Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National

Dowment 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 the headlines.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

I'm Ed Ayers.

And I'm Nathan Connolly.

Each week, Joanne, Ed, our colleague, Brian Ballow and I, all historians take

one topic and explore it through three centuries of American history.

And today we're looking at the history of privacy in the United States.

And Ed, Nathan, we're going to start things off with a somewhat odd political

controversy.

Unlike many dust-ups involving politicians, this one wasn't about bribery or

money laundering or an extra marital affair.

Instead, it had to do with something that elected officials are supposed to do.

Vote.

Are there been a number of media reports, as you both know, on voting and

who voted for which president and what year it happened to be in?

This is audio from a 2014 Senate debate in Kentucky.

The incumbent Republican Senator Mitch McConnell sat across from his

Democratic challenger, Alison Lundergen Grime.

...