced my scholarship and most importantly for grad students out there of my job prospec prospects. One of the most exciting and anxiety producing parts of being the research for backstory is handed a topic that you know absolutely nothing about. How do you wrangle the historians r v of something you dont know about, write a 10 to 20 single space page prep. A picture of a polar bear standing on what looked like by then ice cubes. Humor is the only way to get through. Suggests interesting stories and identify authors who may make interesting interviews. Building ten hours a week. As you can tell that i am anover prepared. That could be demanding at times. I think why it is important for a show like that to have a dedicated researchers rather than for that to be something the hosts are doing, nathan gestures towards his crazy schedule. I cant imagine you are trying to research the whole show. How do you go about doing Something Like that . This is a familiar process. I usually start with journal and blogs, american quarterly, modern American History and black perspectives were really key for me and being able to find these stories that we can use for each episodes. Journal articles are not particularly useful because, if they are found in the right way, they can be a segment. Other times when ever i found which would go into a general for the host to read or producer to see and hopefully thatll generate conversations that happens in between segments of the show if you are familiar of the format. I rely on articles of climate history of reflexivityreflexivi. We are trying to reach a general audience. As a researcher, my job is to take this theoretical work and digest it into facts and stories and hand it over to the hosts and producers. With that article, it was helpful of creating this intellectual and cultural history of perceptions of Climate Change. I want to give out a shoutout working in different departments of the government right now. Those websites, the contents, branches of the government. That stuff is you know it is really key for getting the nuts and bolts of particularly political history. It is interesting to think about how those are phd historians working in those positions. The way that people who did not take the academic route wound up in government and then between the academy and the government and the media with that. Just a shout out to those historians. Looks liking a great source to me. The other is good old fashion shelfwriting. He uva has this tremendous Library Source and it was not accounted for me to go in there looking for one book but come out of 20. That was helpful in a way looking at additional sources was not always as productive. You can go through a book and check out stories. Related to that, it was often, i would go to the best kind of synthetic history that i could find of the biggest historical arc of the show prep. For the Climate Change episode, i relied on james fleming, Historical Perspective on Climate Change. The discovery of Global Warming. These types of works once where authors create these narratives. Theyre indespencible. Another great method for me was relying on colonies. It was uncommon for me to email and reach out to my peers at uva or other institutions. In the case of time change, i reached out to one of brians students suggested who i knew was working on Climate Change and weaponization of weather and asked if you can kindly share your research to help me figure it out, which he did. I bring it up to point out how important it is for us to use our network as scholars to help create this public programming. We are lucky to have people wholl donate their time and research that way. Relatedly, i believe it was nathan that subjected chaplin for this episode, he knew she