VFH Radio’s ‘BackStory’ wins national acclaim

The Federation of State Humanities Councils has presented “BackStory with the American History Guys” with one of its Helen and Martin Schwartz Prizes, given annually to the nation’s three best humanities projects.

Produced by VFH Radio at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities since June, “BackStory” is a public radio program that brings historical perspective to contemporary events.

Each week, U.S. historians Peter Onuf, Brian Balogh and Ed Ayers host the hour-long topical program and are joined on-air by fellow historians, people in the news and callers.

Ayers is president of the University of Richmond and former dean of UVa’s College of Arts & Sciences. He is a scholar of 19th-century U.S. history; Onuf is UVa’s Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor of History and an expert on the federal period. He is spending the 2008-09 academic year as Harmsworth Professor at The Queen’s College, Oxford University; and Balogh is a UVa associate professor of history who studies the 20th century experience in America.