Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, 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.

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

I'm Brian Ballow.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

And I'm Ed Ayers.

If you're new to the podcast, Ed, Brian, Nathan Connelly and I are historians.

Each week, we take a topic in the news and explore that theme across American history.

This week, Ed, Joanne and I are going to focus in on a specific event.

Our story begins on April 2nd, 1917, and around 830 in the evening.

President Woodrow Wilson was about to address a joint session of Congress.

Now Wilson was a powerful speaker.

But this speech would be one of the biggest challenges of his presidency.

Wilson had stayed up pretty much all night the night before he has to go to Congress to make this momentous speech.

This is historian Will Hitchcock.

And he's been agonizing about this decision.

Congress is packed.

They're in the House of Representatives.

It's absolutely jammed.

The Senate is convened with them and they know what's coming.

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