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 Brian Ballot.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

And I'm Ed Ayers.

Each week, Nathan Connelly, Joanne, Ed and I, all historians take a topic from the headlines and try to understand how we got here.

Today on the podcast, we'll discuss how presidents present themselves to the public and the use of slogans and activism.

We'll wrap up the conversation with a segment we call footnotes.

This is when one of us shares something from the historical archives that caught our eye.

Hey Ed, why don't you start us off?

Well, I'm happy to, Brian.

In the news this week, we've read a lot about President Trump and his tweets.

And we started having kind of a meta conversations about that, not just about the substance of the tweet,

but whether tweeting is a good idea or not is that a master strategy to control American public opinion,

or is it just an impulse that the president can't control?

And they got me thinking, well, how have US presidents before Twitter them and before Donald Trump presented themselves to the public?

And a large part of their job, it seems to me, is to create a persona that provides a unifying story for that moment, American history.

And I thought, if I just knew some historians who could cover the span of American history, I'm not able to find out the answer.

Well, at least I have Joanne who's going to help me understand the early stuff because certainly your guys had to invent that.

And it seems to me they spent quite a bit of time and energy thinking about what sort of persona they wanted to project.

Well, exactly. And invent is the right word because the Republic was created in a world of monarchies and everybody knew what a king was,

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