(Bloomberg) -- 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 the UK 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 US, 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.
Study History
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. Dan Carlin, then a radio journalist, was an early convert to their potential. He knew that in traditional broadcasting, a certain mass appeal was needed to reach an audience. But the addressable market for podcasting was the entire English-speaking world. “If you even have a tiny little slice of that pie,” he remembers thinking, “that’s still a lot of human beings.”
Carlin was also a historian. As a history major at the University of Colorado in the late 1980s, he had snuck into the journalism school to see a talk by the great broadcast journalist Connie Chung. During the Q&A, a student asked Chung which module would best prepare them for life in the news media. Carlin recalls Chung gave what she acknowledged would be an unpopular reply. Everything the journalism students were learning would be re-taught to them by their employers, she told them, and they would be better off working on the fundamental skills of critical thinking, analysis and research — by studying history.
Carlin proved her right, becoming a journalist in Los Angeles, where he was adept at the research behind stories. He moved into radio, and in the summer of 2006 began recording the podcast he has been running ever since, Hardcore History.
The first episode was just 16 minutes long. He remembers reaching 5,000 downloads, which felt like a “huge victory” at the time. But in the decades that followed, as his audience grew into the many millions, Carlin found there was practically no limit to his audience’s appetite for historical storytelling.
Episodes can now last for more than six hours, and although Carlin produces only one or two per year, Hardcore History remains one of the most popular history podcasts in the world. (It was at the time of writing No. 2 in the US.) Carlin says advertising is only a small part of his revenue; the bulk of his income comes directly from listeners, who pay for individual episodes or packages of shows for up to $100. His early episodes still sell — one advantage of the history business is that old material doesn’t go out of date.
Carlin’s success perhaps comes down to his authenticity. He spends six to eight months on an episode, two months of which will be spent entirely on reading and research. During recording, his mornings are spent improvising on a subject in the studio, and during the afternoons he will continue to read. At a time when so much media is quick and conversational, audiences respond to a speaker who is genuinely immersed in their subject.
Classical Civilization
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.
Popular history may also be filling in for the decline of academic history. Higher education data for the UK shows that while overall student numbers have risen by almost 20% over the past five years, the number studying history has fallen 10%. In the US, spring enrollment for history by undergraduates on four-year courses has fallen by more than 15% since 2019. As students are pushed by the high cost of education to study subjects that offer a more obvious route to employment (US dental school enrollment has risen 14% in the last decade), their fascination with history may be finding an outlet in books and podcasts instead.
Different Conversations
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.
A few years ago, Beard spoke to a class of secondary school students in the UK about the freedom of speech. The teenagers thought of this as a modern problem, something that had emerged from social media. They were visibly uncomfortable; as the conversation moved to the Harry Potter author JK Rowling’s views on gender, no one wanted to say the wrong thing. So Beard told them about Socrates, who was condemned to death for his political views.
She recalls the students “were amazed” to learn that this was an issue as old as history itself, but what happened next fascinated her: “Their ability to talk interestingly about these issues grew enormously,” she said.
“Socrates had some fairly spicy takes on democracy — of which he wasn’t the biggest fan — and he was forced to commit suicide, but the distance of time made him safe for discussion,” Beard said. “It was a different level of conversation to when they were looking over their shoulders at whether they were saying the right thing.”
Global Interest
In 2019, a small London-based TV production company, Goalhanger Films, branched out from sports documentaries and began recording a World War II podcast called We Have Ways of Making You Talk, hosted by the historian James Holland and the comedian and historian Al Murray. Goalhanger co-founder Jack Davenport says the team was surprised by the audience the podcast received; before long it was reaching a million downloads a month.
To grab a bigger audience, however, Davenport knew they would need a show that was broader and more accessible; not everyone can focus on a single six-year period for hundreds of episodes. So he and his co-founder, Tony Pastor, devised a format for a show that an audience could join any time; it might focus on Henry V one week, Eva Perón the next. They took the idea to James Holland’s brother, Tom — well known for his written histories of Rome, Islam and medieval Europe — and asked him which historian he would most like to be sat next to at a party. It was this question that opened the door to the globe-spanning success of The Rest is History.
Podcast listeners form parasocial relationships with the hosts who speak, for hours at a time, into their ears; they begin to feel as if they know them. Davenport says this is “absolutely deliberate — that’s what we want.” Goalhanger, which now produces many of the UK’s most popular podcasts, including The Rest is Politics and The Rest is Entertainment, avoids interviews and focuses primarily on the chemistry between hosts. “We want to make shows that people feel they want to spend a lot of time with, and that means effectively feeling like you’re part of their relationship,” Davenport says.
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, says 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. 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.”
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