BackStory

BackStory first started posting on Tumblr in March of 2012. The idea was to share segments from the podcast, post about the things that couldn’t fit into the show and continue the conversation about all things American history.

Through the years, we’ve had some hits and some misses, but we’ve always had some great followers. And while we’re moving on, we hope you will come along with us and keep the conversation going on our other platforms. Get posts from BackStory’s blog and photo stories from BackStory on Exposure. You can follow BackStory on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter and hear from us weekly by signing up for our newsletter. Finally, there’s always the reason why you came here in the first place – the podcast. If you don’t subscribe, now’s a good time.

Whatever you do, don’t be a stranger.

[Photo from the Library of Congress]

The 2016 presidential campaign and election of Donald Trump highlighted the plight of poor, white Americans. Trump’s campaign focused on this “forgotten” group, which, he argued, had been left behind by the rest of America. We thought this dovetailed nicely with our latest show, The Melting Pot: Americans & Assimilation, as a reminder that assimilation is a struggle along socio-economic levels, as well as ethnic and national lines.

Nancy Isenberg is the T. Harry Williams Professor of History at Louisiana State University. Her recent best seller, “White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America,” exploded in popularity as many Americans sought to understand Trump’s poor, white voter base. In her book, Isenberg confronts the question of assimilation in American culture, and how, in addition to immigrants and racial minorities, poor whites also struggled in their search for an American cultural identity.

Isenberg writes of this search during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s:

“No matter whether it is cast as urban or rural, religious or secular, Anglo- or other hyphenate, the search for national belonging is never new. Despite the nasty cultural memory jarred loose by the retrogressive message in Deliverance (and especially the horrific rape of Ned Beatty’s character), the backcountry of America never completely lost its regenerative associations. Appalachia remained in the minds of many a lost island containing a purer breed of Anglo-Saxon. Here, in this imaginary country of the past, is where the best of Jefferson’s yeoman ‘roots’ could be traced. Most of all, there was a raw masculinity to be found in the hills. A larger trend was turning America into a more ethnically conscious nation, one in which ethnicity substituted for class. The hereditary model had not been completely abandoned; instead, it was reconfigured to focus on transmitted cultural values over inbred traits.

An inherent paradox added to the confusion over the nature of cultural identity. Modern Americans’ largely blind pursuit of the authentic, stable self was taking place in a country where roots could be, and often were, discarded. In the American model, assimilation preceded social mobility, which required either adoption of a new identity or assumption of a class disguise in order to insert oneself into the desired category of middle class. Yet by the late 1960s the middle class had become the most inauthentic of places: the suburbs provided indelible images of foil-covered TV dinners, banal Babbittry, and bad sitcoms. People took part in staid dinner parties, evocatively portrayed in The Graduate, where the talk was of a career-making investment in plastics-and what better stood for inauthenticity than unnatural products invented by chemists? There was a growing awareness that middle-class comfort was an illusion. Two sociologists ironically concluded that the few authentic identities still claimable in 1970 existed in the isolated pockets of the rural poor: Appalachian hillbillies in Tennessee, marginal dirt farmers in the upper Midwest, and ‘swamp Yankees’ in New England” (p. 270-71).

In other words, many Americans outside the upper-middle class had to assimilate before they could realize the American Dream of class mobility. Do you agree with Isenberg? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below, and then head over to check out our new show on assimilation in America.

On our last show, The Melting Pot: Americans & Assimilation, our hosts discussed how various groups have assimilated into American society.

Thousands of American students recently started their first fall term at college. Colleges today represent a place where many young Americans will find an entrance into broader society. More immediately, though, every freshman is worried about how they will find their niche on campus. For many, their dorm will facilitate their assimilation into student life. Here they will form their first friendships, some of which will last for life.

However, not all dorms will continue to provide this opportunity. This summer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology decided to close its dorm at 70 Amherst Street - also known as “Senior House.”

This dorm was - there’s no other way to put it - weird. One of MIT’s oldest residential spaces, it became known as a center of campus counterculture beginning in the 1960s. As a recent article in WIRED noted, “Some did drugs and dropped out. Some did drugs and graduated. Others were proudly ‘straight edge,’ eschewing drugs and regarding their bodies and minds as pristine temples. Many went on to create startups, join huge tech firms, and change the technological world as we know it.” Senior House was also noted for its annual Steer Roast, a weekend of debauchery during which students roast an entire steer (see the video above). Alumni often return to town for the festivities.

By reputation, Senior House was a place where students who felt like they didn’t fit in with the rest of the student body could find a home. Many students told WIRED that Senior House “was the first place they’d ever not felt judged.” But school administrators decided to close the dorm, citing concerns over high incidences of drug use. This decision raised important questions over the extent to which school administrators could target and regulate their students, particularly those who refused to assimilate into the larger student body and campus culture.

Here at UVA, I have many friends who live in Brown College, our Senior House equivalent, during their undergraduate years. Talking to them, I heard familiar stories: that living in a space with others who felt excluded from mainstream student life created a sense of trust, respect, and love. For my friends, living in a “weird” dorm was an integral part of their university experience.

Did you live in Senior House, or another “weird” dorm? What are your thoughts on the state of campus counterculture? Let us know your thoughts, and then head over to listen to our show on assimilation.

“Scout’s honor” - What Does Honor Mean to Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts?

This year, thousands of young, American Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts pledged “on their honor” to respect their country, help others, and uphold scout law. But what does this concept of honor mean to them? To find out, we asked several scouts to describe the meaning of honor, as part of our new episode, “Death Before Dishonor: Shame and Reputation in American History.” I talked to BackStory producer Ramona Martinez about her experience talking to the scouts.

According to Ramona, pledging to act with honor is essential to both scouts’ values, but defining exactly what honor means proved tricky. As one Boy Scout explained, “I have a definition but I can’t put it into words.” Many scouts had trouble defining honor without using the words “honor” or “honorable,” saying they knew it was important to “honor” others, but had difficulty explaining further.

Some offered examples by pointing to parents who served in the military or agreeing not to share a friend’s secret. Others repeated elements of the scout pledges, such as promising to be kind, courteous, or respectful. Several kids thought of honor as a possession - something that could be “passed on” from one person to another. To us, it appeared as though many scouts had an innate understanding of what it means to be “honorable,” but struggled to find the right words to describe it.

Fortunately, the scouts recognized that although it’s difficult to be “honorable,” it was beneficial to society. Many of them mentioned words like “respect,” “trust,” or “reputation” in their answers, which is one of the many ways dictionaries define it. One older Boy Scout declared that honor “means standing by what you believe, and not backing away when you face adversity.”  Another stated that “anyone can be honorable or honor someone,” and mentioned that it was tied to the idea of helping anyone who needs it. And one Girl Scout summed up her views by noting that, if people act honorably, they will inspire others to do the same.

Take a listen to some of the audio from Ramona’s interviews and tell us in the comments what honor means to you.

This fall, we are revamping our Tumblr to bring our listeners a behind-the-scenes look at the production of our shows. We’ll take a more in-depth look at current episodes, and highlight fun facts or interesting stories that didn’t quite make the final cut. Our first piece will take a deeper look at what honor means to Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, as part of our new episode “Death Before Dishonor: Shame and Reputation in American History.”

On that note, I’d like to draw back the curtain and introduce myself. My name is Aran Teeling, I recently joined BackStory as a research assistant and I’ll be managing content for our Tumblr page. I am currently a master’s candidate at the University of Virginia, where I also majored in history as an undergraduate. In my free time I enjoy soccer and running, and my current favorite history book is “No Higher Law: American Foreign Policy and the Western Hemisphere since 1776” by Brian Loveman. I’m looking forward to bringing you a closer look at the amazing work that goes on behind every show.

Thanks again,

This week we’re talking protests in America! From the Black Panthers protesting  for their second amendment rights to the Confederate women’s bread riots.