This is backstory. I'm Ed Ayers. Next Friday, President Obama will again tout the nation's declining unemployment rate.

Last month was below 5%. But from listening to some candidates for president, you wouldn't know that those were good numbers.

Don't believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9% and 5% unemployment.

Who in America denies that real unemployment today, including those who have given up looking for work and a work and pot time, is close to 10%.

Don on Trump and Bernie Sanders questioned what we mean by unemployment. But what did it mean to be out of work before the term unemployment even existed?

In the 18th and early 19th centuries, plenty of Americans lost their livelihoods. But that was just a part of life.

They even used different sentence structures than we used today. They will say I went into business and I made a great failure of it.

Today on backstory, a history of unemployment in America.

Major funding for backstory is provided by the Shia Khan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation and the Arthur Vining Davis Foundation.

From the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, this is backstory with the American History Guys.

Welcome to backstory. I'm Ed Ayers, here with Peter Onough.

And Brian Ballot.

Hey Ed, we're going to start the show today in 1878.

That's when the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Massachusetts decided to count something no agency had ever attempted.

The number of unemployed workers in the base state. Now back in the 1870s, the word unemployed had multiple meanings.

It had been used primarily to mean people who did not normally work.

The typical person was a child under the age of 10. Or women over the age of 50.

This is historian Alexander Kessar. We chatted with him about the subject a few years ago.

He says those populations weren't expected to work for a living anyway.

It was clear that the word meant people who were not employed. They did not hold jobs.

Yet headlines across the country talked about a much larger jobless population.

The country was still recovering from the financial panic of 1873.

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