Other Side of the Glass: BackStory

Other Side of the Glass is The Mediavore’s conversation with public media producers about their work. This week: Tony Field, Producer of BackStory.  BackStory is a new weekly program from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.  The program takes a look at issues of the day through the lens of American History.

This week’s program is all about Thanksgiving, and is  available online.

Tony, first let me give thanks to you for putting together a timely program for this week, and for taking some time to tell us a little about BackStory. What is Back Story, from the producer’s point of view?

Basically, the idea driving the show is that what we think of as “current events” are really the visible remnants of things that have happened in the past. The tip of the iceberg, so to speak.  And so it’s impossible to get a handle on the present without at least trying to understand what the present is made of. It’s the stuff of cliches, I know, but those cliches don’t seem to have permeated the structure of our news media, public broadcasting not excluded. We see the show as a complement to the rest of the news space, where listeners can take part in a kind of backwards-looking analysis that sets out to uncover the roots of all things American. Each hour is a mix of interviews, call-out segments, produced features, and conversation among the hosts, renowned academic historians in their own right.

When the show is successful, I think it challenges people to confront their assumptions about A) how unique our current historical moment is, and B) how continuous our historical moment is with past historical moments. Early on, we did a show about the long history of Americans feeling anxious about the environment. That’s an example of A. An example of B might be a show we did on the idea of race, where we talked about how the categories of black and white were inventions of a specific historical moment, and have had different meanings throughout American history. Other show topics have included “family values,” punishment, the weekend, and voting. We take on big ideas, but try and keep things as conversational and accessible as possible, and have as much fun with the material as we can.

Each episode seems to take the point of view that history is contemporary, or even an essential piece of the news.  How much of a burden is that as you put together the program?

I wouldn’t call it a burden at all. In my former life, I was a producer at “On the Media,” and we would constantly find ourselves banging our heads against the wall trying to find the “media angle” of these great stories we wanted to cover. Brooke Gladstone used to describe it as putting everything through “the media extruder.” With a history show, there’s no extruder needed — everything, as our hosts like to say, has a history. If there’s a burden, it’s in crafting show topics broadly enough to create a sense of movement through history, and narrowly enough to create enough “takeaways” for the listener. I hope that word isn’t copyrighted yet.

Tell us a little about your three hosts, and how you use their respective areas of expertise to give the full BackStory to an historical issue.

The show’s conceit is that we have a “History Guy” for each of the three centuries of our nation’s existence. Peter Onuf is our 18th century guy. He’s an institution here in the University of Virginia history department, kind of the in-house authority on our local hero Thomas Jefferson. Ed Ayers, president at the University of Richmond and author of a number of important and beautiful books about the Civil War South, is our 19th century guy. Brian Balogh, a political historian here at UVA, rounds out the trio. As 20th century guy, he is the show’s main pivot between past and present, and as such, tends to “drive the bus.” We make a lot of fun with, and fun of, the kind of parochialism you find in the academic world. It’s one of our ways of helping to differentiate the three voices for new listeners.

In an upcoming show about the history of financial panics, for example, the guys will introduce the topic by way of a “panic-off,” in which each guy tries to one-up the others by making the case that a panic in his century was really the worst.  We also play a lot with the different methodological approaches each of the hosts brings to his academic work — Ed is a social historian, Peter is more of an intellectual historian, and Brian tends to work on institutions and structures. So Ed always seems to have these very human stories at-hand to illustrate a point, which Peter picks up and synthesizes in profound and unexpected ways. Imagine a cross between a ballet, a Marx Brothers movie, and a Beastie Boys song, with your favorite professors playing all the main parts. That’s kind of what we’re going for.

The latest episode is American As Pumpkin Pie: A History of Thanksgiving.  Obviously, you are trying to put your own imprint on the great American tradition of Thanksgiving specials.  But what was your goal with this episode?

Our goal, as it always is, was to blow listeners’ minds. Whether or not you buy into the cartoon version of the Thanksgiving myth, I think we all have this idea that the celebration, at least, has its roots in the colonial days. But as it turns out [SPOILER ALERT!] the holiday as we know it is very much a 19th century invention, and has a whole lot more to do with all kinds of political, economic, and social upheavals in the years leading up to the Civil War than with the Pilgrim days. One of the most fascinating revelations for me was that a thanks giving for the Puritans (which happened many, many times throughout the year) would have been much more likely to involve a fast day than a feast day.

Any listener who tunes in to the Thanksgiving episode is going to be armed with the most interesting talking points at the supper table Thursday (or the most annoying smarty-pants). What else are you hoping that people take from the program?

First let me say that the annoying smarty-pants quotient of BackStory is surprisingly low. I wouldn’t mind, frankly, if it were a bit higher. Contrary to the notion that history is all about names and dates… let’s just say you wouldn’t necessarily want our History Guys on your Trivial Pursuits team. But what they can do — and this is I think BackStory’s biggest value — is model a way of thinking about the world, a Historical Method, let’s say, that can be applied to just about anything. It basically boils down to asking where any given thing, or idea, or ritual came from. Thanksgiving is a great candidate for that kind of unpacking, for the reasons I mentioned a moment ago, but really I think the bigger objective here is to remind people that everything has a history, and that things and their meanings are rarely as static or transparent as we think they are.

The program starts out with Roger Staubach (who, as a member of the Dallas Cowboys, never got Thanksgiving off) and ends with Butterball University.  Did you wonder what it would be like if Butterball University had a football team?

I didn’t, but I imagine it would be very slippery.

If the program had 10 more minutes, what would you have included that you had to cut?

There were two things I was sorry to see go. One was a call from a Russian immigrant in Boston, who talked about what it was like to bring her young daughter to Plymouth Plantation the year after they arrived in this country. In the old world she had been a refusnik. In the new world she was hands-down the most enthusiastic fan of Thanksgiving I’ve ever encountered. The melting pot aspect of the holiday really spoke to her. The other thing I would have liked to have included was a short segment on why our classic American food was named after a Middle Eastern country. Maybe we’ll get to that one next year.

I’m sorry you didn’t get to the history of the turducken, myself.

Ben Franklin thought the turkey would have made a much more “respectable” national mascot than the bald eagle. He called it a Bird of Courage. I think if Franklin were around today, he’d agree that the turducken would be even better. So many layers! So much bounty! But not so good on the courage front. It’s spineless…. times three. I’ll ask the History Guys what they know about it and get back to you.

How do you use listeners/readers to drive the topics of future programs?

We invite listeners to post their ideas for future topics, and comment on topics already proposed by others. We’ve gotten some really great ideas for shows this way. Every so often, we’ll create a short list of our favorite topic submissions, and run a web poll that invites people to vote on their favorites. Our final show of 2009 — a show about populism in American history, appropriately enough — is a product of this process. We also have another page where all of the shows currently “in the works” are posted. We ask people to post their questions and stories about those topics, and those comments frequently help shape the structure of those shows. These discussion boards are also one of our primary means of finding callers for each week’s show.

Best Thanksgiving television experience: A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, Macy’s Parade, or John Madden’s Turducken Awards (just wanted to bring up the turducken again)?

I’m going to have to go with Charlie Brown. If only for the groovy soundtrack.