Studying the past has been a passion of mine for more than 50 years. From ancient Egyptians and Romans to the Chinese, the Visigoths, Byzantines, Vikings, and Saxons, I've traveled back in time to witness cataclysmic events and small turns of the tide that have made us what we are today.
Whether it's standing next to Leonidas at Thermopylae or charging the Union center at Cemetery Ridge with George Pickett, taking yourself out of the moment and transporting yourself to another time, another place, talking to other people, living another life if only for a brief time teaches you a lot about yourself and the times in which you live.
Today, in a failing market for books of all kinds, history books are the only genre that sees an increase in sales.
Bloomberg notes, "Ancient history sales rose 67% from 2013 to 2023, while books focusing on “specific subjects” — individual stories of lives, events or movements — climbed 70% over the same period."
History podcasts have become a mass entertainment, with tens of millions of people downloading episodes of "The Rest is History," "Hardcore History," "Revisionist History," and "The History of Rome."
Meanwhile, so-called "academic history" has fallen in popularity. The number of students majoring in history has fallen considerably. In the UK, while overall attendance at colleges and universities has risen by 20% over the past five years, the number of students studying history has fallen 10% (it's 15% in the U.S.).
This doesn't reflect a loss of interest in history. In today's hyper-competitive job market, students want to study subjects with a more practical application to their lives.
I read very few academic treatises on history. It's usually one obscure historian trying to make an obscure point about an event that's already been studied to death. That's not to say that these academic historians don't contribute to our knowledge of the past. But I read for leisure and to scratch an itch to know that can't be satisfied.
Podcasts are excellent entertainment and I learn a lot, especially from Dan Carlin, a former radio journalist who started his "Hardcore History" podcast in 2006, which has now grown to several million listeners.
Carlin believes that the mass appeal of history podcasts has to do with our aging population.
Why history, though? What is it about the present moment that makes the past so enticing?
Carlin suggests this could be one symptom of an aging society. As people get older, the past becomes more meaningful. “We start to realize our own personal stake in history, the more of it we have in our lives,” he says.
Perhaps it is also a symptom of the fact that we live in interesting times. Other periods of profound technological and political change have been accompanied by a mania for the past. The Victorians, as their society was transformed by the industrial revolution, became obsessed with dinosaurs, ancient Egypt and classical civilization. Amid the social revolutions of the era after World War II, Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters were historical epics: War and Peace, Ben-Hur, The Ten Commandments, Spartacus, Cleopatra.
The number one rated history podcast in the world is "The Rest is History," which features two middle-aged, "cheeky" historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, and is downloaded 12.5 million times a month. The attraction for me is that the two historians are so immersed in their subject that they are able to take you back to the era they're discussing. And the discussions are, well, entertaining. Two men who know the subject matter intimately make wry jokes about the principals, draw parallels to contemporary events, and banter back and forth like intelligent old friends is fascinating.
I still prefer the written word. I've trained my mind's eye to translate words into images in my brain far more easily than listening to a podcast. Still, for a history junkie, I'm happy to get a "fix" by listening to fascinating conversations from intelligent people about stimulating subjects.
