When British academics Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook recorded the first episode of their podcast, The Rest is History, during the 2020 lockdowns, they agreed to address their nerves by pretending nobody was ever going to listen – just two friends having a chat about the debatable “greatness” of Alexander the Great at the pub.
Seven-hundred episodes, more than 12 million weekly downloads and a celebrity following (including frequent guest star and “friend of the pod” Tom Hanks) later, and the notion of no audience is a fiction right up there with Marie Antoinette’s famous “let them eat cake” line. (She never said that. See: Episode 475).
Last November, Holland and Sandbrook did a coast-to-coast tour of sold-out venues across the United States – further evidence of their own rock-star status as well as the explosion of the podcast world’s newest (if unlikeliest) genre darling.
Because other charting-topping podcast genres make sense: true crime, with its high stakes, whodunit narratives; celebrity interview shows that leverage charm and pre-existing fan bases. But shouldn’t history – the high-school subject voted most likely to be slept through – be a harder sell? Not according to Apple’s charts, where The Rest is History currently sits at No. 4 among the top subscriber podcasts across genres.
Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook host The Rest is History.Supplied
Other favourites including Hardcore History, Revisionist History (from Malcolm Gladwell), The History of Rome, Stuff You Missed in History Class, Tides of History and History Hit regularly crack the top 100, while more niche offerings tackle the past from every imaginable era and perspective: Dig is feminist history, Black History Buff tells stories of important Black figures, History of the 90s casts a nostalgic eye on the not-so-distant past, Burnt Toast is history for foodies. Even former president Barack Obama is working on a history podcast focused on America’s reconstructionist era in the late 1800s (maybe that’s what he was talking with Donald Trump about at Jimmy Carter’s funeral).
This history of history podcasts dates back to 2006, when the American political journalist Dan Carlin launched Hardore History almost a decade before the first season of Serial taught most of us what a podcast was. Back then audio entertainment was for NPR nerds only, whereas, according to one U.S. survey, almost as many young people listen to podcasts as watch television these days, and their tastes are leaning toward antiquity. Seventy per cent of listeners of The Rest is History are under 40. Last month the actress Nicola Coughlan followed up her x-tremely steamy season of Bridgerton with a new gig as host of History’s Youngest Heroes, a podcast on BBC.
Craig Baird launched Canadian History Ehx with a plan to push back against the stereotype that casts Canada’s backstory in particular as one giant Confederation-focused snooze fest. In 2019 he averaged 10,000 downloads. Last year he cleared one million with top episodes on the 1934 kidnapping of John Labatt and the more recent house hippo hoax (a prescient 1999 campaign to teach Canadians about fake news).
Baird scored a viral moment back in 2023 when he hyped his Prime Ministers of Canada series with an X thread picturing federal leaders as members of a hair-metal band. It was huge for audience growth, but Baird believes his sustained success, and the success of history podcasts across the board, comes down, at least partly, to contemporary anxiety. “We feel like we’re constantly living through these unprecedented events, so maybe there is some comfort in putting what’s happening today into context,” he says. Sure, 2024 was (another) flaming trash fire, but the First World War/Great Depression double feature was probably worse. And Trump may be horrible, but what do you know about Attila the Hun?
Leah-Simone Bowen and Falen Johnson co-host The Secret Life of Canada, a podcast whose debut coincided with the country’s 150th birthday festivities. “It felt like people were interested in talking about our country’s history in a way that was more critical,” says Johnson, who remembers watching that first episode (about how the Banff National Park was built on forced labour of interned Ukrainian immigrants) surpass Oprah on the charts.
History podcasts aren’t simply the “new” true crime, she says, but are an extension of that same grisly appeal: “When you look at how our country came together, there is a lot of crime there, a lot of bad behaviour.” Johnson is Mohawk and Tuscarora (Bear Clan), while Bowen is a first generation Canadian. The Secret Life of Canada seeks out sources that haven’t always featured in our history books. “Instead of an academic who has written on a certain subject, we might speak with a tribal elder. I think that’s a perspective that people really want to hear,” Johnson says.
The accessibility of podcasting as a medium invites more voices to the table, but there is a flip side. A recent piece in the Atlantic unpacked the “Dangerous Rise of the Podcast Historians,” pointing out how the absence of gatekeepers opens the door to dangerous and inaccurate fringe perspectives: Tucker Carlson’s September, 2024, interview with internet historian and Holocaust denier Darryl Cooper was short on facts but long on the kind of controversy that is catnip for the algorithm.
Johnson agrees that ensuring accuracy is important, but this is not an issue of the internet era. “It was right- wing spin that told us what a great guy Christopher Columbus was. The guy raped and pillaged – it says that in his own damn diary,” she says.
Last week, The Secret History of Canada aired its final episode as the co-hosts move on to new projects, but not because they’ve run out of material. “The thing about history is that we think of it as being fixed in the past, but it’s actually this living breathing thing that is forever being re-examined and reconsidered – there’s always something new.”
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