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, the show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Nathan Connolly.

This week and next, the backstory team is off.

Yay, summer.

So we're going to do something a little different.

We're going to play pieces from other podcasts that have featured great historical stories.

We'll hear from the podcast Curious City, produced out of Chicago's WBEZ,

and Tripod, a podcast produced by New Orleans Public Radio Station, WNO.

We'll also dig up a story from the backstory archives.

This week's topic is local history, but the stories we've collected explore themes

that resonate far beyond a given city's limits.

At the same time, they illuminate some of the history that makes each of these places unique.

We'll start in Chicago.

WBEZ's Curious City is an initiative that investigates questions from listeners

about all aspects of life in the windy city.

This particular story, zeros in on one aspect that makes Chicago such a distinctive place.

It's strong sense of neighborhood identity.

A listener who hadn't grown up in the city wanted to know where the story she'd heard of a so-called Nazi neighborhood, true?

...