Political/History podcasts - Recommendations

yeah LL you would not like Carlin

and Tracer OTM, I even played a clip of him for Mr Veg because it was cracking me op the way he would 'perform' the quotes, it is so hilarious and distracting and weird.

I was actually listening to an early Hardcore History podcast a couple of weeks ago (I think it was the bubonic nukes episode) and they did this ridiculous voice of doom vocal effect whenever Dan Carlin quoted anything, which made his quoting 100x worse than usual.

Scare quotes

Mike Duncan of The History Of Rome podcast fame has a new one: Revolutions

Finally! Although I'm starting to feel dubious of the "guy effortlessly summarizes history books he has read" format. He's really good at it, so I'll give it a chance.

hey, beats actually reading history books

i like reading history books. if he weren't so good at keeping himself out of it, i would have bailed on the history of rome almost immediately, but he's really good at that. no filler, no fluff, minimal editorializing. i guess as far as summarizers go, he's at the top of the heap!

otm

I've been liking "The British History Podcast." It's crazy detailed though. He's been going for 4 years, 174 episodes so far, and hasn't even reached 1066 yet. It's very much in the Mike Duncan style.

Just finished the 12 part series on the Charles Manson murders on "You Must Remember This". Very highly recommended. The late 60s in L.A. seems like such a crazy time and place.

Otm. Her "voice work" is super facepalm but I really enjoyed it overall, she researched the hell out of it.

Moshe Kasher's "Hound Tall" is fun, with an expert on a topic paired with some stand-ups

i love carlin - he reminds me a lot of our own michaelangelo matos - but he does this thing i CAN'T STAND --> whenever he quotes someone (which is lot; it's a history podcast) he suddenly adopts this weird stentorian loudspeaker voice, like he's announcing the starting lineup for the new york yankees ABSOLUTELY REGARDLESS of whatever the quoted material is, or what tone it has, or what it's about, or when it was written. it is TERRIBLE. you already are a stickler for saying "quote" and "endquote", dan, so the tone of voice change is TOTALLY UNNECESSARY. GAH

completely OTM, Dan Carlin is unlistenable.

so much shouting

even when he's not shouting, he seems to think everything he says is going to BLOW your GODDAMNED mind.

the explosion sound clip he plays at the end of the shows are funny as hell

some of his theatrics are ridic but I like the show overall..

I'm only about halfway done with it, but the latest hardcore history episode about nuclear war is pretty the scariest thing ever when you keep in mind that Donald Trump is currently the president of the United States.

Oh it's one of those brisk 6 hour long episodes

Yeah, the length of these podcasts is a bit ridiculous, but whatever, I'm never bored when listening to them.

i just listened to my first of his podcasts - the american peril - which was a scant 4 hours long. it was p enjoyable but this is so otm:

whenever he quotes someone (which is lot; it's a history podcast) he suddenly adopts this weird stentorian loudspeaker voice, like he's announcing the starting lineup for the new york yankees ABSOLUTELY REGARDLESS of whatever the quoted material is, or what tone it has, or what it's about, or when it was written. it is TERRIBLE. you already are a stickler for saying "quote" and "endquote", dan, so the tone of voice change is TOTALLY UNNECESSARY. GAH

I learned about Revolutions about a week ago, and jumped in with the French Revolution, since I knew nothing about it and it seemed appropriate for the times. He's fun to listen to! I think I'm learning something.

I had a hard time with the French revolution podcast. Such a complicated story with so many characters that it was hard to keep track of everything. If I had this in book form, it would be the kind of book where I constantly would be flipping back towards previous sections just to remember who this person was or what exactly happened then or whatever, but you can't really do that with audio. Then the next series is about the Haitian revolution which happens concurrently with the French one and what happened in France affects events in Haiti which means I have to go mentally keep track at what point things are in France as things are happening in Haiti (except that there is always a several week lag, since it takes a while for messages/people to travel between France to Haiti). Anyway about 6 or 7 episodes into the Haitian revolution I gave up. I would love to read a good book about this period though.

Killer Mike is going to do a podcast on Reconstruction.

I've tried Dan Carlin so many times and I just can't do it. The bombast and the voice thing is such a turn off compared to History of Rome/Revolutions

xp. the black jacobins is a very good read on the haitian revolution

The History Matters show from the guy who did the Fall of Rome podcast is pretty good so far. It's done by two academic historians who'd normally be talking about this stuff over beers anyway, so they decided to record it.

If you can't use bbc radio iplayer there are lots of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time episodes on youtube. It varies from pretty good to absolutely essential, depending on the quality of guest contributors, which are often very good tbh. JFC would rather drink the lager than listen to Dan Carlin though, he sounds Trump reading history from a junior school book.

"The French Revolution... was yknow.. when warfare got..at least in the minds of Europeans in this era.. y'know ..really serious"

yes, it is rather lunkheaded in many ways. in the american peril episode he posits this duality of the american psyche in which they are on the one hand "almost unrealistically good" - by this he means that the US has an idealized democratic republican self-image - and that this butts heads with their desire to be a great power and engage in imperialistic colonialization. he repeats the words "almost unrealistically good" many times. he also goes for some fairly radical and obtuse historical relativism when he points out that the slaughter of the moros in the philippines and the joy that the american soldiers take in it is more understandable when you remember that the US has just finished slaughtering the indigenous population of america like a decade before and nobody gave a fuck about that either

i should add - despite the fact that many people in america were disgusted by the accounts they heard of the slaughtering of the Moros and thus the fact that it was possible for turn of the 20th century americans not to be total white supremacist maniacs

sidebar - highly recommend Presidents are People Too by former daily show writer/Flophouse co-host Eliot Kalan

serious & delving but short and light in tone
i like it a lot.

new Abe Lincoln ep features Kalan's 2 1/2 yo son reciting (via Dad) the Gettysburg Address
cutest damn thing you'll ever hear

I just stumbled across a Dan Warren apocalyptic cutup of Dan Carlin. Hardcore Prophecy: The Trump of Doom.

Not as good as his Obama cutup for obvious reasons, but perhaps of interest to Hardcore History fans.

Citations Needed is a great show. This ep gets into local TV/news reporting, how that often revolves into police stenography, and how gentrification brings about more cops:

http://citationsneeded.libsyn.com/episode-54-local-crime-reporting-as-police-stenography

Revolutions is rocking my world. Dude is so good at streamlining a huge amount of complicated information and communicating it both clearly and with an overarching clarity of intent. Very rare and underrated skill ime.

yeah, there are quite a very very good history podcasts these days, but they almost all follow the model Mike Duncan set down

quite a few

oh i love Revolutions

when I needed to nerd out on the French Rev it was a godsend

Only the dude from History of Rome does it better imo. But coming close is an achievement!!

same dude, right?

Eastern Border is a good show about Soviet History from the perspective of the common folk, if you can get over the host's Latvian accent and occasional bizarro opinions about US politics.

Yeah, I'm neck-deep in three different books about the French Revolution rn, and Duncan has pretty effortlessly cleared up basically any confusion or lingering questions that my reading material had failed to resolve. All while I'm working and only half paying attention.

My only complaint as I head into the homestretch is that he seems (understandably, as his wife was about to have a baby) to be rushing through a lot in order to wrap things up.

omg lol i didnt know it was the same guy

well that explains EVERYTHING

seconding kingfish re: citations needed, it’s fkn great

I've been liking "The British History Podcast." It's crazy detailed though. He's been going for 4 years, 174 episodes so far, and hasn't even reached 1066 yet. It's very much in the Mike Duncan style.

― Why because she True and Interesting (President Keyes), Wednesday, September 2, 2015 9:35 PM (three years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

He's got to episode 295 now, and the year 945, so still over a hundred years away from 1066, it really is a life's work. I came on board about five years back, blitzed the first hundred or so episodes while stuck in a hotel in Guangzhou, and have been listening since. His presenting style is really not to my taste, this almost put me off at times, but luckily I was too far invested by that point to quit. It's odd as I do still find so many of his quirks vaguely annoying, but it's like listening to a friend, I've just got used to them. And have to respect the ridiculous amount of work he puts into the show, little things like pronouncing obscure place names and words like 'borough' in the "correct" way, can't help but respect this.

Cold War Conversations - Cold War history, but on the street level. Fave episodes include a great interview with someone who put on underground punk gigs in East Germany, another who was a teenager during the Prague Spring, the son of famed U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, and even a member of the Trabant Owners Club
https://coldwarconversations.wordpress.com

wow that sounds dope

just listening to The Korean War in Britain, it's good stuff.

I skipped that one + went to the SR71 ep, better!

The History of the World podcast is about as unpretentious as its stated aim is grandiose. I know next-to-nothing about the creator but he's very good at synthesizing a lot of information and making it both palatable and conversational. And he really is trying to tackle all of human history and pre-history (it takes him two dozen episodes to start making his way out of the Neolithic).

(I'm sampling other ancient history podcasts atm and haven't been bowled over otherwise. The History of Ancient Greece seems all right but the dude's voice/accent/inflection/whatever is a seeeeeeeerious hurdle and I don't know how much longer I can keep jumping.)

sounds great tbh, thks

I thought Blowback was great. The episodes on the missile crisis were riveting.

Looking for politics more than history (although I welcome recommendations for both). I love Know Your Enemy and am almost all caught up on it, what else should I listen to for thoughtful/well-read lefty political takes? Can be historical, for that matter, but especially interested in people doing good things in talking about contemporary Western politics. Not opposed to current events type shows, but something more substantive than drive-by punditry.

“Will Be Wild” about the Jan 6th insurrection was really good?

OK! My first reaction is "do I need to hear more about Jan. 6," but then I just finished listening to two hours on Whittaker Chambers so I shouldn't rule anything out.

i had zero interest going in before it was recommended to me & was impressed by how engaging it was