Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities,

the University of Virginia, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur Vining Davis foundations.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory.

Today, we have something a little different on backstory.

One of our own co-hosts, Ed Ayers, is going to tell us about a project that he's been working on for,

well, you better say the number.

Go ahead and say it, Brian.

25 years.

25 years.

We're talking about Ed's two book series on the American Civil War and Reconstruction.

The first volume in the presence of mine enemies came out in 2003, and it won the Bankraft Prize.

It opened with John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry in 1859, and it ended just before the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863.

Ed's just published the second volume in that series, the Thin Light of Freedom, the Civil War and a Man's a Patient in the Heart of America.

He picks up the story in 1863 and continues through 1870 and the 15th Amendment.

Hey, Ed, this feels very weird, but welcome to backstory.

Thanks so much, Brian. I'm glad to be here more ways than one.

Good. Now, I don't have to tell you that the Civil War has been in the news a lot lately, but your scholarship began long before the controversy over Confederate monuments.

What got you interested in the Civil War in the first place?

So I first thought of this project in 1991, and the question was, how could Americans grow to hate each other enough in a few months to kill each other?

You know, frankly, it was partly inspired by the first Iraq war, and we saw how quickly it is that people could learn to hate people they didn't know.

And I was driving through the Shenandoah Valley and one of the most beautiful places in America, and I saw a sign for the Battle of New Market.

And all of a sudden, it occurred to me on this beautiful landscape, there had been a devastating war, and the 23rd Psalm, though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, sprang my mind.

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