One advantage a headset has over the standing microphone is that the volume of the speaker will not change when he or she moves around. — dpa
The snow queen’s castle was in pieces. In the darkness behind the stage at the Theatre Royal, one of the largest and oldest of London’s West End theatres, the set for the long-running hit musical Frozen had been disassembled to make way for two historians.
Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook stood in the ruins of Elsa’s palace, awaiting their cue.
Suddenly there was a wave of noise. Thousands of fans cheered as the theme to the duo’s podcast, The Rest is History, started playing.
Sandbrook shook his head, thinking: “What on Earth? This is like a weird parallel universe! This doesn’t happen to historians.”
It has continued to happen, however.
Sandbrook and Holland have played venues from New Zealand to New York, Los Angeles and London’s 5,000-seat Albert Hall, where they are accompanied by a full orchestra. In any major city in the Anglosphere, large crowds will turn out to hear two chummy, middle-aged British men talk about the Visigoths or Admiral Nelson.
The Rest is History is downloaded 12.5 million times per month, making it more popular (by nearly a million downloads a week) than This American Life.
The company that makes the show, Goalhanger, has signed a deal – to be announced later this month – with a Hollywood production company to develop TV and film formats based on it.
At the core of the show’s fanbase are tens of thousands of paying subscribers, the most dedicated of whom meet socially and refer to themselves (in homage to both Internet fandom and the first Anglo-Saxon ruler of England) as “Athel Stans”.
More broadly, the history business is booming.
In 2023, people in Britain and Ireland spent more on history books than at any point since Nielsen BookData’s records began in 1998.
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.
In the United States, where the overall book market is flat, history has grown by 6% in the past year alone, according to Circana. For the first time in an election year, history as a category outsold politics (by two to one).
Google’s Ngram viewer, which covers printed sources up to 2022, suggests a significant increase in writing about history over the past decade.
Historians are reaching huge audiences via email newsletters – Boston College history professor Heather Cox Richardson is one of Substack’s most successful authors, with 1.8 million subscribers – and social media.
TikTok’s year-long interest in the Roman Empire, and how often men claim to think about it, has been the subject of more than 85 million videos.
It is in podcasts, however, that history has the greatest success.
The Rest is History competes with Hardcore History, Revisionist History, The History of Rome, Stuff You Missed in History Class, Tides of History, History Hit and hundreds more to satisfy the public’s seemingly insatiable appetite for amiable discourse about war, monarchy, empire, plague and revolution.
The path to the history podcasting’s world domination began in the early 1990s. While Francis Fukuyama declared (in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man) that history was over, a new concept was emerging on the nascent internet: “asynchronous radio”.
By the early 2000s, Internet radio stations were uploading episodes and discussions – “audioblogs”, as they were briefly known – that could be downloaded and listened to at any time on a computer or one of the new personal media players, such as Apple’s iPod, which was first released in 2001.
Within a few years, podcasts became a niche area of broadcasting.
Why history, though? What is it about the present moment that makes the past so enticing?
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 civilisation.
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.
What comes through from the best history podcasts is not only the on-air rapport between hosts, but a transparent and authentic affection for the subject.
Audiences, said Sandbrook, “love the stories. They love the characters. They love the feeling of being catapulted back to the past. So in a weird way, I think they’re not really there for us, so much as they’re there for what we represent – the richness of the past, the amazing adventures that people have had, the vanished world that we will never encounter again.”
The same can be said of the hosts that have made history podcasts so successful.
Among those who do study history, a few are fortunate enough to do so with Mary Beard, perhaps Britain’s best-known historian.
For many years her classics lectures at Cambridge were attended by scores of students from other departments, who would sneak in to enjoy her lively and fascinating evocation of the distant past. History, Beard told me, is far from a redundant skill: It gives us a means to understand the present.
It is Mary Beard’s passion for her subject that enables her to teach it in such a compelling way: “For me,” she said, “the ability to think about the world 2,000 years ago is as exciting and as mind-blowing, as our speculation about life on Mars.” — Bloomberg
Will Dunn writes for Bloomberg. The views expressed here are the writer’s own.
