Political/History podcasts - Recommendations

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

Yeah, I've subscribed as well.

sounds cool. I've checked some shows with a similar idea but they usually start with Sumeria

So what’s the hivemind take in Dan Carlin? I started his WWI series today and I really enjoyed it and found several points illuminating, but I’ve also always been a terrible student of history who finds even a lot of layperson works too dry, so maybe I’m just falling for the wow effects of appealing narratives that aren’t totally accurate.

I've never read anyone take him down as bad history but I hate his performance style so much I've never made it through an episode myself.

The criticism I've heard of Dan Carlin is that he represents old-school great man theory history, not sure how fair this is, but he's certainly a big fan of Churchill.

it is like listening to a dumb as fuck WWF commentator was my impression. Although since then a friend of mine from a public school background and much better educated than me said it is good stuff! I'm not convinced tbh.

i actually like the bombast, the "NPR" podcast style just drives me up a wall

haven't heard one of his podcasts in ages, but the stuff i was listening to was pretty decent history-wise. i don't entirely trust him politically, but for "history as disaster porn" (which tends to be the approach he takes) it's good!

There are four basic male voices I hear on US podcasts

* Old-timey transatlantic accent radio host voice
* Bombastic hype man voice
* Stand up comic chillin' with his bros voice
* An imitation of Ira Glass

TBH I find all of these weird and grating to different degrees, only the third one seems at all natural, but it has a very high correlation with pricks with nothing interesting to say. Ultimately the last one is the mark of a decent-ish show.

Yeah I was into the style even though I guffawed at a couple of the most OTT moments. I basically need someone shouting in my face like a carnival barker to not drift off while learning history, it's a sad truth about myself I've come to accept.

I've been trying to do the History of Rome podcast too -- the content is digestible enough but the sound quality and vocals on the early eps are just painfully bad and it makes it especially hard to listen in the car, where I do most of my podcast listening.

It can be a gateway. I got interested in Roman history after his Death of the Republic series. He’s pretty aware that his mode of history is out of style academically.

The guy who does the Martyrmade podcast seems like a right wing creep on Twitter, but his series of the founding of Israel and Jonestown are pretty great

Haven't gotten around to History of Rome yet but his later Revolutions podcast is great and suggests he's since ironed out whatever earlier kinks he'd experienced.

The first 50 episodes of HoR are kinda rough

It sounds like a guy muttering voice memos into his iPhone in a bathroom

British History Podcast guy went back and re-recorded his first 50 or so out of sheer embarrassment. I re-did my first one because I found some new recordings, not doing any others barring some amazing discoveries, not sure what I make is even a podcast as most people understand it anyway.

Revolutions is finally at the Russian Revolution. They are at episode 23, and introduced Lenin last episode. It's kinda hilarious.

The criticism I've heard of Dan Carlin is that he represents old-school great man theory history, not sure how fair this is, but he's certainly a big fan of Churchill.

― mfktz (Camaraderie at Arms Length), Tuesday, November 26, 2019 9:24 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

First 1/3 of the first part of the WWI ep was certainly not very materialist in its analysis, although I wouldn't exactly say it was "great man theory" either -- if anything he seems enamored with the idea of random chance setting massive forces in motion (which, tbf, is kind of a standard way to read the start of WWI).

Yeah, I didn't find it to be true on the whole, that's the one I've listened to as well, but would like the judgement of an actual historian

im not a historian but my undergrad degree was in history and dan carlin isn't really intellectually rigorous enough for me

i also just don't like his voice

his padded out jibber jabbering is that lacking in content you could literally listen to half an hour without actually learning anything on a subject.