Nearly a third of New Zealanders tune into podcasts every week and many of them are hooked on history.
The past may be a foreign country but it’s never been so popular as a destination. Humanities departments in universities the world over are experiencing falls in enrolments and funding as students are steered towards employment-focused subjects, but history podcasts are rocketing in popularity. In New Zealand, the British-created series The Rest is History is frequently ranked by various platforms as one of our most popular podcasts across all categories.
Technology allows anyone with a smartphone or a laptop to immerse themselves in the fate of the Aztecs, the Ottoman Empire or histories of trade in ancient Persia, delivered in serialised, story-focused instalments. Whether streamed from a host platform such as Spotify, Patreon, Apple or watched on YouTube, history as a topic is very much in the present.
“It’s a good age to be alive as a historian,” says Michael Belgrave, professor emeritus of history at Massey University. “I can go to YouTube, to a podcast, and access some sort of historical narrative about almost any and everything that’s ever happened in the past. And so can everyone else.”
And it may even be that history podcasts are again filling seats in lecture theatres. Joseph Zizek, a senior lecturer in history at the University of Auckland, credits history podcasts with contributing to students’ interest in studying history at tertiary level.
“We often run into students who volunteer that they got interested in the material in a particular course because of a podcast,” he says.
Belgrave sees podcasts as the latest step in a movement that’s been growing since about 2008.
“With the explosion of iCloud storage, the development of Facebook, YouTube and the digitisation of sources like Papers Past … suddenly, the past was available to us, in an enormously new way.”
Kiwis love podcasts
Podcast listenership generally is one of the fastest-growing subsets within the media. In 2022, Edison Research found 30% of New Zealanders were weekly podcast listeners, surpassing the US, Australia and Canada. Listeners subscribed to an average four podcasts a month.
Some researchers attribute this interest to an ageing population, others cite gaps in formal education or companionship sought in an increasingly alienated, lonely world.
Historians also draw parallels between today’s heightened interest in the past and previous periods of technological, political, cultural and economic rupture. Possible factors include nostalgia, escapism, a desire to further understand contemporary times – or, for the cynical, to avoid trudging through 800-page books to glean a series of facts with which to impress friends or win trivia nights.
Whichever, it’s clear that demand for immersive, riveting storytelling hasn’t waned.
Driving the numbers is also the presenters themselves – their passion and knowledge of their subject is a strong drawcard. Whether a single-voice narrative or debates between hosts and guests, many episodes play out in story form, so listeners are invested in the various characters, scenes, winding plot points and vanished or speculative worlds podcasters are able to craft.
If today’s history podcasts had a common ancestor, it would likely be British broadcaster Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time series. One of the BBC’s most successful ventures, it launched in 1998 as a weekly radio discussion, adapting to the podcast format in 2004. Now, with more than 1000 45-minute episodes covering philosophy, history and culture, the radio show – which is available as a podcast after broadcast – has a weekly audience of two million.
Another early convert to the history podcast was critics’ favourite Dan Carlin. The American former radio broadcaster and history major’s Hardcore History has a devoted following, beloved by the terminally online Reddit generation as much as by historians. Hardcore History arrived in 2006 with a 16-minute episode that assessed Alexander the Great in relation to Hitler.
Now, episodes regularly run for more than four hours and are released every four to seven months after months of research. It rates as one of the top history podcasts in the world.
Fellow US author and political history stalwart Mike Duncan’s podcasts, The History of Rome and Revolutions, are also revered by history buffs. The History of Rome ran from 2007-12, chronicling the origins and decline of the Roman Empire. A year later, Revolutions was launched and ran for close to a decade. Vast in its ambition, it clocked more than 300 episodes, which included 103 on the Russian Revolution alone.
People are tired of history being told in a “hand-wringing, pious, judgmental and moralistic way
Similarly, Empire, hosted by Scottish historian and author William Dalrymple and English journalist Anita Anand, examines the rise and fall of empires across history, beginning with the influence of the British East India Company on colonial expansion into India. Since its launch in 2022, it has clocked more than 30 million downloads on empire-straddling subjects, including the history of slavery and the influence of empresses and first ladies (sample episode title: Mrs Genghis Khan).
The ascendant star is The Rest is History, hosted by historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland, which began in late 2020 and quickly climbed the charts to become the most-subscribed podcast in Britain, attracting 12.5 million downloads a month and 45,000 subscribers paying for ad-free listening. Sandbrook and Holland are now making US$100,000 a month from it, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
In 2023, The Rest is History was the first podcast to receive the President’s Medal from the British Academy. Sandbrook and Holland have said the podcast was originally conceived as a side project to their book-writing, which it quickly superseded. In an interview last year with The Telegraph, Sandbrook remarked that people are tired of history being told in a “hand-wringing, pious, judgmental and moralistic way – they want it brought to life by people who are genuine enthusiasts and love the past”.
Podcasts on tour
Outside of the recording booth, communities on and offline are formed around shared admiration, factional positions and passionate discussions lit by a devotion to a particular podcast. For some hosts, this has translated to demand for live events.
Last November, popular history-comedy podcast No Such Thing as a Fish celebrated its decade of broadcasting with a global tour, including a stop in Auckland for a sold-out show.
The Rest Is History filled Auckland’s Bruce Mason Centre in late 2023 during an Australasian tour, and last October packed the 5000-seat Royal Albert Hall. It is booked to return there in May.
Under their Empire banner, Anand and Dalrymple sold out the Barbican Centre in London in two days. There are crossovers into other media, too: Carlin featured as a podcast narrator in the second season of The Twilight Zone reboot in 2019, and in January, it was announced that The Rest Is History is to be adapted for television.
But it’s not all rulers and revolutions or, in some cases, banter about the past. The Rabbit Hole Detectives, a British podcast devoted to historic objects, co-hosted by Richard Coles, Cat Jarman and Charles Spencer, created present-day headlines when it was revealed Spencer – aka the ninth Earl Spencer and younger brother of the late Diana – had left his third wife and was in a relationship with Jarman, a Norwegian-born archaeologist whose specialist subject is the Vikings.
It’s not just ancient history hitting the sweet spot. Author John Ganz, who writes the Unpopular Front newsletter on Substack – which began as an appraisal of historical and contemporary fascism – is a regular guest on history, politics and culture podcasts, as well as co-host of the Unclear and Present Danger podcast.
American journalists Brendan James and Noah Kulwin host Blowback, which examines the history and aftermaths of US intervention on foreign soil. The briskly paced episodes incorporate oral histories, contemporary interviews and archival material to assess Korea, Cuba, Afghanistan and Iraq. The latest examines the US in Indochina under Nixon and Kissinger.
For James, it was the “general rehabilitation of the Bush-Cheney junta during the Trump years” that prompted his interest in starting Blowback. “It was fairly surreal to see that [rehabilitation] happen. Up until that moment, nearly everyone had agreed that they had blown up the world. Not only regarding the Iraq War and the War on Terror, but also on climate, civil rights, and so on. I thought maybe history really is moving that fast, and it would be worth it to retell the story of the Iraq War. And for younger listeners out there, to tell it for the first time.”
James credits right-place, right-time fortune for the show’s success. The pair employ a fact-checker and spend months on research. “We like getting into old newspaper clippings and wire reports; in our last season we had fun digging up some really hard-to-find issues of these relatively obscure journals and Catholic weeklies to find reporting no one else was doing at the time, and whose stories have been buried since. Making what was old new again is a nice thing we’re able to do – thanks to the work of the original writers.”
They’re grateful, James says, that their audience has embraced the serialised style: “They trust us to work all year to deliver a 10-part series that can really cook.”
Better than nothing
Local historian Vincent O’Malley says the more ways engagement with Aotearoa’s history can be promoted the better, in any format. “The reality is, 10 episodes of a podcast is better than nothing, if they’re not reading,” he says. “There are many different ways to convey history and introduce it to people, and podcasts are a useful way of doing that.”
Like James, he emphasises the need for history podcasters to cite and provide bibliographies of their sources as a nod to those historians who did the legwork.
O’Malley rates the the Irish History podcast, which tallies a daunting 400-odd episodes over the past 15 years. Its creator, historian and author Fin Dwyer, says The History of Rome and Hardcore History provided the impetus to launch his podcast.
O’Malley says, “Some are macro-history: the Irish Potato Famine, migration. Others are slices of micro-history, such as a murder in a small rural town in the mid-19th century. It’s really great storytelling and that’s key, regardless of the format. It’s the story that draws people in.”
He also enjoys podcasts with a visual element, such as RNZ’s New Zealand Wars series, hosted by Mihingarangi Forbes. Similarly, Toby Manhire’s six-part series for The Spinoff, Juggernaut: The Story of the Fourth Labour Government, successfully fused historical and contemporary narratives into analysis of its political subject.
Massey’s Michael Belgrave is currently absorbed in Empire. “I’ve learned an incredible amount, about which I knew nothing, I have to admit.
“I spend three hours mowing our quite large lawn, and that’s when I listen to podcasts. It must have taken me six months just to get through [the history of] Rome.”
He admires the scholarship of the podcasts’ hosts, but he does have some caveats. “What they don’t do is show that [for every] expert there might be another who disagrees – there might be more complex stories to be told.”
Belgrave refers to an episode in one podcast involving Russian aspirations in California five years before the Gold Rush. “My question is always, where does it fit with indigenous people? So there are things that aren’t quite right and you think, there’s more to this. But for the most part, I’m listening as an informed person who can discriminate information.
“I think you become a more informed citizen if you understand history. You don’t have to know specific parts of history, in my view, quite so much, but you do need to know quite a lot in order to understand. A history qualification is still needed because all this democratisation still doesn’t ask the question: how do you discriminate between good and bad history? How do you test whether someone’s ideas are good or not?”
For the most part, for listeners learning for the first time about the interbreeding of the Habsburgs, the global repercussions of a single day in Tsarist Russia or the subterfuge that saw the Koh-i-Noor diamond come into British hands, a detour to the past is an hour or 10 very happily spent.