Any recommendations for good history podcasts?
I’m fed up with those two reactionaries on The Rest is History, can’t take Dalrymple flirting with Anand and find that Revolutions bloke completely soporific.
Help!
Slowburn and Fiasco (Fiasco is by the guy who started Slowburn) are good if you’re in interested in recent history. The idea of both is they take something recent enough that you think remember (the Clinton-Lewinski scandal) it and give the bits you’ve forgotten that will make you think about it differently.
Throughline on NPR a is another good one, but again not a traditional history show. Instead it takes relatively current issues and then digs in to the history of the issue to offer an argument for how we got to where we are. For example just recently it did a really good 4 parter on US-Iranian relations because our support for Israel bombing them. This one is pretty liberal so sometimes the episodes can be like “Insulin is expensive because of racism - how the US crushing the slave revolt in Haiti 200 years ago affected insulin prices today”
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@Bekloppt Fiasco is behind a paywall on Luminary, but I just saw the Bengahzi series, which was excellent, is about to run for free on this podcast.
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a bit late but if you find the Revolutions guy soporific give Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History a listen. It’s not for everyone. He picks a subject, and then ‘set’s the scene’ with ~12 hours of background lol. He sometimes has trouble trying to identify where the story he wants to tell starts, so goes way back and tries to fill in a bunch of detail.
His shows are in 4 to 5 hr range, done in 4 or 5 parts, so you need to listen and digest in parts. He’s interested in ‘the extremes of human history’. A lot of his back catalogue is pay to listen, but the more recent ones are free. Look at the subject matter and see if it interests you. I think he’s got one about vikings, one about the eastern theater in WWII, and not sure what else there is. He spends months researching between shows so when he comes out with a new one it’s always a bit of a surprise. I enjoy them but again, probably not for everyone.
I don’t mind that at all. Andrew Hickey goes into minute detail.
My problem with the Revolutions bloke was his delivery. He sounded like he was flatly reading from a script.
Not a recommendation as such as I haven’t listened to it yet, but Gary Lineker’s production firm are starting a “Rest Is Science” podcast.
It has Hannah Fry (who I like a lot) and Michael Stevens (who I am not familiar with - apparently a YouTube presenter.) I’m assuming that this will be a similar format to the other Goalhanger podcasts. Spotify link is here:
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Hannah Fry did Uncharted, which I thought was really good.
I always have reservations about these sorts of science projects due to how far they tend to miss once the topic strays outside of the presenter’s specific academic field, as all science podcasts will ultimately tend to do even with a top scientist (some of the more biology related stuff Ive heard Neil DeGrass Tyson talk about makes me cringe). And she isnt even a scientist but a mathematician by training, but she managed it well in Uncharted. Or at least didnt cover anything that I knew enough about to identify how dodgy the treatment of it was.
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I stumbled upon this one a few weeks ago and listened to a few and thought it was really good for what it is.
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I recently started listening to the audiobook as I’ve really enjoyed reading/ listening to Eric Cline’s books on the events around 1177 BC and ending of the bronze age.
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Yeah it was his Bronze Age episode that led me to it. The next one I did was his 3 hour treatment of the Sumerians, which I found fantastic
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Oohhh, look what I found
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I’ll listen to that, thanks!
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