That’s almost as many judges as the Supreme Court.

Brian Balogh: Earlier this year, all of us BackStory hosts sat down with a long, and I mean long, list that Monica had created for a morning-long judging meeting here in Charlottesville. We were chaired by our executive editor, David Stenhouse, and joined by two special guests who are both fans of BackStory, Chris Jackson, most famous as George Washington in the musical Hamilton, and Margot Lee Shetterly, the author of the best-selling history book, ‘Hidden Figures’. Before we sat down, I grabbed a word with them.

Brian Balogh: I’m delighted to be here with Margot Lee Shetterly and Chris Jackson, who I want to thank for serving on our panel of judges, but I have to ask both of you, why did you do this? Are you crazy?

Margot Lee S.: Well, I was really intrigued by this idea of a prize that is dedicated to public history. So often we think of history, you think of history books, textbooks, classrooms, but public history, history’s something that’s relevant to all of us and it’s part of our daily lives even though we don’t necessarily know how it’s shaping that. I think pulling the curtain back on history and really telling the public this is something you need to know, I think that’s a unique proposition, so I was really excited to participate.

Brian Balogh: Well, we’re certainly glad you did. Hey, Chris, why did you get entangled in this?

Chris Jackson: Everywhere you turn, history’s living and breathing. As we shine a light on the moments that have shaped our times, it empowers us to move through this space and it defines our relationships in a way that creates new history by acknowledging where we’ve been, the hold that it has on us, and how it’s shaped and affected us, and how we can continue to move the conversation forward, further our understanding, and change our today. I think that’s the times that we’re in. Anytime you get to participate in something like this that further spotlights the work that these folks in the world are doing, I think that it makes everything better around us.

Brian Balogh: We asked you to make your way through dozens of entries for this prize, films, museum exhibitions, websites, plays, books. How’d you do it? What was your strategy?

Chris Jackson: I look for the things that I recognized first, that I already-

Brian Balogh: You’re not his fan, Chris.

Chris Jackson: I did. I examined why they affected me the way that they did and then I took every opportunity to look into the things that I didn’t know, much like my experience with BackStory. I’m constantly amazed by the number of things that are illuminated that I thought I knew something about and really didn’t. That’s what the most interesting to me, that’s what I pursue. As I said earlier, this list has given me enough material to last for the next year.

Brian Balogh: Wow. Wow. Well, we’ll check back with you soon.

Chris Jackson: Okay.

Brian Balogh: They’ll be a quiz by the way.

Chris Jackson: Oh, okay.

Brian Balogh: Margot?

Margot Lee S.: My strategy was similar. There were a number of the items on the list that I immediately recognized, but I was really curious about the ones that I didn’t, the ones that I hadn’t heard about that were on a list that for some reason had been selected as important public history. I’m with Chris. I’ve got a Netflix queue and museums to visit from now until 2020 or whatever. That was part of the exciting thing. I think that’s really one of the wonderful things about BackStory and about this award is there’s a sense of discovery.

Brian Balogh: But, it was time for the meeting to begin.

David Stenhouse: I’ll just make some introductory remarks. Thank you so much for setting aside the time to go through this list. This is the first time we’ve done this and I think it’s a great way to mark BackStory’s 10th anniversary. What has BackStory done so well for the last decade is make great history available to a broad audience and what’s the best way to mark that? To reward other people who are doing that same kind of stuff. I hope today we’re going to finish up with an agreed winner who will represent the best aspect of that, so something based on real research, solid history, but also reaches a big audience. Of course, because we are multidisciplinary, it’s going to make chairing this meeting a challenge because we’re looking at how does he compare a podcast to a book.

David Stenhouse: What I propose to do is go around the table and to ask you whether you can let me know, just in headline form and a few introductory remarks, what your top three or four or five would be. The ones you would be happy for us to walk into this room with them having won. Ed, do you want to start with that?

Ed Ayers: I would. The three that I propose are the National Monument to Peace and Justice, Mudbound, and Tower. The rest, they’re all [inaudible 00:20:17] for those three other than intrinsic excellence and civic value, is that they seem to think about form more than some of the others which are relatively straightforward representations.

David Stenhouse: Thank you. Brian.

Brian Balogh: I agree with Peace and Justice and with Mudbound. Simply because I think it would be odd if we didn’t have a podcast in the discussion I have long been a huge fan of the BBC podcast, Witness.

David Stenhouse: Nathan?

Nathan Connolly: One of the things that I brought to the exercise was thinking about what a role for BackStory might be to increase the visibility of a project that might not be widely discussed and talked about. As much as impact and existing impact was part of our assessment, I also was thinking for what kinds of publication work, what would an award from BackStory actually help to elevate its stature, bring it to a wider audience. It was actually on that axis alone that I decided not to support the Equal Justice Initiative Memorial because I know it’s getting a lot of great attention. It’s a brilliant project. It’s a brilliant solution. I’m happy to have much more specific conversations about it.

Nathan Connolly: When I was looking at the Durham website, for instance, the Uneven Ground website, as somebody who has worked on websites and the challenges of conveying important information via the web, I was really impressed at the breadth of the Durham site. Basically, it goes from the indigenous period to North Carolina all the way to the present. I thought it did a really good job as a user-friendly platform in conveying really thorny issues like tenant activism and landlord exploitation.

David Stenhouse: Joanne?

Joanne Freeman: Okay, the few that I picked, I think I was partly picking things that I thought obviously were really history of substance, but also that I felt that they … They certainly grabbed me on an emotional level and in that way, a powerful way that I think gives them a public power as well. That was where the National Memorial of Peace and Justice came from. Nathan, you totally gave me permission to include ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor’, which was actually one of the initial things that I agreed with. Then, I was like, “Can I put Mister Rogers on this?”

Joanne Freeman: The thing about that, I watched that on a plane, one of my recent meanderings. The things that grabbed me about it actually, in addition to the fact that … And, I agree with what Nathan said, that it really shows you the power of public television. It also put Mister Rogers in a very contemporary mode. It brings him up very close to the present in a way that made his project look different and made the present look different in a way that I think good public history does. So, I put that there too and also, as I said, because I was one of, I think, many idiots on an airplane crying at all of the things that that implied.

Joanne Freeman: I have not seen Mudbound the film. I’ve heard much about it.

Chris Jackson: The first one on my list is the Vietnam documentary by Ken Burns. I’m 43 now, so for me, it … I’ve watched it twice. It took me forever to actually get to it. The thing that struck me was, a conflict that spanned so many years, my generation was defined … My parents were living it while they were having my generation. I found that, as a kid growing up in Southern Illinois, we played war every day. I could tell you just about every plane that flew in World War II. We built the models. We played soldier in the back yard. As I was struck by the fact that we were playing those war games as eight, nine, 10-year-olds, it’s at the age of my daughter now, and had no idea that the conflict was so incredibly fresh.

Chris Jackson: I have an uncle who was my mom’s cousin who was a Green Beret. Every year, as my family spoke about how affected he was, I always thought he was the best guy in the world, the most fun.

Margot Lee S.: I have to say, when I first saw the list, the problem that I had was what criteria to use. For example, is it fair to compare a small documentary film to a fictional film, one that’s not actual history but represents history? I think that if we separated it out, it might be easier to apply criteria to each and not have people say, “Well, you have Ken Burns versus the museum versus … How the heck did you guys make that choice?”

Nathan Connolly: I was thinking as we were trying to determine what makes a BackStory award a BackStory award? One of them that we really do mull over as a group around every single show and as we even think about topics are things that are either or sometimes both topical and evergreen, so the thing about the history behind the headlines tagline. Is there something about the Vietnam War that strikes as both as extraordinarily necessary for thinking about Afghanistan and Iraq and that will be evergreen? I guess there’s something about Mudbound that taps into universal evergreen and yet, at the same time, we need to really revisit the interdependency of the black and white experience right now more than ever. I want to know if there’s a way for us to think about the character of the show as a way to get at and sharpen our own criteria.