VA Foundation for the Humanities | FirstDraft1_08_2018_MASTER

JOANNE: Major funding for BackStory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

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NATHAN: From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is BackStory.

BRIAN: Welcome to BackStory. I'm Brian Balogh.

JOANNE: I'm Joanne Freeman.

ED: And I'm Ed Ayers.

BRIAN: Each week Nathan Connelly, Joanne, Ed and I-- all historians-- take a topic from the headlines and try to understand how we got here. Today on the podcast, we'll discuss how presidents present themselves to the public and the use of slogans and activism. We'll wrap up the conversation with a segment we call "footnotes." this is when one of us shares something from the historical archives that caught our eye. Hey Ed, why don't you start us off?

ED: Well, I'm happy to Brian. In the news this week, we've read a lot about President Trump and his tweets. And we started having kind of meta conversations about that-- not just about the substance of the tweet, but whether tweeting is a good idea or not. Is it a master strategy to control American public opinion? Or is it just an impulse that the president can't control?

And it got me thinking, well, how have US presidents-- before Twitterdom and before Donald

Trump-- presented themselves to the public? And a large part of their job-- it seems to me-- is to create a persona that provides a unifying story for that moment in American history. And I

thought, if I just knew some historians who could cover the span of American history, I might

be able to find out the answer.

[LAUGHTER]

[INTERPOSING VOICES]

Well, at least I have Joanne who's going to help me understand the early stuff. Because certainly, your guys had to invent that. And you know, it seems to me they spent quite a bit of time and energy thinking about what sort of persona they wanted to project.

JOANNE: Well, exactly. And "invent" is the right word because the republic was created in a world of monarchies. And everybody knew what a king was but what the heck is a president? Right? No one knew what that meant. What is a national executive and a republic? So one of the things I love about this early period Is that these first presidents were-- and actually everyone around them, as well-- were negotiating on a sort of ground level as to what they were supposed to look like and what they were supposed to act like, and as you put it Ed, what kind of persona they were supposed to present.

So for example, Washington decided very early in his presidency, that he would not ever

shake peoples' hands, that he would not allow the American public to touch him in any way. And that somehow or other, that to him represented some kind of a custom that would show that he was above the people, and yet that he was not so far above them that he was like a monarch.

ED: They could look, but not touch right?

JOANNE: Exactly. That's a little scary sounding, but yes.

BRIAN: So did he have one of those velvet ropes around him?

[LAUGHTER]

JOANNE: No, but I'm sure that there would have been people who didn't like him who claimed he had velvet ropes around him. But the other side of that equation was he did worry that he would

seem too removed. And so he took a walk in the street every day very publicly so that people would see he wasn't just riding around with his carriage and horses. He was a guy walking

around in the street. And people noticed that too. And he got fan mail for the walks. You know,

oh excellent! Good job really showing the public you're one of them.

BRIAN: But could he chew gum at the same time, Joanne?

JOANNE: Well not with those teeth actually, probably not. Even in New York at the beginning of the government, he went and visited-- in person-- every congressman at their boarding house.

And what he did was, he got there. He got off his horse. He bowed. He got back on his horse.

And he went away. So there was no touching of George at that kind of moment. But it was a definite display of, I am here and I am showing respect to you.

ED: Sorry. I don't mean to interrupt you.

JOANNE: No, no. Go ahead.

ED: So it seems to me that Washington-- in many ways-- succeeded. He struck a balance between familiarity and distance that seems to have been-- throughout most of American history-- the kind of tone that most American presidents would set. Does that seem true to you, Joanne?

JOANNE: Well, I think that was true for people who agreed with him politically. And then, I think you get Thomas Jefferson comes along in his presidency at the very beginning of the 19th century.

ED: Well that didn't take long.

JOANNE: No, not at all. It took one president in between. And he comes along and says, no. Jefferson changes the etiquette of the presidency. He decides that there will be round tables so that there won't be any one seated at a position of power over anybody else. He really-- very aggressively-- says, the presidency is going to be a much more small-d democratic office now that I'm in power.

BRIAN: Well, not to jump to the 20th century but to jump to the 20th century, I just want to underscore something in that spectrum that you guys were talking about. That's the need to distinguish one's self from one's predecessor, especially when there's a real change in party.

ED: Right, right.

BRIAN: They're beginning to emerge in the early 19th century to distinguish one selves ideologically through stylistic changes. And what you and Joanne were talking about is so resident of that

contrast between Richard Nixon-- the very formal president, but ultimately disgraced by things

like Watergate, and Jimmy Carter-- the populist president who carried his own coat bag during his inauguration. And obviously when I talk about Jimmy Carter, there are people at the

inauguration. But there are hundreds of millions more that might be watching around the world. How did the image of presidents get projected in the 19th century?

ED: Well, I've got two words for you Brian. Honest Abe.

JOANNE: Aha! ED: Honest Abe Lincoln, right? The rail splitter, right? That was a complete projection of-- you know, he did split rails at some earlier point in his life. They weren't taking him out of the field into the presidency. He did some other things in between, right? But Lincoln, of course, was

beloved because he struck the common tone throughout his presidency, that he would visit the soldiers in the hospital. And he would step out into the streets of Washington.

And of course, as we know in some ways, that inclination to be seen among the people ended

up making him remarkably vulnerable. And so he was assassinated in being at the theater-- sort of the clearest example-- of how you could be a man of the people.

JOANNE: Sorry, I have a question about that.

ED: Yeah.

JOANNE: How much of that was a very deliberate adopting of a persona? And how much of that was just Lincoln? Or can we tell that?

ED: Joanne, you know, there's no doubt that Lincoln-- who was a very political person-- understood the value of this. But he actually took it to impractical ends. He would meet with all these people who would come to the White House to meet him, to talk about some patronage

job they needed, or sometimes very touchingly about sons that a mother had lost.

I think that's one thing that made this so remarkable. And we still remember it. It's authentic. And I think that's an important part of all that we're talking about. The persona can't be

manufactured. We have to have some reason to believe that it's growing from within who the person really is behind the office.

BRIAN: Ed, I'm just thinking of Richard Nixon. And his aides were telling him, you know, you've got to show that you care about people. So there is this iconic photograph of him working the lines of

some huge crowd. And he's shaking hands. Unfortunately, he's looking at his watch at the same time.

[LAUGHTER]

Kind of undercut what his aides were trying to achieve.

JOANNE: Well, let me ask you a question then. How much of what we're talking about here, as far as presidents engaging with the public, how much of that is affected by technology? Because you're talking about a photograph.

BRIAN: Oh, it's totally affected by technology, Joanne. Now, I don't think that's a photograph that Nixon wanted--

JOANNE: Probably not.

BRIAN: --to get around. But certainly by the time you get to the post-World War II presidents-- and my guess is even before-- they are acutely aware of what a 19th century technology-- the photograph-- can do when spread across newspapers across the land. I'm thinking about the

emergence of the video image that Ronald Reagan was just absolutely brilliant at using.

There is a famous still photograph taken from a video of Reagan where he's gesturing with his

right hand up. And he just happens-- and believe me, it's not an accident-- to be standing in front of the Statue of Liberty. And Lady Liberty is also holding up that torch. And Reagan is

calling for freedom right in front of Lady Liberty calling for freedom. These images are made possible by all kinds of technologies that emerge after the photograph. And presidents-- at least in the 20th century-- are very aware of them.

ED: So this is all really interesting. And you'll remember that I acknowledged at the beginning that this was inspired by President Trump and Twitter. So how would we position him, either on this issue of authenticity or on this issue of technological access? Does he mark a sort of a rupture

from what's come before? Or is he sort of an extension-- an amplification-- of what we've seen before?

BRIAN: Well, Joanne, do you want to go first?

JOANNE: No, go ahead.

BRIAN: I see Trump as a real confirmation of continuity in his use of new technology. I actually think presidents have often made their marks by mastering new technology. And ironically, it usually takes two or three presidents to get any new technology.

ED: Yeah, so even though President Obama prided himself on being hip, he was reluctant to go into the Twitter sphere.

BRIAN: He did to campaign, but he didn't to govern. And it's Trump's use of Twitter to govern-- which of course, bothers a lot of people. But this has been true of every new technology. So television had been around for a while before John F Kennedy really used it to nail Richard

Nixon in those--

ED: Yeah, FDR didn't invent the radio.

BRIAN: And FDR hardly invented the radio. In fact, Herbert Hoover-- who helped promote the radio through his Federal Communications Commission-- was horrible at using the radio. So one of the ways that presidents leave their marks and really sear their image on our ears or our eyes

is to master that new technology. And I think we have to give Donald Trump a lot of credit for mastering-- if you will-- the use of Twitter to govern.

JOANNE: But you know, that also brings us to something that's different about this particular kind of technology. Because unlike radio and unlike TV, Twitter-- although it's a brand name and a

company-- it's really kind of bottom-up more than top-down. So it's a form of media that Trump is using. But I think he may have mastered it to spread whatever kind of message he wants to spread. But there's kind of a loose cannon component with social media that feels different

from what might have been the case with more controlled forms of media.

ED: Trump's tweets certainly sound authentic. They have some of the markers of authenticity. You know, there's typos and second thoughts, and so forth. He comes in for some--

BRIAN: Running out of characters.

ED: Exactly. And there's some ridicule that comes from that. But it's also the case that it carries a note of, this is what I really think. You can trust me because if I were trying to con you, I would make this more polished.

BRIAN: Well, I think this question of authenticity is run through this whole conversation. And I want to leave you guys with this story about Herbert Hoover, who was known as cold and distant. And

his aides were just scratching their heads-- how do we make this guy seem more personable? And they asked him if they could use some family photographs. And he said, no way. That's personal. And they quite literally broke into his house and stole photographs and published them in the newspapers to make this guy seem more caring.

And that seemed incredibly authentic, even though Herbert Hoover was incredibly angry-- number one, at his aides breaking into his house-- but number two, showing this side to the

public. Because he didn't want the public to see that side. So this authenticity thing is often in the eyes of the beholder is what I'm saying. ED: It even reminds us how a few pictures we've seen of domestic scenes of President Trump. We don't really see photographs like that. What we hear are expressions of his political opinions coming directly to you, the voter.

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BRIAN: Ed, terrific topic. Let's move on to our next one. Joanne, what do you want to talk about this week?

JOANNE: Well, what I want to talk about has to do with the Golden Globe awards, which were awarded this past week. And I watched. And one of the things that not only did I notice, but probably most people noticed, was that there was a lot of talk of "me too" and also, "time's up," which is another slogan. In this case, it represents an initiative to fight sexual violence and harassment

in the workplace.

So there was a lot of slogan talking related to activism and women's rights and fighting sexual harassment. And it made me want to talk with you guys about other moments in history when slogans have had this kind of a power to sort of propel people or push people forward. Encouraging people to be activists.

ED: So Joanne, I have one kind of weird answer for you on that, as I think about the first sort of mass phrase in American history-- one that was sort of on the lips of people who believed it

and who didn't. I'm thinking, of course, of the immortal words of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." I think people know what "and" and "too" means.

BRIAN: I think that's #TylerToo.

[LAUGHTER]

ED: Exactly. Right.

JOANNE: It's crying out for a hashtag, actually.

ED: Isn't it, though? It almost uses all of the Twitter characters though, just with the slogan itself. Tippecanoe was a reference to the 1811 battle led by General William Henry Harrison, who

happened to be the presidential candidate in 1840 when this phrase became popular. And his supporters were trying to remind voters of just who this old guy was. Well, it turns out that back in 1811, he had been the general who had opened up Indiana and Ohio to white settlers by defeating the Indians. And so "by Tippecanoe" just suggests, oh remember that? That was a big deal. That's William Henry Harrison. You know that. And "Tyler too" of course is his vise presidential candidate who just sounds good.

BRIAN: He's along for the ride.

JOANNE: And it begins with T.

ED: Now as it turns out, of course, it was Tyler too because Harrison dies early in his administration. And Tyler too ends up being president. But the point that I want to make with

that is that it's referring not just to a man, but to a party-- right-- to a platform, to an entire ticket. So this shows you at the very beginning of two party mass politics, when the very idea of voting was a kind of activism, right? People are trying think, well how do we get people to vote for somebody they don't know? Here's what we should do. Let's give them an identity that is ingrained in this slogan.

JOANNE: So that brings us smack into the middle of electoral politics, Ed. But what are some other slogans that we could talk about that really are more focused on the kind of moralistic component of the "me too" slogan? What else sort of echoes that?

ED: That's a good question. As it turns out, there's a slogan that predates all this electoral stuff. It actually grows out of 18th century England, but spreads throughout the United States, as well. And it was the great slogan of the anti-slavery movement, "am I not a man and a brother?" So there was a case where you would have found hundreds of thousands of people-- many of

them women, an interesting foreshadowing of what you ask about Joanne-- who would be motivated to join anti-slavery organizations partly by the very direct question, am I not a man? Am I not a brother? Am I not a human? And the answer to that question is obviously, yes. And if the answer is yes, what is the obligation that you have as the person reading this?

JOANNE: Also though, the question, "am I not a brother"-- that makes me think of "me too" because that's about relationships and bonding and pulling people together in a way that's going to

grab and activate them in ways that maybe some slogans wouldn't.

ED: Yeah, exactly. And it was meant to play on your feelings. It was meant to be in the sort of technical meaning of the phrase, sentimental. By asking a question, it invites an answer. BRIAN: It strikes me that one of the places that we can count on sloganeering in order to activate the public are wars. "Remember the Alamo." I'm thinking about, "Remember the Main" that came out of the Spanish-America war. I'm even thinking about "Loose Lips Sink Ships" during World War II. Now, that was meant to get people to not do something, not spread rumors. But to go back to the country's first war as the United States-- or what would become the United States--

were there slogans that actually activated and motivated people?

JOANNE: Well you know, it's interesting. You would expect-- based on the popular memory of the revolution-- that if you looked in newspapers during the revolutionary period that they would be all full of cries of "No Taxation Without Representation." but as a matter of fact, they're not. So that wasn't being used-- certainly not in the press-- as a slogan in that way.

But there were certainly lots of, it not necessarily slogans, images and ideas that were repeated. There was the liberty tree, right? There was this idea that there would be planted a

liberty tree, or liberty poles, that would be planted. And that people would protect against them being torn down by Loyalists or British supporters.

I think this gets us back partly to technology.

BRIAN: Yeah.

JOANNE: Right? Because we're talking about things that it's not so easy to spread around slogans.

BRIAN: Joanne what about songs? Yankey Doodle.

JOANNE: Ahh, yes. Songs are much easier to spread around than slogans. And it's true. Yankee Doodle was a song that started out being, really, a way to mock American soldiers-- that they, you

know, stuck a feather in their cap and called it macaroni-- meaning sort of foppish. And Americans took the song and basically wore it with pride, and threw it on right back at the British.

BRIAN: And it becomes a rallying cry, right?

JOANNE: It does, it does. And as a matter of fact, Americans-- generally-- were pretty good at taking songs, British fighting songs, and twisting them around and throwing them back.

ED: Or turning them into our national anthem [INAUDIBLE]

[LAUGHTER] JOANNE: There's that, too. But yeah, that's true-- that songs are a really powerful way, and particularly if you're taking someone else's song and using it for your own purposes.

BRIAN: And it strikes me that songs are perhaps the most enduring way to deliver activist slogans across all of American history.

ED: Yeah, I have one word to say to you-- Dixie.

BRIAN: Yep

ED: You know, the way that that mobilized the Confederacy-- and of course, the even more powerful song, "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" is both a marching song, but also a song that people back at the home front could sing to demonstrate their solidarity with the men at

the front. So I think you're right about that.

BRIAN: And Joanne and Ed, you can see my response to "Dixie" coming, which is the iconic song of the middle of the 20th century among activists. And that's "We Shall Overcome." And "We Shall Overcome," even though we did have bumpers by then, was not splashed across bumpers. It was sung. It was sung in protest. It became the anthem of the civil rights movement. But it was picked up by almost all of the social movements that followed in the

1960s and 70s.

There was a bumper sticker in reaction to "We Shall Overcome." And it resonated with some

of that "Dixie", Ed.

ED: Yeah?

BRIAN: It was, "America. Love It or Leave It." And this was the darling of Americans who supported George Wallace, a very conservative Democrat-- Spiro Agnew-- and it literally was plastered on bumpers. And it said, look you protesters. You don't like this place, get out of here.

JOANNE: But you know, the thing about songs is that they have a power that can surpass words. And certainly, songs long outlive very often the period in which they're being used for a specific purpose. So even just thinking of "We Shall Overcome," I remember being in second grade and learning that song in school, and singing that song in school. I didn't know what it meant.

ED: Right. JOANNE: But I still, you know, learned the song. I knew the song. And the song stayed with me. So music, I guess, has a power. It's a cliche, but it really can sort of spread far beyond sometimes

where words can go.

ED: So Joanne, it sounds to me as if this kind of survey of things we can think about that are memorable-- of phrases or images or songs-- maybe highlights what's unique about the episode that you mentioned. Does it strike you that something that's based in social media is perhaps something of a break with the past?

JOANNE: Well, I mean, one of the things that strikes me about "me too" as a slogan and as something to rally behind is that it really began to gain power-- just as you're suggesting-- with social media,

which means it wasn't really "me too." It was "we too." It gained power when I think it became a we. And it became a we through social media in which massive numbers of people saw it, identified with it, and put it right back out on that social media.

BRIAN: But I would add to that, Joanne, by saying there have been many social media campaigns for all kinds of activist causes. What seems to distinguish these is it is both a slogan to signify an activist campaign and an invitation to come out-- if you will-- an invitation quite literally in real

time to add to the evidence of why we need this social activist campaign.

JOANNE: Right, an invitation and a confession.

ED: And to use the phrase from the civil rights movement, to stand up and be counted. So you're exactly right, Joanne-- that it's a collective enterprise. But it's not an accident I think that it's "me too." I'm not sure that we've seen something that could do that before, most of which were about submerging your identity and a collective cause rather than somehow maintaining your own voice in a larger kind of song.

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BRIAN: We end our first draft conversations with a footnote. This is where we share something that one of us has found in the archives. And this week, I want to share something that I found while working on my book. This is from 1972. And I'm working on a book that talks about the use of--

ED: You're working on a book, Brian? [LAUGHTER]

I'm working at a coal mine, working [INAUDIBLE] working at a coal mine.

BRIAN: All right. That's all right. This week, I'm the one who came up with this priceless document from 1972.

[LAUGHTER]

ED: Can't wait.

BRIAN: It is called-- wait for it-- "The Value of History." And it is a program for a conference put on by the American Society of Appraisers. And as you work your way through this program, it tells you how to value real estate, how to value material objects like art, how to value just about everything that's old-- except people, I guess. And it got me thinking about the kinds of values we place on history.

Now, just a word on why I was looking at this weird material. In the mid 1960s and 1970s, Americans began putting old property under conservation easements, to protect it. Very nice.

It kind of works. But being American, they want to get some value for that, right? Because they can no longer build a subdivision if they want to keep this historic property. And the government actually begins offering tax deductions for the historical value of that property that they're choosing not to develop.

ED: So Brian, when you start talking about that I was so excited. I thought that in 1972, people actually believed that there was a value in what we study for a living. But you actually mean

just economic value.

BRIAN: No, no I mean dollars and cents.

JOANNE: But if you're talking about history and dollars and cents, the thing that pops into my head-- and I don't know if you guys have seen the show on PBS called Antiques Roadshow?

BRIAN: Oh yeah.

JOANNE: OK. Where people bring in-- every week I guess, they're in a different city. And people cart in artifacts, things from their attics and their basements that are old. And they want them to be appraised. And the whole show is really attaching a money value, monetary value, onto an old object. You know, the sort of best segments are when, oh my gosh! It's worth $250,000! And on the bottom of the screen, you see [BING SOUND] $250,000! And so it's sort of connecting people with history, but it's doing it in the sort of bluntest of ways, which is--

ED: No, that's not the bluntest of ways because there's been a follow up show to that that's even blunter.

JOANNE: Uh-oh.

ED: So you know, the Antiques Roadshow involves people themselves kind of volunteering, bringing something in that they think has some kind of sentimental value. But there's another show called American Pickers, which is not about Bluegrass but which is about going into apparent piles of junk and picking out articles of value of history. And it's the same theme except it's even better because people had no sense that it was worth anything.

So I think, Brian, that maybe back in the 70s, they began something that's still running rampant today. I think eBay is a lot about things that turn these old things that seem to be of

no value-- these old toys or whatever-- into something valuable. So in fact, it can be that people, in their everyday lives, value history the most for the monetary value it has.

BRIAN: So in a society where new and improved-- at least in the 20th century-- is the essence of who we are, why do we value-- literally in monetary terms-- things that are old?

JOANNE: Probably partly because there's less of it. I mean, this again is sort of brass tacks blunt and not the sort of most beautiful way of thinking of this.

BRIAN: No, I think you're right. And not only is there less of it, but we can be pretty sure there will be even less of it in 10 years.

JOANNE: Right. Right. Scarcity and value.

ED: Now, I know I struck the cynical tone before. But Americans actually value the past in lots of different ways. Genealogy is the most popular hobby in America. And collecting of all kinds is remarkably prominent. So I think there is a sense that in a world where new and improved is

everything, wouldn't it be good to have something that was old and the same, you know, that was artifactual, that was-- you know-- made by hand, that showed the signs of its making?

But it's also interesting how we can value something that's not really that old, that is mass produced. Think about Beanie Babies or Trolls or some of these other things that seem to be sort of useless mass produced junk at the time they came out, but through sentimental value have acquired a kind of value from being in our memories.

BRIAN: Which really raises a final point here, which is what do we consider to be old? There was a huge battle-- just about this time-- in the 1970s, 1980s, about whether gas stations could be antiquities. Right? At the time, antiquities meant like a Victorian house. And with the emergence of what we call social history, caring about the lives of everyday people-- perhaps people who weren't in the middle class-- caring about people who might not have been white men, there was a real battle among historians about preserving every day things that were

part of regular people's lives-- things like gas stations.

JOANNE: So what we're really talking about here-- and this goes back to the original document that you mentioned, Brian-- is people literally creating history.

BRIAN: Exactly, which is what my book's about.

ED: Are working on it?

[LAUGHTER]

BRIAN: I may never be able to work on it again. I'm so traumatized by my colleagues making fun of me. It will take, at least, months.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOANNE: This week, we say goodbye to our senior editor, Bridget McCarthy.

BRIAN: Bridget, you made us better every time we got behind the mic. Thank you so much for everything you've done. Bridget, you were great. We're going to miss you.

ED: Brian, that was a good line but you forget that Bridget's not here to edit that down so that you sound coherent.

BRIAN: You're right!

ED: So that's going to be in the show. I just want to point out to you. Bridget all kidding aside, we're so appreciative of all that you gave the show. You made a sound coherent and concise each

week, even when we weren't. And you brought such a great spirit of enthusiasm for what we were doing. It was a great gift, as well. Thanks and good luck in your new gig! JOANNE: Bridget, I'm going to be short and kind of sappy. And I'm just going to say, I'm going to miss you so much. You really were the person who transitioned me into the world of podcasts. And as both Ed and Brian have said, you made us sound so coherent and snappy even when we didn't start out being coherent and snappy. So I wish you the best of luck in your new job, but I sure miss you here.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ED: That's going to do it for us today. But you can keep the conversation going online. Let us know what you thought of the episode or ask us your questions about history. You'll find us at backstoryradio.org or send an email to [email protected]. We're also on Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter, @backstoryradio. Whatever you do, don't be a stranger.

BRIAN: This episode of BackStory was produced by Nina Ernest, Emily [? Gattic, ?] and Ramona Martinez. Jamal Milner is our technical director. Diana Williams is our digital editor. And Joey Thompson is our researcher. Additional help came from Sequoia Carillo, [? Angelie ?] [INAUDIBLE] Courtney [INAUDIBLE] and Aaron [? Teeley. ?] Our theme song was written by Nick Thorburn. Other music in this episode came from [INAUDIBLE]

JOANNE: BackStory is produced at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. We're a proud member of the Panoply Podcast Network. Major support is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Provost's Office at the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.

WOMAN: Brian Balogh is Professor of History at the University of Virginia and the Dorothy Compton professor at the Miller Center of Public Affairs. Ed Ayres is Professor of the Humanities and President Emeritus at the University of Richmond. Joanne Freeman is Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University. Nathan Connolly is the Herbert Story Adams Associate professor of History at the Johns Hopkins University. BackStory was created by Andrew Wyndham for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.