Three history professors spent a recent Sunday afternoon leaning into microphones in a small studio near the University of Virginia, trying to become radio stars—and attempting to invent a new model of educational programming in the process.
When they don their bulky headphones, they become “the American history guys,” hosts of the monthly public-radio show BackStory. Peter S. Onuf, a UVa history professor known for his work on the American Revolution, gives his perspectives on the 18th century. Edward L. Ayers, president of the University of Richmond and a Civil War historian, is the show’s 19th-century expert. And Brian Balogh, an associate professor of history at UVa, is the 20th-century guy. In each episode the professors interview other historians, playfully one-up each other on historical facts, and take calls from listeners who ask how contemporary life compares with the America of the past.
For more than three years, the professors have logged a few hours each week crafting their radio personae. So far the show airs on only a handful of stations (and online), but its organizers are thinking big, hoping to win national syndication and turn the trio into household names.
First, though, these academics have to learn to be effective broadcasters. And Mr. Balogh, for one, admits that he is not used to communicating to a general audience. “My scholarship in the past has been impenetrable,” he deadpans.
Luckily, the history guys have some help. Three seasoned radio producers sit in the room adjoining theirs, hunched over a mixing board. The producers make sure the sound levels are even and —more important —steer the professors away from academic jargon and too many big words.
“Do we need more of an explanation about Taylorism?” the show’s producer, Tony Field, asks his colleagues after Mr. Ayers casually mentions the term while answering a question from “Bob in St. Louis.” “Yeah, I didn’t get it,” replies Andrew H. Wyndham, executive producer.
“Poor Bob,” jokes Rachel Quimby, associate producer, who notes that the professors have wandered away from the caller’s original question, about changing attitudes toward unemployment. The historians, continuing their erudite banter, can’t hear the producers’ running commentary unless it’s beamed to their headsets. Mr. Field prompts Mr. Ayers to offer a short definition of Taylorism, a labor-productivity theory also known as “scientific management.”
The more digressions the professors make, the more time the producers must spend later editing the material down to an hour of radio that commuters might want to listen to while driving home from work. The show is a full-time job for Mr. Field and Ms. Quimby, whose salaries are paid by grants from sources including UVa, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities here, where the show is recorded. It takes about nine hours of recording for every one-hour show, in addition to countless hours of editing.
“I’m going to make a simple, bold statement and suggest that from our beginnings, it’s been a central tenet of American ideology that aristocrats are bad,” Mr. Onuf says, getting to Bob’s original question. “And the definition of an aristocrat is somebody who doesn’t work or lives off the work of others.” In the production booth, Mr. Field praises the brevity of that comment.
In their first tapings, the history guys drifted into minutiae so often that Ms. Quimby once brought in a buzzer to remind them to define their terms. But the “Quimby button,” as they called it, was quickly retired, after the professors got the hang of their new role.
The tension remains, though, as the show tries to strike a balance between scholarly depth and popular acceptance. “People are used to listening to stories—they’re not used to listening to academic lectures in their car,” says Mr. Field. “How do you make these hosts seem to be talking to listeners as equals when the listeners aren’t their equals on the level of scholarly expertise?”
Comic Beginnings
The inspiration for the show is a decidedly nonscholarly one. Mr. Wyndham’s original pitch was to create a history version of Car Talk, the popular National Public Radio show featuring two auto mechanics cracking jokes while answering listeners’ questions about their cars. Mr. Wyndham had met Mr. Onuf and Mr. Ayers at the Virginia foundation—where both did stints as visiting scholars, and where Mr. Wyndham serves as director of media programs—and thought the two historians had the right mix of humor and enthusiasm.
Mr. Onuf, who describes himself as “a skeptical, ironic fatalist,” was initially dubious: “I said, I think that’s a terrible idea because I don’t think history’s funny. It seemed to me if we had serious discussions, that doesn’t seem on the face of it to be a yuk a minute.”
Mr. Ayers, who is known as the “nice guy” of the show, puts it more diplomatically: “It took a nonscholar to picture that this actually could work.”
The two insisted that they bring in a third host, someone who knew 20th-century history better than they did. They suggested Mr. Balogh, who was game.
So the trio gave it a shot, originally calling the program The History Hotline.
But when they sent their first demo CD to a few NPR stations, a couple of years ago, it wasn’t snapped up, and producers had several criticisms of the format. Mr. Wyndham reluctantly shared a copy of the pilot episode with The Chronicle and, indeed, it was rough. There was no set topic, so the talk jumped from slavery to the role of religion in modern America to the origins of American imperialism. Between calls, the hosts tried gimmicky standing features, including “kidding around with history,” in which they interviewed a grade-school kid about American history, and “gear of yesteryear,” in which Mr. Balogh described some defunct piece of technology.
“We were trying to do everything at the same time, and it was stiff,” says Mr. Onuf, an impression that left other stations skeptical of the basic concept.
In response, Mr. Wyndham called in reinforcements early last year, hiring Mr. Field and Ms. Quimby, who had worked on other popular NPR shows. They changed the history show’s name, jettisoned the corny features, and focused each episode on a timely theme. The Memorial Day show, for instance, explored Americans’ changing attitudes toward death.
It included an interview with Drew Gilpin Faust, president of Harvard University, whose recent book, This Republic of Suffering, looks at how the Civil War influenced those attitudes.
One of the callers described growing up in a retirement home where her parents worked. “I knew early that we leave this world and … there is nothing romantic to it, but there is mystery to it,” she said. Her question for the guys: “How has the replacement of the once-common practice of dying at home with the modern hospital experience affected how we view dying and death?”
Not exactly an amusing subject, but not all of the topics are serious. Mr. Onuf now says he is convinced that a show about history can be both funny and humanizing. Much of the humor comes as the hosts trash-talk one another’s areas of expertise. In the Independence Day episode, Mr. Balogh and Mr. Ayers began by playfully asserting that early American history was too dull to spend a whole hour on. “I really don’t understand how we’re going to spend the whole show talking about the 4th of July. Yawn,” said Mr. Balogh. “Oh, come on, guys,” responded Mr. Onuf, who then threatened to spend the time reading the Declaration of Independence aloud.
Scholarly Backlash?
Do the history guys ever worry that their colleagues will see their joking around on the radio as frivolous, as too dumbed-down to befit serious scholars?
“This fits in my opinion perfectly well with the mission of the university,” said Mr. Balogh. “This is honorable material.”
But in a conversation after last month’s studio session, the professors were hard-pressed to think of any other scholars who had hosted mainstream shows about their disciplines.
“Usually we’re reduced to a series of talking heads. There’s just not a model for this,” said Mr. Ayers, who has been interviewed on plenty of radio and television shows.
Mr. Balogh agreed. “You don’t hear first-rate scholars thinking out loud about their subject matter.”
The closest things the professors could name were blogs, which Mr. Ayers hopes have set the stage for their project by making people more curious about what academics are talking about.
One of the scholars who has appeared as a guest on BackStory, Eric Foner, says he appreciated being interviewed by a fellow historian for once. Mr. Foner, a professor at Columbia University who is well known for his work on the post-Civil War years, frequently appears on talk radio and television. “Often the host is not all that well informed himself, let’s just say,” he says. “This is a higher level than many such shows.”
And at times the three professors’ depth of knowledge lets them do things that traditional broadcasters probably wouldn’t.
In a recent episode, Mr. Ayers interviewed Britton Frank Earnest Sr., a leader of a group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The professor asked him what he says to black Americans when they object to seeing him waving a Confederate flag. “There are misconceptions about it,” said Mr. Earnest. “I say, ‘Read and study and find out the truth.’ Not only did conscripted slaves fight on both sides, but. …"
“No, sir. No, sir. No, sir. This is not true,” broke in Mr. Ayers, firmly but politely. “We won’t argue about this on the air, but we can’t go down this road of all these black people fighting for the Confederacy.”
“So no black people ever fought for the Confederacy?” asked the guest.
“Any number of those are trivial compared to the four million people held in slavery for 200 years and the 180,000 who fought for the Union, OK, so it’s a trivial thing.” said Mr. Ayers. “So I’m just going to ask the question again.”
It’s a moment that Mr. Field is proud of.
“That knowledge base kicks in, and you realize, Oh, this guy is also a historian,” says the producer. “Ed wasn’t doing it to make a good radio moment. He was doing it because he’s a good historian.”
The three professors aren’t told callers’ questions in advance. “It throws us off-balance a little bit,” says Mr. Ayers, “because we don’t have any idea what these calls are going to be. We’re putting ourselves at risk.”
And have they been stumped?
“Oh, yeah,” says Mr. Ayers, with a smile. “Luckily the questions are broad enough usually that we can pretend that we’re answering.”
‘A Mission’
So far only three radio stations, all in Virginia, carry every episode of BackStory, but individual installments have run on 51 stations in 26 states, says Mr. Wyndham. “It is under consideration as a special series by a major public-radio distribution network,” he says, but declines to provide details about the deal while it is still under negotiation about the deal while it is still under negotiation.
The history guys no longer like to compare BackStory to Car Talk; it has evolved into a new kind of program.
Mr. Ayers calls their work “a mission.” He hopes that if the show catches on, it can instill new habits of mind in listeners—and help them think more deeply about the past.
“Americans tend to live in the perpetual present,” he says. “I love the idea of someone driving around in the car and sort of listening to history for 20 minutes.”
Mr. Balogh agrees. “We can’t help but think in historical terms,” he says. “This is our small way of making history a part of everyday life.”
