I’d like to start a thread to hear from other people about sources of historical information that they’ve found to be particularly informative and engaging.
I’ll leave it pretty wide open and lead with a few examples.
I’ve repeatedly mentioned Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, and I have yet to come across another source that serves up the kind of historical storytelling that covers extremely broad topics at a good level of depth. He stays out of the weeds for the most part but laces plenty of primary source material as well, along with mentioning a great number of fantastic books that he draws from.
Lately I’ve been listening to lectures and Q&A sessions by Professor Paine from the US Naval War College and I will soon dive into one of her books. Her perspective on history and geopolitics is extremely insightful and her communication style is wonderful to me. I particularly like how she often answers wildly speculative questions with “I don’t know”, which are words you don’t always hear from experts on geopolitics.
Authors, specific books, podcasts, blogs, all fair game. Who are your favorites?
Military History Visualised (creator also has a podcast type channel called Military History Not Visualised)- Austrian creator who does well researched but concise deep dives. Uses his German speaking abilities to find and translate primary texts. Also does really good interviews
The Tank Museum: Channel of the Tank Museum at Bomvington. Great coverage of tanks from WWI to present. They have tank chats, series where historians and history youtube creators rate their favourite and least favourite tanks
Drachinifel: Naval history. well researched and the dry humour is unbeatable
Star Media: It has some really well produced documentaries and docudramas, but considering that they are a Russian company sponsored by the Russian Ministry of Culture, probably not a good source for actual history. (I use it for listening practice)
Authors: David Glantz
Podcasts
We Have Ways of Making You Talk: James Holland and Comedian Al Murray have fun chats about WWII. They ramble, but it’s part of the charm
History Extra Podcast (BBC): Very skilled interviews of authors and historians discussing a very diverse set of topics
I’m very familiar with the first three youtube channels. All excellent suggestions. I particularly like the 5 Minute Guide to Warships series by Drachinifel. I’m probably about 1/2 of the way through his content library.
I’ll definitely be checking out the History Extra Podcast. I have sort of written off the BBC in the last 10 years along with NPR/PBS but they have and sometimes still do produce outstanding content.
I’ve been diving into local history a bit more lately. My most recent deep dive began with asking the question “How did Lewiston, Maine go from a <1% Muslim population in the public schools to 50 percent and rising in under 25 years without any population gain?” Political opinions aside, it is an interesting story of circumstances, political decisions and sociocultural currents that are swirling all around us at all times.
I’ll also mention people as an outstanding resource for learning more about history. You’ll always get their version of it, but that’s true no matter whose recounting of events you listen to. You can learn a lot about history from people who lived through whatever you’re trying to learn about.
Another outstanding Youtube channel is Mark Felton. He puts together a lot of short explanations of particularly unusual or interesting aspects of history, mostly covering WWII and the Cold War. I really like digesting youtube content in 10 minute chunks or less. He does longer format stuff as well, but I don’t always get to those the way I do his short videos along the lines of…
Pittsburgh has been like that for a looooong time and still is.
My local bellwether is the Walmart-Giant Eagle near by. When you see something on the news in Syria or Ukraine or where ever, in about a week I see them at the shopping center getting new clothes & food.
The Rest is History podcast by James’s brother Tom Holland (not the actor) and Dominic Sandbrook.
Both brothers Holland write excellent books, the former about WW2 (currently I’m reading Savage Storm, the second part of his Italian trilogy 1943-45) and the latter about Rome and Christianity (Shadow of the Sword about the origins of Islam is particularly captivating.
That’s because due to the features of your legal immigration system you get richer Muslims. The UK gets the poorer Muslims, hence there’s a running joke (it’s not a joke) that almost every pro-ISIS social media account has a “London, England” in their bio.
Perhaps we are getting Somalia’s cream of the crop here in Lewiston, but an influx of wealthy, educated immigrants isn’t reflected in any academic or economic metric that’s available for me to examine. Some kids are certainly excelling, but the average is on a very troubling backslide. That isn’t good for anyone, no matter where you were born. The politics and socioeconomic outcomes of Lewiston are a whole separate topic, but the history of the local migration we’ve experienced is something that interests me independently of any personal concerns I have about the situation.
Yes you are. I’m not being ironic. Are Lewiston Somalis regularly doing drive by shootings and throwing bombs in internal turf wars like their brethren in Sweden?
“Wealthy and educated” is relative to the country. You’re getting the wealthiest Somalis as the poor ones are still in Mogadishu or Puntland.
WWII is the best gateway drug to all of world history in my opinion. You can use the situation in the 1930’s and 1940’s to ask all kinds of questions and then go looking for the answer. The Japanese had a whole set of equally wild ideas about race and the supernatural, and the Japanese invasion of China is something that doesn’t get a whole lot of play in US history classes.
Unfortunately, both indiscriminate and targeted drive by shootings are now quite common in Lewiston, Maine. Few of the shooters have been apprehended, but there’s no real dispute about whether or not it is being committed by immigrants.
Just last week a back-to-school gathering was terrorized by shots fired in broad daylight. There was a press conference with “community leaders” offering the typical sanctimonious platitudes to explain it away. The violence has coincided with our more recent wave of E. Africa’s cream of the crop. There was no significant increase in violence for the first decade plus of Somalian settlement here in Lewiston.
I remember an AP History course on WWII I took my Jr. year of HS. I don’t think I could have explained anything about Japanese operations in Manchuria, China and the S. Pacific except mentioning the Rape of Nanking, which I left that class learning almost nothing about.
Not that it was a waste or bad information, but that it was a pretty normal American class where we learned about American operations more than anything else. I left that class knowing who Heinz Guderian and Bernard Montgomery were but not a single Japanese or Chinese general.
I guess that depends on what you define as US soil. I’m guessing you’re getting at the battle my grandfather was a part of in the Philippine Islands, where there were many civilian casualties.
