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.

Welcome to backstory.

I'm Nathan Connolly.

I'm Matt Ers.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

And I'm Brian Bauer.

Each week, Brian, Joanne, Ed, and I all historians take a topic from the headlines and try to see

how we got here.

This week, we're tackling three new stories, apologies by famous men, the Alabama Senate

race, and net neutrality.

And we'll wrap up the conversation with a segment we'd like to call footnotes.

That's when one of us shares something from the archives that we absolutely love.

So Joanne, why don't you start us off today?

OK, well, the thing I want to talk about is public apologies, because there have been so many

of them in the news in the last week or two.

And they all have to do in one way or another with the question of sexual harassment or sexual

abuse, and they've been coming from politicians, from Hollywood executives, from celebrities,

from newsmen.

And first of all, the fact that it's happening on mass like this is interesting, but also

...