There’s no shortage of history podcasts out there
If you’ve got even as little as eight minutes, these are worth checking out
What do we look for in a history podcast? A tidy narrative or issue analysis? Social history of things like old age, music composition, mothering or travel documents, or stories of individuals who, say, negotiated the Paris peace conference?
Should the podcast be hosted by historians, or should history buffs who work in other disciplines also make them? How local or global should it be? There are so many history podcasts now that there are websites that exist solely for the purpose of curating them — like HistoryPods.com and its attendant Twitter profile.
Last year, extraordinarily, a radio conversation between two historians went viral. BBC Radio 3 show “Free Thinking” invited Naomi Wolf to talk about her new book about the Victorian-era laws and criminalization of homosexuality. In the show, presented by cultural historian Matthew Sweet, it transpired that Wolf had misunderstood a key British legal term and built the bulk of her argument on that misunderstanding.
When the episode made it online as a podcast, it exploded a thousand online conversations. Some were about shabby research, some about celebrity polemicists who get to write history books and some of the grumbling was about the state of fact-checking in nonfiction book publishing. Wolf’s publisher soon after pulled the book from North American markets. With or without the Wolf scandal, though, “Free Thinking” remains one of the best shows on the history of ideas. Give a listen to “How we talk about sex and women’s bodies,” for example.
Elsewhere in the BBC vaults is
“13 Minutes to the Moon,” the 2019 audio series on Apollo 11’s moon landing. It contains the original audio between Mission Control and the astronauts, old and new interviews with key players. Start with the clip of the tense 13 minutes of the landing itself, as the communication becomes patchy and fuel runs low. This year, BBC World Service added the season on the failed
Apollo 13 mission, which should have been NASA’s third moon landing. When it comes to recent American history, few podcasts are a match to “Slow Burn,” hosted by Leon Neyfakh. The first two series, on the Watergate scandal and the Clinton impeachment, have been produced by Slate, but Neyfakh has since moved to the Luminary podcast platform, on which he released a series on the Bush vs. Gore election battle, and one on the Iran-Contra affair and Reagan administration. A good entry point is the Linda Tripp episodefrom the Clinton series: an extraordinary interview with the government employee who started it all out of, it seems, personal animosity for the Clintons, her dislike of the First Lady especially.
There are several solid Canadian history podcasts, but I’d single out four. “Cool Canadian History,” written and hosted by David Borys, comes out every two weeks in 20-minute episodes. Borys is a military historian who teaches at the University of British Columbia’s Langara College and is especially strong on Canadian military history, but his interests are broad: There is an episode on the Vancouver Women’s Caucus’s 1970 Abortion Caravan to Ottawa; a historical fact check on the movie “The Last of the Mohicans”; one dedicated to Canadian actors on “Star Trek,” and one on Leon Trotsky’s stay in Amherst, N.S.
“Today in Canadian History” comes out in short and snappy episodes no longer than eight minutes. Hosts Joe Burima and Marc Affeld, primary school teachers in Calgary and advocates for quality public education, interview an expert or a witness. Two hundred guests — historians, journalists, authors — have appeared in the 220-plus episodes so far. This amuse-bouche format will work for many listeners who are pressed for time.
“Witness to Yesterday (The
Champlain Society Podcast on Canadian History)” is presented in 20- to 40-minute episodes, also in the conversation format. Its hosts are Patrice Dutil, politics and public administration professor at Ryerson University, and Greg Marchildon, Ontario research chair in health policy at U of T. There is quite a bit of social and economic history on the podcast: the car industry, anti-Catholic hatred, the 1918 flu epidemic, SickKids hospital, gay life on the Prairies from the 1930s on and the history of banking in Canada each get an episode.
Finally, a one-off series on Canada’s first female first ministers — the first crop of provincial and territorial premiers and the one short-lived prime minister — is well worth your time. The title of the series is, fittingly, “No Second Chances.” The “Things Fall Apart” episode reminds us that female first ministers in Canada tend to last half as long as their male counterparts, and “reach the top only to fall back down, often because they enter into their roles when chances of failure are highest.” Is it the inherited hostile conditions or the actions of the leaders themselves? The perennial question.
Those who prefer their history international should check out “The Global History Podcast: Exploring Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Early Modern World,” hosted by U.S.-based PhD students Chase Caldwell Smith and Jeffrey C.J. Chen. This one is for genuine keeners: The guest experts go into great detail about their methodological approach, as well the state of current scholarship on the topics at hand.
The episodes usually go well into the second hour and can get overlong — the young scholars seem reluctant to edit — so the skipping feature may have to be employed here and there. There’s a lot of fascinating content, though: Give a listen to the episode “Climate, Medicine and Race in Eighteenth Century,” in which Suman Seth talks about the gradual emergence of the concept of “race” in medical science and international relations; or the episode with Monica H. Green on how historians work with geneticists to study diseases like the plague and leprosy with the help of, among other sources, ancient pathogen DNA retrieved from the teeth of human remains.
There is certainly room in the history podcast cybersphere for people who prefer their history irreverent, silly or even as a dose of standup.
The “Pontifacts” podcast is, in its own words, a “lighthearted, only slightly blasphemous papal history podcast, ranking the Popes from Peter to Francis.” “Rex Factor,” similarly, rates all the kings and queens of England and Scotland on factors like “batteyness,” scandal, quality of rule, longevity and dynastic succession. And on BBC Radio 4, for six brilliant seasons now, is British classicist “Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics” and before a live audience at that. The figures whom she elucidates are mostly historical (Aristotle, Livy, Ovid, Nero’s mother Agrippina the Younger, Aristophanes), but there’s the odd mythical one, too, like Eurydice, Penelope, Penthesilea the Queen of the Amazons and Helen of Troy.