Veeky Forums related podcasts

History of Rome is pretty good.

Shit that happened two generations after the mongol conquests don't really count. That's like calling Napoleon a shitty general because France lost early in WW2.

After all, everyone knows they lost eventually, the world isn't ruled by mongols. The hordes from 50-100 years later after Genghis aren't what people are talking about when they mean "the mongols"

Please tell me more about how popular things are automatically bad, clearly a hipster like you must know all the cool things before anyone else got into them.

Because Dan Carlin isn't a historian. He's an entertainer but people do take him seriously. In his king of kings podcast he still reguitates the same bullshit that the Greeks were fighting against lightly armored Persians and other bs.

Yeah that sounds like a really important detail worth throwing out absolutely everything else he's said over.

It's REALLY important we know EXACTLY how much armor every person in history was wearing. I can't think of a single thing more important in all of history. You might as well not even discuss the topic at all if you don't know about the armor!

It matters because Dan Carlin frames the Persians as unable to deal with hoplites which is just flat out false.

Consider the conflicts between Persia and the Greek states in the early 5th century BC. The Persians were defeated in pitched battle at Marathon (490), Plataiai (479) and Mykale (479). That much is true. But they were victorious in pitched battle at Ephesos (498), the Marsyas (497), Labraunda (497), Malene (493) and Thermopylai (480). They had successfully conquered the Greek cities of Asia Minor three times over, and had reduced major settlements like Miletos, Naxos and Eretria by siege assault. At the time of the battle of Marathon, Persian armies enjoyed an unbroken victory streak against Greek opponents; as Herodotos himself points out, the very name "Persian" caused fear among the Greeks, and the Athenians were admired simply for standing their ground. Marathon was the first victory of a Greek army over a Persian one in fifty-six years of intermittent conflict.

However, I'm going to hazard a guess and suppose that you've never heard of any of the Persian victories I just listed except Thermopylai.

That, right there, is the problem with our perception of the Persian Wars that Dan Carlin will never correct: we focus entirely on the part of the story where the Greeks win.

The result of this blinkered view is that we tend to think of Persian armies as hopelessly outmatched by their Greek opponents. All we know is that in all of the battles that we read about, the Persians get completely curb-stomped. And when we look for an explanation for this pattern, Herodotos gladly hands us one: in his accounts of Thermopylai and Plataiai, he notes that the Persians used shorter spears than the Greeks and wore less armour, and that they were therefore at a disadvantage in close combat against heavily armoured Greek hoplites.

I agree with this. I picked up Hardcore history at the beginning of Blueprint for Armageddon. Was pretty entertaining, I noticed some excessively flowery language, some cherry-picked quotes, and a whole lot of bias towards the Western Front, but I thought it was pretty good.

Then King of Kings hits, and he starts by recounting Thermopylae in a way that makes it sound like a summary of 300.

Noped the fuck out of that. No historian has thought of the Persians like that for a century.

He is totally an entertainer, and unlike these assholes he doesn't even tell you that he's not a historian.

The only nitty-gritty historical podcast I've found that's worth anything is My History Can Beat Up Your Politics, but it's dry as shit and has a very limited subject matter.

Taking this explanation at face value, many modern authors have assumed that the Persians simply couldn't hope to win a head-on engagement against a Greek army. For all their wealth and power, they were totally outclassed in a straight fight, and the Greeks were only too happy to demonstrate this time and again.

Indeed, when we look more closely at the equipment of the heavy infantry on both sides, we find little reason to believe that the Persians would have been at a structural disadvantage. Herodotos notes that the Persian Immortals wore armour made of iron scales, and carried large wicker tower shields with which to form a tight shield wall on the battlefield. He also describes different contingents of Xerxes' army that were heavily equipped, including several whose combat gear he describes as "like that of the Greeks" - Karians, Lydians, Phrygians, Phoenicians, Assyrians, Egyptians. Heavy infantry fighting in large homogenous formations was a common practice throughout the Eastern Mediterranean, and it would be absurd to suppose that the Persians encountered some unheard-of approach to pitched battle when they invaded mainland Greece. Even after the defeat at Marathon and the bitter fight at Thermopylai, it was the Persians who desired a decisive pitched battle in the plain at Plataiai, trusting in the superior tactical capability of their semi-professional army against the poorly organised, untrained Greek militias.

In other words, we can't trust Herodotos when he claims the Persians fought without armour, and we certainly mustn't be tempted to draw the conclusion that Persian armies couldn't fight well against Greek ones. Overall, the Persians had a great track record against all their enemies, including the Greeks; we have no reason to assume they would have obsessed over their few defeats to the degree that we do.

So your problem was that his thing wasn't twice as long?

Okay.

Nice copypasta. Have any opinions that aren't someone else's?

Carlin mentions at multiple points in the podcast that he's not a historian. He lists his sources and admits his biases. Hes going for a pop history narrative type thing. I understand the frustration, but he's been forward about his being a fan of history and not an expert. Lazy fans and lazy social media mouths calling him a historian are the problem.

Recommending this. It opened my eyes to the fact that "realistic" behavior incorporates some really out there horseshit.

My all time favorite history audio series is "Lost to the West: 12 Byzantine Rulers". Good fun stuff, great for worldbuilding inspiration.

12byzantinerulers.com/

So history is an opinion now? Spreading bad history is just wrong. As I said, the problem arises when people take Carlin seriously. He provides entertainment but he also puts out plenty of bad history in his podcasts which his fans take seriously.

History is just an option you get based on what details a person decides to tell you.

Your copypasta is just someone who cherry picked his own details to fit the conclusion he was trying to make.

Which is exactly what you are accusing Carlin of doing.

So, if you're going to say Carlin is bad, you need a better argument than "He omitted these details this other person I'm copying from cited" because the person you are pretending to be also omitted details.

What details are omitted? It's a fact that the Persians trounced the Greeks plenty of times. There's no reason to believe that the Persians had anything to fear from the untrained and badly organized militias of the Greek city-states. In their conflict with the Persians the Greeks refused to fight in the open plains against the Persians. At Marathon they waited 10 days until they attacked the Persians, some have speculated it was to negate their cavalry, others have said they were attacking a withdrawing Persian army. At Plataia the Greeks refused to budge from the hills. At Thermopylae they defended the pass a top the Phocians' wall. The Persians re-conquered the Ionia and put down the Ionian revolt. That's not an opinion, that's history.

I'll just quote the thread you copied your post from and tell you to fuck off.

>Herodotos' account of Marathon seems to suggest as much. He notes that, while the Athenians and Plataians were victorious on the wings, the Athenian centre was actually overrun by the Persians.
Have you actually read Herodotus? He mentions how a few troops, Sacae, not even Persians, managed to slip through the phalanx. The center was not overrun in any sense of the word.

>Even after the defeat at Marathon and the bitter fight at Thermopylai, it was the Persians who desired a decisive pitched battle in the plain at Plataiai,
No. He retreated to Boetia after sacking Athens, and constructs a fortified camp. He only makes an opportunistic raid when he sees the Greeks in disarray, but if he really wanted a pitched battle, you'd think he'd have attacked sometime in those 11 days before then. He also was primarily relying on local Greek troops.

>But already in the 450s BC, Persia was reasserting itself, and there was practically no limit to the time and resources they were able to throw against their western enemies.
You mean "Pay greeks to fight each other"? Because the last war of the Delian league features the Greeks stomping the shit out of the Persians at Eurymedon and Pampremis, before failing (mostly to disease) at a siege attempt which they kept at it for 4 years.

> All the while, no Greek army was ever able to operate against them on a scale that threatened their heartlands or the integrity of their empire
No greek army tried; and for that matter, no Persian army tried to reassert control over Asia Minor until the aftermath of the wholesale destruction that was the Peloponesean wars. And when a Greek force did try, well, Xenophon trampled his way across all of Persia with his men.

Are you just thoroughly ignorant and intellectually dishonest, or are you cribbing from someone else who is?

OP said he listened to Carlin for "entertainment/inspiration". Not the historical accuracy of Persian armor "and other bs."

>So history is an opinion now?
It legitimately always has been. In college, I had multiple history professors who insisted that, day one of class, we were able to tell the difference between "History" and "The Past".

You have to remember that, up until very recently, most of what we know concerning the past was, at some point, written down by a human being. Every human being comes with his or her own individual idiosyncrasies, biases and beliefs. These things totally do filter into the historical record.

The Fall of the Republic is fantastic as well

>he doesn't even tell you that he's not a historian.
this is demonstrably false

Yeah, I'm pretty sure in every single episode and right on his website he says he's a "journalist, not a historian."

>That's like calling Napoleon a shitty general because France lost early in WW2

I mean, if he'd done his fucking job right they wouldn't have, now would they?

System Mastery is pretty good, two guys who've been playing RPGs for decades review out of print, obscure or old games. Often laugh out loud funny, and their explorations of game mechanics are always illuminating.

Listening to Punic Nightmares right now. I really like how he presents the facts.

>History of Rome is pretty good.
I've been meaning to pick up his book.

Revolutions is great too

Did that copy pasta just use Herodotus to claim that the Persian had armoured infantry in order to dismiss Herodotus’ claims that the Persian were lightly armoured at another battle?

I am going to shill BBC's In Our Time podcast every chance I get because I think it's really good.

I'm listening to British History Podcast, though I did some of HH at one point.

Is there a place to bulk-download them? I didn't mind them, they were pretty gud.

Hahaha guess who's never listened to a single Hardcore History episode.

He repeats it so much I get a little tired of hearing it. Every other sentence he says "but remember guise I'm just a history fan, not a historian" as if he's afraid we'll forget.

As someone who has a masters degree in history I find Carlin pretty good. He does a solid job giving his audience the basics, names and represents his sources quite well and discusses more notable theories on historical events when they are present.

His work is not on a level of an academic paper but his work isn't meant to be that. Still, he does a better job explaining some topics than most lectures I attended at the university.

The BBC's In Our Time is great--has an archive of 500+ shows on history, science, philosophy, and culture.
The History of Byzantium.
The British History Podcast.
Sawbones.

>It's a dan says "I just can't even imagine that" episode
>It's a dan says "where people at X point in history really any different from people today, or do we just pretend we would never do those things?" episode
>He is totally an entertainer, and unlike these assholes he doesn't even tell you that he's not a historian.
He mentions it literally every episode.

Best way I found to "bulk" download when I did it for the history of rome was to fiddle with the example code given here: askubuntu.com/questions/549360/how-to-download-mp3-files-whole-site , though I think I had to change a few options. Searching for "[podcast name] libysn" should give you a good starting page to run that command from.

Basically the Mongols were a one-trick pony, they found an inbalance in the rules and exploited it and nothing else, which worked for a while but since they actually kind of sucked at everything else, it wasn't viable long-term.

>BBC history
I really don't want to listen to 500+ shows of how the blacks built Britain.