The history of a national embarrassment, and why it's not over yet.

President Obama did not end the "birther" movement today. Hours after the president released his long-form birth certificate—years after releasing the short-form one that proved he was a citizen—the issue had already evolved. Republicans who'd been on the hook demanding proof of his citizenship wondered why it took so long. People with too much time on their hands—in other words, the majority of people surfing the Internet for this kind of stuff—were combing the document for proof of forgery.

So Obama did not end birtherism. He did end one era of conspiracy theories about him—the fifth era, by my count. And maybe all he did was make sure the sixth era got started with as loud and embarrassing a bang as possible. If you understand how this started, and who played the biggest roles in elevating it, maybe you can also understand why it's not going to end.

Paleobirtherism: 2003-07

In the beginning, there was no controversy whatsoever about Obama's family ties to Kenya. Reporters mentioned them when he became president of the Harvard Law Review. Book reviewers mentioned them when he released Dreams From My Father in 1996. In late 2003, when Obama jumped into the open race for Illinois' U.S. Senate seat, conspiracy theorists were more focused on his middle and last names than his birthplace. An aide to one Republican candidate launched, then scrapped, a website comparing Obama to Osama Bin Laden. But it wasn't really until Obama's Republican opponent Jack Ryan dropped out of the race and Obama gave the Democrats' 2004 convention keynote that rumors about his past became marketable.

On Aug. 10, 2004, perennial political candidate Andy Martin put out a statement claiming that Obama had lied about aspects of his past. (His convention speech made a lot out of his African heritage, something that reads very differently in 2011.) Martin challenged the idea that Obama's father was a "goat herder," called Obama Sr. a "devoted Muslim," and wrote that Obama's "secret shame at his family history of rape, murder and arson is what actualizes him."

That, for a long time, was the Obama conspiracy theory. The candidate with the Muslim-sounding name and the Muslim father must be a secret Muslim! Chris Hayes traced the rumor's growth over chain emails in 2007, when Obama was struggling against Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. Some of them were based on facts, like a document, turned up in a CNN investigation, from Obama's school in Indonesia. His stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, had registered him as "Barry Soetoro" and listed his religion as Muslim. But none of them were about Obama's citizenship.

Proto-birtherism: April 2008 to June 11, 2008

In March and April 2008, Clinton regained ground and looked to have some chance of beating Obama for the Democratic nomination. This was the time when some Clinton supporters started glomming on to any rumor that looked dangerous. A chain letter from American missionaries in Kenya did the trick: It claimed that Obama's real middle name was "Mohammed."

Politifact quickly debunked the rumor, with one caveat. "We tried to obtain a copy of Obama's birth certificate," the reporters wrote, "but his campaign would not release it and the state of Hawaii does not make such records public."

The first mainstream reporter to pick up on that sentence was National Review's Jim Geraghty. "Obama could debunk some rumors by releasing his birth certificate," he wrote, on June 9, 2008. One of the debunkable rumors was that Obama was born in Kenya—something that would disqualify him for the presidency. "Rather unlikely," wrote Geragthy, "as it would require everyone in his family to lie about this in every interview and discussion with those outside the family since young Obama appeared on the scene."

On June 12, 2008, the Obama campaign released a certificate of live birth on its website, and to select media outlets. Within minutes, it was accessible to anyone who had become curious about the rumors.

Short-form birtherism: June 12, 2008 to March 2009

The release of Obama's COLB did not end birtherism. More accurately, it created it. The one-page document, which had the basics about Obama's birth and the weight of Hawaii's government behind it, inspired a mad rush of would-be forgery analysts and detectives. Two anonymous experts, who used the nom de birthers Techdude and Ron Polarik, published extensive image autopsies that proved, to the gullible, that the Obama campaign was passing on a forgery.