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 Joanne Freeman.

I'm Nathan Connolly.

And I'm Ed Ayers.

Each week, Nathan, Ed, our colleague, Brian Ballow and I, all historians, take a topic

from the headlines and try to see how we got here.

And I'll note that Brian couldn't be here this week, but he will be back soon.

Every few weeks, we're mixing it up with what we call the first draft of history.

This is a more free wheeling conversation where we're each bringing in a story or a topic

in the news that caught our eye.

So today on the podcast, we're going to talk about body politics or the art of the presidential

handshake, and I suppose the presidential show.

John F. Kennedy at 100, an African-American landmarks, and then we're going to wrap up our

conversation with a segment that we call footnotes.

And that's basically when one of us shares a quirky or amusing item from the archives

that we absolutely love.

Okay.

So let's dive into our first story and I'm going to start things off with what I'm calling

...