As BackStory moves towards the end of its production, we’ve asked our hosts – both past and present – to select memorable moments from the show that we’re publishing as episodes once per month. First up is Peter Onuf. Peter is the first (and only!) emeritus host. Peter retired from full time hosting duties in […]
On February 18, 1965, two leading voices in American politics took the stage at Cambridge University to debate the question: “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American negro?” On on side of the debate was James Baldwin, the prolific American writer and documenter of the ongoing civil rights movement. On the other […]
In honor of our last year of production, BackStory is bringing you memorable moments from outside of the podcast. In 2016, BackStory intern Elizabeth McCauley wrote a story about the windigo, a creature from the spiritual beliefs of the Algonquian peoples. The blog post served as a companion to the “Where the Windigos Are” segment […]
Charlottesville, VA— After more than three hundred episodes that have reached millions of listeners over the last twelve years, BackStory, the American history podcast produced by Virginia Humanities, will record its final episode this summer. The last episode of BackStory will publish on July 3, 2020. Over the years, BackStory has looked at pivotal points […]
Almost 100 years before Rosa Parks’s famous protest of segregation on the Montgomery bus system, a woman named Mary P. Bowers took a similar stand on a streetcar in Charleston, South Carolina. Her 1867 protest would eventually lead to the desegregation of the city’s streetcars that same year. This was no isolated incident, either. Elements […]
We have all read that California is burning. Wildfires continue to threaten, and destroy, communities across the state. They are so numerous that the Los Angeles Times recently published a guide for those who have “lost track of all the California fires.” These fires have become repetitive, even normal. More commonplace are the causes often […]
“Anointed with Oil places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation’s special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century […]
In the interest of maintaining the quality and integrity of our work, BackStory is working to establish a code of ethics that will help to make our storytelling process more transparent for those who serve as sources for our work and for our audience. We also need to consider the unique space we occupy as […]
The fundamental concerns of American psychiatry – articulating madness, understanding mechanisms responsible for mental distress – have always eluded it. As Owen Whooley argues in On the Heels of Ignorance: Psychiatry and the Politics of Not Knowing, the history of the field is a history of ignorance, and a cyclical record of disappointment and reinvention. […]
This weekend is the 50th anniversary of Woodstock, the iconic 1969 music festival that defined the counter-cultural “summer of love” movement of 1960’s America. But if Woodstock was the retrospective peak, then what about the descent? In his book “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” Hunter S. Thompson wrote: “We had all the momentum; we […]