In a historic moment, the Democratic Party formally nominated Hillary Clinton for president Tuesday, making her the first female nominee for the nation’s highest office in 240 years.

The vote was merely a formality, despite the noisy protestations of some diehard supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders. Sanders himself made a powerful gesture toward party unity, requesting that Vermont cast its votes last so that he could step to the microphone and deliver Clinton the nomination he had fought so hard to wrest from her. “I move that all votes cast by delegates be reflected in the official record, and I move that Hillary Clinton be selected as the nominee of the Democratic Party for president of the United States,” Sanders said. And that was that: Clinton crashed through at least one of the “highest, hardest” glass ceilings that, as she put it eight years ago, she had only managed to imprint with 18 million cracks.

History was the theme of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and not merely because of the nomination of a woman. The Clinton campaign has an uneasy relationship with history: It has to look back without seeming backward. The former secretary of state wants to tout her long record, and also to remind voters of the happy days in the 1990s when her husband was president, but she is also eager to prove both that she is her own candidate and that she offers something fresh.

Clinton is often said to face the challenge that the entire electorate knows her well, and it has its views pretty well fixed. But much of that relationship begins in 1992, when Bill Clinton vaulted onto the national scene as a presidential candidate. It covers what happened next, both good and bad: the health-care debacle, Whitewater, her famous women’s-rights speech in China, and her time as a senator, presidential candidate, and secretary of state. It does not, however, include her career before 1992, like her advocacy for legal aid, or her work for the Children’s Defense Fund. That meant viewers and conventioneers were treated to stories like Clinton going undercover to reveal segregation academies in Alabama. The message to wavering progressives, especially the younger ones, seemed clear: You might know her as nothing but an insider, Hillary was a rabble-rousing lefty before you were born.

No speech better exemplified the tension than the evening’s crowning remarks from Bill Clinton. The former president’s speech was one of the most anticipated of the convention, for reasons both good and bad. On the one hand, Clinton remains among the most beloved figures in the Democratic Party. Moreover, he is, at his peak, a nearly unparalleled orator. Clinton delivered the most memorable and important speech of the 2012 Democratic convention in Charlotte, making the case for Barack Obama’s reelection in a way that Obama hadn’t managed to do. On the other hand, Clinton is at his peak less and less these days, and has developed a reputation for going off script and embarrassing his wife’s campaign. The Democratic Party is not what it was back when he was president—16 years ago, now!—and his politics are no longer its politics. Many people seemed to be watching Clinton’s speech as much to see if he’d go off the rails as to see what he’d say.

Unlike his 2012 speech, where the Big Dog’s task was to exercise his unusual talent for making wonky policy understandable, his goal in this speech was to humanize Hillary Clinton, and to let some of his natural charisma wear off on a candidate who is happier with briefing books than receiving lines. The ex-president started off a little shaky, and his opening anecdote, of getting to know Hillary Rodham when they were students at Yale Law School, was a bit tone-deaf. (If you have a reputation for womanizing, it’s maybe best to avoid lines like, “This was not just another tap on the shoulder.”) The stories were a bit threadbare from the telling.

But Clinton got warmed up, speaking for 40 minutes, downright concise by his standards. He took on the idea that Hillary Clinton is washed-up with an oblique shot at Sanders’s revolution-boosting followers. It was another way of suggesting that far from a milquetoast moderate, she is in fact a stealth liberal.

“If you believe in making change from the bottom up, if you believe the measure changes are many evils lives are affected, you know it is hard and some people think it is boring,” he said. “Speeches like this are fun. Actually doing the work is hard. So people say, ‘Well, we need to change. She has been around a long time.’ She sure has. And she has sure been worth every single year she has put into making people's lives better.”

Unsurprisingly, he reserved his harshest remarks for Donald Trump and the Republican Party, though he never named the GOP nominee. Clinton developed an extended riff on the idea of the election as a contest between two figures, one “real” and one “fake.”

“If you win elections on the theory the government is always bad and will mess up a two-car parade, a real change-maker represents a real threat, so your only alternative is to create a cartoon. Cartoons are two-dimensional. Easy to absorb. Life in the world is complicated and real change is hard,” he said, adding to huge applause, “Good for you, because earlier today you nominated the real one.”

Not all of Bill Clinton’s claims hold up to scrutiny—ask a Libyan about his claim that “you could drop her in any trouble spot. Pick one. Come back in a month and somehow, some way, she will have made it better”—but the speech served its purpose of reintroducing Hillary Clinton to an electorate that thinks it already knows her.

Overall, Tuesday offered much more comity than the rambunctious first day of the convention. Hardcore Sanders supporters remain implacably opposed to Clinton, and some staged a walkout as she was named the nominee, but their exit probably came as a relief to party leaders and Clinton backers who preferred them gone.

Besides Bill Clinton’s speech, one of the emotional peaks of the night came during an appearance by “the Mothers of the Movement,” a group of mothers of black men and women slain by police and gun violence, including the mothers of Sandra Bland, Jordan Davis, and Eric Garner. The contrast between their impassioned testimony and the refrains of “Blue lives matter” at last week’s Republican National Convention was stark. Madeleine Albright, who served as secretary of state under Bill Clinton, also delivered a scathing attack on Trump’s foreign-policy approach.

“Many have argued that Donald Trump would harm our national security if he were elected president,” Albright said. “The fact is: He has already done damage, just by running for president. He has undermined our fight against ISIS by alienating our Muslim partners. He has weakened our standing in the world by threatening to walk away from our friends and our allies—and by encouraging more countries to get nuclear weapons.”

There were moments of levity. Lena Dunham and America Ferrera, two of the many celebrities to appear, cracked jokes about how no one should listen to TV stars. Howard Dean, the former DNC chair and governor of Vermont, reenacted his famous speech following the 2004 Iowa caucuses—stopping just short of delivering the infamous scream, much to conventioneers’ amusement.

But it was Bill Clinton who owned the night. Remembering his early life with Clinton, after she rejected his suggestion that she run for office, he said, “I really hoped that her choosing me and rejecting my advice to pursue her own career would not be a decision that she'd regret.” That’s a huge, complicated question in any marriage, to say nothing of one as complex and public as theirs. But watching from New York, Hillary Clinton couldn’t have regretted having an advocate like Bill Clinton on the stage in Philadelphia.