Panel and we are each going to say a few words about are quite different roles. Well nathan and i have the same rule. He is trying to steal the 20th century for me and doing a good job. Well have a different roles and back stories. We will talk about that a little bit. Then were going to open it up to questions. Just for starters, this is not what it looks like behind the scenes of back story. In fact, rarely are we in the same place at the same time. I had to Google Nathan to see what he looked like. I talked to him every week even though. Introducing myself. I am a professor at the university of virginia. I cohost back story and i direct the National Fellowship program at the jefferson scholars foundation. My cohost Nathan Connolly is known to most of you as an outstanding scholar. He is the herbert back stir adams chair Herbert Baxter adams at the john hops guns university. The remaking of jim crows south florida. He is also hard at work on a book that is really a deep transnational family history. A fair description, and it is called its a five generation history of working class families who travels and travels took them between the caribbean, europe, and the United States. Nathan is also an overall good citizen, and as part of his citizenship, he has been involved in a project that a number of you out there are working on coal mapping and equality. Laying up the landscape 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 is 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 find 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 chaplain 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 chaplain. Are you going to tell everything about it . Joyce is the James Duncan Phillips professor of Early American History at harvard university. Her most recent works include roundabout the earth, circumnavigating ma gellen to orbit and with Allison Bashford the new world of Thomas Robert malfus, 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, joeian freeman at Yale University and ed airs president emeritus at the university of richmond, considering that we are 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 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 airs and peter onif 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, were not very funny, so nobody is going to be interested in this show. But andrew prevailed on ed and peter onif, this he came to me. I said thats a ridiculous idea, nobody is going to be interested in this. We spent about a year and a half doing one demo, which was truly horrible. If it does not 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 to eventually hit big time and we could be on one or two public Radio Stations. Originally, the show was a call in 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 centuries one of our most frequent tropes was, oh my century is better than yours. My century is worse than yours. 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 were all sitting in a studio, but we were on the show live in norfolk and the color called in and asked whether william and mary had been founded on pirates booty i am pointing at peter, and peter is pointing at ed and we are saying you take this one. Ed is googling furiously, wikipedia is next to monica and joey, that was our Major 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 universities station, that is how we got our start. And we were very fortunate eventually to expand to roughly 200 public Radio Stations around the country. We had some good, good in terms of audience stations. The public Radio Station and chicago probably reached the largest audience of any station that we were on. There was a good time. We were also on alaskan public radio, i cannot 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 onif, 18th century guy, deciding to retire, both from the university of virginia and stepped down from backstory. 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 back story, but i also really love the current back story. 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 did not know what a podcast was. Not entirely true. I urged that we go to broadcast even though i did not know how to find podcasts on my phone, because of two things. We wanted to reach a much more diverse audience and 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 are currently downloaded by roughly 100,000 listeners every week. And i should have mentioned about eggs eight or nine years ago, we went to a weekly format and we continue that weekly format on pasta podcasting. So im in love with my cohost. It is true. Nathan. I am in love with our researchers. I am in love with our sizeable 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 the breeze. We are aiming for that. But in fact, it is a costly production. It is a complicated production and if it sounds good, it is because of the incredible cohost that i have and it is because of the amazing stat that we have enjoyed for 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 i have never asked, like, what did it feel like to kind of just come into an existing podcast with at least two old white guys . Dead awesome. I have to resuscitate right away. 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 big booker t. Washington or the black middle class it might have been, and i will be very honest and say up front 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, as an assistant professor with all kinds of expectations about timetable and clock and even then as an early associate professor and brian will be the first one to tell you we have, you know, conversations where im often agonizing about how to do Work Life Balance where i have three young children, two manuscripts in the pipeline and a podcast that were doing. And the process of imagining my own calculations and tradeoffs has a lot to do with really trying to understand genre. So back story was a phenomenal way to really begin to engage how senior scholars think about really being expensive complicated ideas and still them down an extraordinarily compelling ways. One of the things im sure brian wont want to take the credit for or add, for that matter. Who is the other guy . Peter. It is that they have the benefit of being able to take a field at a glance and really look at it and come at something very complicated with an extraordinarily grounded an intimate look, oftentimes a compelling anecdote and that is a skill that i have had to do a fair amount of learning about. Really understanding that is i much eye as i want to complex the fight things it is about to trying to show the complexity in the details and learning from these folks has been wonderful in that regard. I will also say that the show itself was going through and this was all happening backstage its own kind of agonizing conversion from broadcast to pack cost. A lot of the process of creating a show for radio had to do with approximating that npr sound. So the strategies in the booth had a lot to do with getting our show to sound like this American Life or prairie home companion, car talk. There is a lot that goes into many times when you read the script, whether or not you do retake on jokes that might have come off russia extemporaneously and try to get that magic to happen again for take two and three. And thankfully we have arrived in terms of our own legs in podcasting at a much less varnished sound that i think is much more honest as a listening experience goes. Were in an environment now where last i heard, this may have been like twomonth old data which we have probably gone up by at least 100 that we are 400,000 podcasts that are out there. Having backstory which exists in the top 1 of all podcasts will still be something that people want to tune into means there is a challenge coming up with compelling topics and really finding the news cycle. In some ways the most exhausting thing about that first year on backstory was that 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 that we had to offer, deep contextual views of whether it was muslim bans, transgender bans, border walls environmentalism i just want to say, i am the one that said we have to do a show that is not about donald trump. I came up with a great idea. The history of hair and everyone looked at me and said hair . Donald trump . We will never mentioned Donald Trumps hair. I loved the show on the ufos. One of the things that we have been able to do really well is that we find a way of balancing two things. One is, in a field where we all would like to imagine ourselves as being really effective collaborators, there is a lot that goes into structuring productive collaborations. Sometimes when you are on a Conference Program committee or you want to coauthor something, there has been no shortage of opportunities to step on each other where that is concerned and i think that one of the things that makes it easy is to work on back story, to juggle my own work life stuff, to think about the shows own permutations is because of the team that we have. There is a really clean division of labor that allows engineers to engineer, producers to produce, hosts to hosts there is a great deal of humility in terms of those roles where we will oftentimes bounce actual intellectual questions off of engineers and producers and they will help us arrive at things and we will help with script work as needed on the fly. In that sense 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 like to say is that i think it is really critical to think now about how we are electing to engage the public. I know there is a lot for me personally, i do the kind of work that i would say comes out of a left orientation. The kinds of questions that i ask are grounded in materialistic questions, grounded in anti racist work, i have been doing for very long time. Doing that work in a space that has been opened up in a way that maybe some npr audiences might not be amenable to thats really important. How does one do antiracist work in a liberal media atmosphere . I know we are having a lot of considerations about who is electable or whats acceptable, police discourse. Backstory has provided me with a platform for experimenting, figuring out what some of those middle ground and yet still radical perspective can be and the fact that its grounded in extraordinary research and our own deep rigorous historical sensibilities allows us to feel more confident. When we do decide to step out when we feel it is necessary an important. And that sense its been immensely rewarding. Can i task it with one more job . Can you say just a few words about regular about our regular gig, here and now . Another one of the things that came with the new podcast format was a partnership with the folks on wbbrs here and now. And we have been doing basically every other week these appearances on here and now. Here in now, for those less familiar, it has about 1 million listeners . 1 million and a quarter. We get nine minutes to entertain 1 million and a quarter listeners. It will oftentimes be on topics that are again, right on with the news cycle. It is a very compressed timetable to get our hands around these issues in ways that are, again, really directed at trying to take advantage of our expertise a scholars. This is a relationship that i think has been really great for the show and it is also one that i have done over 20, almost three now, here and now appearances. The first i would say, 19 to 20 of these, without exception, i was self and i leading as i left the booth. I should have said this, i could have said. This im going to read some of the texts. And through the magic of editing, they come of sound great and its all wonderful. But it is also one of those things, especially the early going, we were trying to figure out, do they want us to be analysts . Do they want us to talk about Wikipedia Pages . What is our relationship with this other entity . And there have been things that we have said that they have decided might have been too polarizing for there are the incentives. We make our own calculations Going Forward i will say that its a relationship that i think is mutually beneficial. We have still to figure out a little bit of a tweaking about whether or not we can get the chance to be personalities. The great thing about back story, you build a relationship with the host as people. I think the here and now, we are content providers. So i think there is another round of evolution we can spare with that relationship to make it possible to feel more active personalities on the show. But i do think it is a very important civic space and again, allows us to be piped into audiences we might not be able to access because they might be looking for us with their usual podcast or search. I think it was my first appearance on here and now, within a couple of hours, i was called out on the Rush Limbaugh show. Thats just annoyance that i dont normally reach whether im and whether im when we were on terrestrial radio as it is called, or when we went to podcast. Format that is when i stopped reading comments. Please. Okay. So for being here thank you. Brian, thanks for asking me back. It is been well over a year since i was actually the researcher. So a round of applause, or maybe not but a nod to monica who actually is the current researcher. Monica blair. Yes. Brian asked me to come here and talk a little bit about what goes into creating a prep for the s