Major funding for backstory is provided by the ShiaCon Foundation, 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 with the American History Guys.

I've just received a call from Secretary Clinton.

She congratulated us. It's about us on our victory.

Hi podcast listeners, I'm Brian Ballot, and I'm Ed Ayers.

Ed, this morning we're doing a quick take on putting what is clearly a historical election in historical content.

We're doing so quickly that our stalwart ally Peter O'Nuff, the expert in early American history, is not able to join us this morning.

But we'll see if we can't soldier on and try to find some larger perspective in which to make sense of this election that we all just live through.

You bet we're going to soldier on, Ed.

I know our listeners are wondering what about this campaign and election is truly unprecedented and what about it resonates with the past.

Yeah, I'm going to show you why we have history rather than just polling.

You know that history is marked with these unpredictable sort of ruptures.

And this does feel like a rupture in American history in lots of different ways.

And it feels in some ways as if it's going contrary to all the trend lines that we thought we're moving American history in one direction.

It seems to be moving against diversity. It seems to be moving against a greater presence of women in American life.

And it seems like it feels like we're moving backwards.

Ed, that's such a 20th century view of this.

I actually think it depends on how far back in history you go.

Well, there have been people saying things much like what Donald Trump has said for well over a century.

You know, I think of you talk about the guild of the age being the time that is most like this where you have this great turnout and you have the two parties and everybody identifies either as a democratic republican.

And we remember out of that context, however, came the largest third party revolt in American history before this current moment of rupture, the populist party.

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