This is backstory. I'm Brian Ballot. During the American Revolution, the average American

drank a lot of booze ten times more than today. You'd think George Washington would have

worried about rady troops, but no. Washington was incredibly concerned that soldiers were

not getting enough to drink. We're revisiting some of our favorite and some of our most surprising

stories. We'll hear about a 19th century mental illness, drapedomania, that can found

at white Americans in the decades before the Civil War. It was an illness described

and defined as one that causes enslaved persons to run away. We'll look back at Chicago

in the 1960s, in an effort to protest unfair housing policy there. We were able to get

so many people inside the house that when the Sheriff's Guys came, they couldn't get

in to remove the furniture. Today, a look back at some of backstory's greatest hits.

Major funding for backstory is provided by the ShiaCon Foundation, the National Endowment

for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation, and the Arthur

Vining Davis Foundations. From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory

of the American History Guys.

This whole idea, people who were nowhere near each other, doing something at exactly the

same time, that had to be invented. And it was invented in the 1860s.

As they're beginning to finish the Transcontinental Railroad, they're imagining a way of celebrating

it simultaneously, having everybody in the country in order to simultaneously experience

since it unites the east and west. Wouldn't it be great if everybody could know exactly

when it's done?

This is Mike O'Malley. He's an historian at George Mason University, and he says that

in 1869, this idea of a national moment of Simultonati was totally new. The Union Pacific

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