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

for the Humanities, the Joseph and Ruppert 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 Joanne Freeman.

I'm Brian Vello, and I'm Ed Ayers.

Brian, Ed, Nathan Connelly, and I are all historians.

Each week, we explore the history of a story or topic in the news.

This week, Joanne, Ed, and I are going to start off with a phrase that politicians love

to use.

American exceptionalism.

This self-congratulatory refrain has a pretty surprising origin.

Well, Brian, it's a 19th century visitor to the United States who's most often credited

with creating that language.

That would be Alexis de Tocqueville, who reported back to his fellow Frenchman in 1840 that

Americans' democratic politics made their country unique.

But even though Tocqueville did use the word exceptional, he didn't actually use the word

exceptionalism, and we want to get things right here on backstory.

So we need to jump forward to the 20th century, specifically to a political organizer who's

jotting down some notes on the state of the American economy in 1927.

It is a basic fact that American capitalism is still on the upward trend, still in the

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