How we drew up the longlist

Brian Balogh: I’m here with our executive editor, David Stenhouse, and our researcher, Monica Blair, and it’s a rare opportunity to dig into really the behind the scenes, the backstory of BackStory. David, I’ll start with you. We managed to survive for almost 10 years without a BackStory Prize, why a BackStory Prize in the first place?

David Stenhouse: Well, I joined the show this year, in BackStory’s 10th year, which is a big achievement for a show to start off as a Public Radio show, to make that successful transition to a podcast. One of the things I did was I sat down with my colleagues and the producers to say, “How do we mark this? What do we do?” We had a lot of conversations about the best way to mark 10 years. What we concluded after that meeting was, “Well, what does BackStory do well?” I think what BackStory does is great history and we communicate that with a big audience.

Monica Blair: Yes.

David Stenhouse: Then, the idea came, why don’t we set up a prize to recognize the people who are doing the same kind of great work that we try to do?

Monica Blair: Yes.

David Stenhouse: Who are doing great researcher, new, groundbreaking discoveries, and are helping focus that to a wide audience outside the academy, so drawing on the strength of the academy but communicating to a wider [inaudible 00:11:17]. It was a short little jump to come up with the idea that we should create the BackStory Prize to mark great public history that reaches a wide audience.

Brian Balogh: How’d you narrow it down?

David Stenhouse: Well, I think that was the challenge. Monica does wonderful research for us in the show week by week, so it was a task that I passed on to her and said, “I would really like you to come up with a long list.” You came up with a great long list, 100, I think on that one.

Monica Blair: Yeah, just over 100 entries.

Brian Balogh: He’s looking at you, Monica.

Monica Blair: I’m Monica. I’m the researcher here at BackStory and what I do is a lot of the research before the shows come out. I write long 10-page preps about the directions that history is moving on a particular subject. This is really a new kind of prep for me in that I wasn’t just thinking about the history of a particular subject, but I was thinking about the history of public history. How do we put history out into the world? How do we make it seen and known? Certainly, I think BackStory itself is an effort at this to try and move what we learn and know outside of the classroom into people’s cars and houses and gyms as you workout and listen.

Brian Balogh: Wherever they’re trapped.

Monica Blair: Yeah, wherever they’re trapped and looking for something else to listen to.

Monica Blair: What I really did for this is I started thinking about what is public history? What kind of forms can it take? Certainly, podcasts we’re on my list, but I also thought about movies, museums exhibits, plays, all sorts of different kinds of ways of reaching the public in ways that are really engaging and novel. Once I had a broad list of categories, I started really digging into things that have been produced in the last year in that particular mode.

Monica Blair: For instance, with museum exhibits, I started out thinking about some big names, the Smithsonian exhibits, museums in California, and Chicago, and big cities. Then, I also tried to capture some of the smaller, more grass-roots work as well. Some of these exhibits get a lot of press, so they get reviewed in academic journals of public history or they get reviewed in the New York Times or the Washington Post, but some of these smaller exhibits don’t necessarily get that kind of press. I think that both levels do really important work on the ground and in the world at large for enhancing our understanding of history and of our world today.

Brian Balogh: Monica, you got a close look at roughly 100 projects. Give us a sense of the range and which ones really stood out to you.

Monica Blair: Well, the range was quite large and so with films, you have things like Mudbound, for a podcast you have Nicki Hemmer’s A12, which spoke to me on a really personal level being from Charlottesville and UVA. In terms of exhibits, of course, we highlighted big national projects, but I also really loved a project by the students at the University of Missouri Kansas. They had a public history class that made a project on the making of LGBTQ history in Kansas City. I thought this was a wonderful example of the way that students themselves can also be producers of really great public history.

Brian Balogh: I agree with that. They sure pulled off a professional product.

Monica Blair: They really did and they had a traveling exhibit and a great website that you can check out yourself.