History Podcasts: Essential To Survival of the Human Species

Thank you savvy Economist writer(s) for explaining the appeal of these shows. Here’s what you left out.

History podcasts recently made the big-time news.¹The fact that “recently” means “well over a year ago” to me does not bode well for my ability to write timely blog posts. I’m working on my whole podcast and blog project at a snail’s pace. And that’s not even referring to how slowly snails move, but to how slowly snails write. After all, a snail’s brain is just a couple of ganglia surrounding its eating tube, so their ability to blog rapidly is seriously limited unless they’re using ChatGPT. The Economist of London called us out and that article lays out three reasons why folks love us:

1. People over thirty have realized that they didn’t pick up enough good history in school. They’re now rediscovering the joys of history later in life.
2. Fans of history podcasts build smart, friendly networks full of smart, friendly people who feel part of something bigger than their individual, smart, friendly selves.
3. Good history podcasters tell great stories. Because they’re historical, those stories have long shelf lives.

Agreed on all three points, friendly Economizers. But those reasons are just the beginning. In the improv spirit of yes-and: Yes, that wacky gang from everyone’s favorite magazine-that-calls-itself-a-newspaper are entirely correct. And it should have gone further.

Let’s be boring and start with point #1. I’ve been teaching history full-time since Olden Times, way back when the Foo Fighters had only been fighting foo for some nine years.²That’s 2003 if you’re not a Dave Grohl fan or don’t feel like looking it up on Wikipedia.Reflecting back over my career, I can confirm the point about the thirty-year-olds. Although many, many “traditional-age” college students who’ve only lived for some 1.8 to 2.1 decades do truly love history, sometimes young people’s passion for exploring their species’ past takes a few more years to marinate. Part of the issue is simply one of life experience. When you’re a teen or even in your early twenties,³Why do we have a noun for people in their teen years but not for people in their twenties? Should we try coining the word twent? Discuss. it’s hard to have enough time-perspective to really understand why you need more time-perspective.

Another problem is that some STEM enthusiasts have sent the wrong message to the public.⁴Definitely not all, and hopefully not most of them. I’ve met many, many extraordinary STEM advocates and practitioners who are supportive of the humanities. They’re as terrified about the implications of deemphasizing history as the most hardcore history cheerleaders out there. Don’t get me wrong; I freaking love science and other STEM fields. But there are some administrators who have imagined STEM education as a zero-sum game, downplaying the importance of the humanities and aesthetic arts in order to allocate more attention and resources toward their more trendy subjects. In the worst-case, most short-sighted scenarios, these essential humanities programs get cut altogether.

Yet even when more enlightened educators realize the objectively true fact that history and STEM fields are complementary, some still inadvertently send the wrong message. There are many prospective students and parents who decide that required history classes feel like distractions. As a consequence, budgets get slashed, faculty get laid off, and entire departments get thwungged off campuses by some giant metaphorical STEM catapult experiment.⁵It’s worth adding here that good catapult experiments require a very strong grasp of history. Smart engineers don’t just invent catapults from scratch; they study existing catapults, take inspiration from centuries of historical designs, reflect on what’s effective and what isn’t and why, and only then do they make them more efficient. Again: complementary fields.

Despite the history major’s continuing tailspin, pretty much everyone understands that history matters. When I ask my students, their parents, or the vast majority of educators why we need history, they generally get it. The short list: If we don’t understand the past, we don’t learn from our mistakes; we’re easy prey for demagogues who tell us about how things have always been without any way to verify their often bogus claims; we’re out of touch with the folks who made us who we are; we fail to appreciate the sacrifices of those who came before us; we don’t actually know who we are because cannot understand ourselves in temporal context. I’ve got a few others, but you get the gist: People do realize that history needs to be taken seriously.

Economist contention #2 is that understanding history together helps build strong communities of listeners. Yes. And that capacity for community-building goes much deeper than most other kinds of shared experiences—like, say, joining in a pickup game of SPUD, or watching a chili-pepper eating contest where obviously self-loathing people eat Carolina reaper chili peppers until they weep and vomit like sick little babies. Collective connections forged through history are more profound than those activities.

In fact, history itself is one of the most profound ways to build communities and even nations. Acknowledging ways that your ancestors shared experiences with your neighbor’s forebears helps transforms groups of individuals into unified peoples. Closely related are other unifying cultural features: Having a common language, calendar of celebrations, rites of passage, dress, music, and so forth. It’s similar to when everyone on your block agrees that the colors and patterns in your cloth rectangles are preferable to those in the cloth rectangles of other folks who live elsewhere. All of those symbols and things have origins in the past, which is why understanding their history is so important. In short, thinking historically builds community more powerfully than virtually any other ways of thinking.

Which brings us to claim #3—that good history is about good stories told by good storytellers. Yes—and not just any old stories, but true old stories. I confess I am a massive fan of the improv comedy podcast Hello from the Magic Tavern—a more traditional example of employing the yes-and approach. That show is one of the silliest pieces of audio entertainment ever forged by human beings.⁶Or by shapeshifting badgers and/or by wizards summoned into existence by a conspiracy of birds who willed that a champion wouldst materialize into being out of the miasma of space-time. It’s chock-full-o-nutty stories that are, in my own nutty opinion, pretty great. But not only are their stories untrue, they’re extremely, ridiculously, deliberately untrue. And although fiction and nonfiction both enrich our lives in profound ways, there are many good reasons to house them on different shelves—more reasons than I can get into in a short paragraph that ends with this word.

To make things more complicated, some of the best history contains some storytelling elements. History is an evidence-based discipline, but historical evidence is by its nature incomplete. That means the historian’s job is to fill in the gaps, which requires some subjective, interpretative elements in reconstructing the fragments left of yesterday in order for them to make sense to us, the people of today.

Even with all of those complicating factors, our job is still to make the history as true as possible. No, history podcasts don’t typically have the same kind of peer review process as an academic publication. But most history podcasters want our audiences to learn about actual past people and stuff that really happened.

We also understand that what we’re doing actually matters. Remember that bit above about learning from our mistakes? It turns out that doing good history can be like drawing up a map of a minefield. A mapmaker who wants all of the little skulls-and-crossbones representing the mines to line up in some certain shape—like, say, a pair of starfish doing a tango—could make a really cool-looking map. But the only minefield map you really want use is the one that shows where the actual mines are. When we start inventing stuff in history, we run the risk of forgetting the most important lessons from the past. Those lessons keep us from collectively blowing ourselves to bits.

Those consequences are remarkably unfunny.

The Economist understands this fact. It’s why their writers and editors adhere to high standards of evidence. It’s why they publish corrections when they—like all of us—occasionally screw up. It’s why they still have reporters around the globe, when it would have been much easier to ignore the parts of the world that most readers don’t care about.

And it’s why they might have spent more time talking about other, sexier genres of podcasts, but instead chose to extol the virtues of history ones.

Keep up the good work, mates!

• 1
  The fact that “recently” means “well over a year ago” to me does not bode well for my ability to write timely blog posts. I’m working on my whole podcast and blog project at a snail’s pace. And that’s not even referring to how slowly snails move, but to how slowly snails write. After all, a snail’s brain is just a couple of ganglia surrounding its eating tube, so their ability to blog rapidly is seriously limited unless they’re using ChatGPT.
• 2
  That’s 2003 if you’re not a Dave Grohl fan or don’t feel like looking it up on Wikipedia.
• 3
  Why do we have a noun for people in their teen years but not for people in their twenties? Should we try coining the word twent? Discuss.
• 4
  Definitely not all, and hopefully not most of them. I’ve met many, many extraordinary STEM advocates and practitioners who are supportive of the humanities. They’re as terrified about the implications of deemphasizing history as the most hardcore history cheerleaders out there.
• 5
  It’s worth adding here that good catapult experiments require a very strong grasp of history. Smart engineers don’t just invent catapults from scratch; they study existing catapults, take inspiration from centuries of historical designs, reflect on what’s effective and what isn’t and why, and only then do they make them more efficient. Again: complementary fields.
• 6
  Or by shapeshifting badgers and/or by wizards summoned into existence by a conspiracy of birds who willed that a champion wouldst materialize into being out of the miasma of space-time.