Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines. I'm Nathan Connolly.

If you're new to the podcast each week, along with my colleagues, Joanne Freeman, Ed Ayers, and Brian Ballot, we explore a different aspect of American history.

Since backstory started 12 years ago, there have been many incredible podcasts that have come out, centered around history.

Now as you probably know, back stories last episode will be published in early July. And so throughout the year, we wanted to introduce you to some of the great work others are doing in history podcasting.

So we've been featuring a range of podcasts in recent episodes. You might have heard previews of, scene on radio, or what's Ray saying.

If you missed them, the first time, you can go back in our archives and check them out. Today we're excited to showcase an episode from the brand new podcast, The Last Archive.

The show is hosted by Jill Lapor, a professor of American history at Harvard University.

Professor Lapor is also a staff writer at the New Yorker and the author of many books, including These Truths, a history of the United States.

I'm pleased to have Jill here with me to help set up this episode. Jill, welcome to backstory.

Hey, thanks so much for having me.

So The Last Archive is about the history of evidence, proof, and knowledge. And it asks why it seems like there's less that we can know for sure.

Now, I love the topic, but I'm very curious as to how you arrived at it as a topic for a show.

I teach a course on this. I teach a course called The History of Evidence,

as for law school students and for undergraduates. And it's a super fun class to teach because people have a lot of curiosity about the history of the fact and where do clues come from?

And why do we accept some things as evidence in one realm, you know, sort of a journalist might accept an anonymous source and use that, whereas a historian wouldn't take the equivalent source as a useful or a defensive old piece of evidence or just a kind of comparing things across realms of knowledge is always really fun.

And thinking about it historically, something that pretty much everybody in the class has never done before.

Yeah, our rules of evidence, we all kind of carry them around like I believe what my brother says because he never lies to me, but my cousin, Jill, he's always telling me crap.

You know what I mean? Like, that's a rule of evidence and I have that and that's, you know, it's empirically demonstrated to me.

But what are they in what you do?

The class is such a blast and also so open-ended and we never really get to the bottom of anything that I thought it would be fun.

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