Popular History and Academic History

0:11Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of Tides of History ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible ad. The best works of popular history transport us through time. They make us feel like we could have been there 50 or 100 or 1,000 years ago. Seeing what those people saw, experiencing what they did, seeing how the course of humanity's long journey changed because of their actions. Documentaries, podcasts, books, whatever the medium might be, the most outstanding works of popular history make the past

0:48accessible to those who don't have the luxury of spending their life studying it professionally. Far more people consume popular history than works written by academics and for academics. That's baked into their nature. Academic work is for specialists who need to be able to operate at a level of minute detail and hyper-focused knowledge. Popular history is for the masses, or at least some targeted portion of the general populace. That doesn't make popular history better or more worthwhile, though.

1:22It just means it's geared for a different audience that has different expectations and needs. While academic history seeks to inform and persuade, popular history also has to engage. That is its first and most essential role, to hold the audience's attention in ways that academic works simply don't have to consider. But that also gives them an influence that specialist works can't match. Books like that have changed my life, not just once, but many times.

1:54And I'm guessing that if you're listening to this, they might have done the same for you. Great popular history, the kind rooted in propulsive narrative, immersion in a world, and detailed research has extraordinary power. It alters how we see the world. It shows us where we stand in the decades, centuries, and millennia of our past. It makes us more empathetic, and frankly, better people, if we can understand the lives of those who

2:26have come before us. That's what truly great works of popular history do. They make the past, and the lives lived within it, accessible to the masses. History matters, but how we tell it matters, too. Grubhub plus membership auto-renews. Sign up now on the app or at grubhub.com slash plus slash gold. Don't miss it. We are live from Fetty's house. Hundreds gathered around the TV, all connected to reliable Wi-Fi from

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3:33and duplicate charges. Third-party built subscriptions continue until canceled. Hi, everybody. From Audible, I'm Patrick Wyman. Welcome to another episode of Tides of History. In what now seems like another life, I used to be an academic. When I was going through graduate school, I was mostly convinced that I was going to end up in a history department at some university, teaching undergrads and maybe the occasional grad student, doing research in archives and attending conferences

4:05where I would present my work to other academic historians. That obviously didn't happen for me, and I do not regret it at all. I would have been miserable doing the hyper-specialized work and terrible at getting along in a history department, endlessly frustrated at the minutiae of academia. That's not a knock on academia. It's about my fundamental lack of suitability for what that kind of profession entails, and I'm glad I never had

4:36to find out just how badly I would have fit in that context. Having a professor you love and respect tell you that you are, quote, an academic magpie collecting different interests and topics is a pretty good indicator that you're not cut out for it, and she was 100% correct. The reason I don't regret not taking that path, regardless of how well it suited me, is because I've had the opportunity to make history for popular audiences for almost a decade.

5:11In that time, I've learned a few things about making popular history. If you write several million words of podcast scripts in two books, you should learn a few things, and if you don't, well, you're probably not particularly good at the job, and I'd like to think I'm decent at it. Being even decent at something requires some self-reflection and consideration of what exactly you're trying to do, how you do it, and why it matters. That also means reflecting on the role of academic history in how I do my

5:49job. Both how I use what I learned in my eight years of training in graduate school, and how I relate to the specialized professional academic historians and archaeologists whose research allows me to make episodes and write books. Today, we'll dive deep into this topic. I'll discuss what I found unsatisfying about academia as it was constructed during my time in it, what I also found unsatisfying about popular history as I found it, and how I've tried to work between those two worlds. My hope is that you'll come away with a better understanding of what academic

6:22historians do and why popular history couldn't and shouldn't exist without that work. So I'm going to start with some kvetching. Graduate school was difficult. That's not the part I'm kvetching about, because if you want to learn more about a specific topic than anybody else living or dead, the goal of a PhD, then you're going to need to overcome some difficulties. I didn't mind reading thousands of pages of historiography a week, the coursework, or taking my qualifying exams, a three-day process of writing that, once passed, allowed me to teach undergrad courses.

6:54The dissertation was hard, but it was supposed to be hard, because you're producing original research. Anybody who sails through a PhD in any topic is either way smarter than I am, or isn't trying hard enough. That is, at the end of the day, the purpose of academic history, to produce original research based on primary source material that expands our collective body of knowledge about the past. We lost about half of my graduate school cohort between the first year and the end, and that's pretty typical. One of my very best friends left before finishing, and it was absolutely the right decision for him.

7:30Nobody has to stay in a PhD program, and beware the sunk cost fallacy, which tells you that the time you've spent will be wasted unless you finish the job. That's nonsense. If you've learned things, it's not wasted. And I truly dispute whether having the PhD in hand actually makes folks with a background in the humanities more employable. If I could offer one piece of unsolicited advice, it's to not be afraid to quit something if it's just not working. But I digress. No, my kvetching revolves around the fact that nobody guiding me and my colleagues through

8:04graduate school seemed to have a clear view of what exactly we were being prepared for. The standard answer to that question was jobs in academic history, preferably on the tenure track. To the extent I can evaluate it, the people in charge of my graduate program did a reasonably good job on that front. We were encouraged to publish in academic journals, attend conferences, network with academics who had similar interests, apply for grants and fellowships, and spread our wings to visit new archives and research centers. Here's the problem, though. Those jobs that we were being prepared for no longer existed, at least not enough of

8:40them for all of us, even the half who made it, to have a reasonable shot at getting one. In 2013, a few years before I was set to finish, I went through all the job listings in the United States and counted all the newly minted PhDs in my field, ancient and medieval history. According to my math, there was one tenure track job for 16 new PhDs. Looking honestly at my body of work and the people I knew I'd be competing against for one of those jobs, I realized that my chances of actually getting one were slim to none.

9:14If you want to put all your eggs in a basket with a 6% chance of not shattering, you can be my guest, but I wasn't going to do that. I started looking into other career paths, realizing that at best, academic history was in the midst of a serious downturn, and at worst, I was the equivalent of someone trying to get into horse breeding a few years after the Model T started to roll off the assembly line. Maybe because they already had those jobs or because they were so fully institutionalized into an academic way of working

9:48and thinking, the folks advising me and my colleagues on our career decisions never wrapped their heads around that simple fact. The jobs they were theoretically preparing us for simply did not exist. I mean that literally. There was no amount of work we could do no number of conferences we could present at, no quality of original research we could publish that was ever going to change the fundamental dynamics of the job market. I watched over and over as tenured professors retired and were replaced with adjunct faculty rather than a

10:19tenure track hire. That model was dying before our eyes, and nobody in charge seemed to either realize it or, if they did, to have a plan to work around it for us. They were talking about cover letters rather than alternative careers, and that's always stuck in my craw more than a bit. The actual options were as follows. Number one, to swing for one of those rare tenure track jobs right out of the gate. Two, to try to make yourself a more attractive candidate by doing a postdoctoral fellowship and publishing more. Three, to go into university administration. Four, to start teaching classes as an adjunct, hoping to hold on

10:54at the fringes of the academic job market long enough to get a full-time position. Those options weren't mutually exclusive. Lots of people I knew took adjunct gigs, teaching as many as four classes a semester at four different universities, making maybe $30K a year with no insurance while they applied for jobs. Only a couple of them actually made it out of adjunct purgatory to full-time jobs. A couple are still doing the adjunct stuff, and most have moved on to other careers, because that's simply not viable forever. Watching that happen, I was determined not to waste a few years chasing a dream that didn't exist,

11:26at the end of which lay a job I knew I wasn't going to like or be particularly good at. So I started doing other things. I was a big fan of mixed martial arts and combat sports, so I built a second career on the side as a writer and podcaster covering those sports. Leaving aside the fact that I was doing a job I really enjoyed, talking with other people in the media and making what seemed at the time like decent money, it was a hugely beneficial learning experience. I learned how to do interviews, how to post on social media, how to pitch media outlets, and how to

12:00write for and speak to people who weren't specialists in the material I was covering. Nobody ever said a word about any of that in graduate school, not one word. I learned by watching, talking, and writing about a sport in which people punch one another in the face. The most important thing I learned from face punching, however, was that there will always be a next article, a next podcast episode, a next interview. There was no time or room to be precious about my work. I had to produce content, and that's a much different mindset than being told your goal is producing limited quantities

12:32of original research. That was the shift that had to happen before I could even consider making popular history. I had to get used to the idea of making stuff regularly, with no weeks off and no long breaks at the end of the semester to recharge. Writing one article or appearing on a podcast to talk about history is cool. Having a job in which you create popular history content for people that you can be proud of and which supports your livelihood is a rather more challenging thing. That was where I found myself in August of 2016 when I launched my first history podcast, Fall of Rome.

13:05All of a sudden, I was in a wildly different business than I'd been when I was covering mixed martial arts or slogging through my doctoral program. I had a PhD, but I had only the foggiest idea of what it meant to make history for anyone other than specialists. I was about to get a series of long, difficult lessons in the difference between academia and the rest of the world. Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic-y series.

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14:10Whether you're exploring your current fascinations or discovering new ones, Audible has all the stories that'll introduce you to your most fascinating self. Tap into a whole new world of heated conversations with a saucy romantic-y series. Become your friend group's sci-fi expert on the latest blockbuster book-to-screen adaptation. Or find unexpected reveals through the exclusive episodes of a viral true crime podcast. However you choose to listen, Audible keeps you fascinated so you can be just as fascinating. All in one easy app. With plans now starting at $5.99, you'll get access to over 900,000 audiobooks and podcasts, including trending bestsellers, the hottest new releases, and exclusive podcasts you won't find anywhere else.

14:44Sign up now to become a member and get any audiobook every month plus exclusive podcasts. Plans now start at £5.99. Audible. Be fascinated. Be fascinating. I mentioned earlier that academic history is about creating new knowledge of the past. Digging into archives nobody's been to, finding new insights in texts that scholars have been examining for ages, creating data sets drawn from disparate materials, constructing novel interpretations that reflect a changing view of the source material, and so on. When I started doing popular history with Fall of Rome, I figured that I would just try to communicate this

15:17specialist material to general audiences, cutting through jargon, theory, and disciplinary insularity to convey where we were on these topics and what we should know. That was effective and it's still a really major part of what I do on a day-to-day basis making podcasts and writing books. It's pretty straightforward if not exactly easy. I read what scholars are doing, try to summarize it in reasonably plain language, and then convey what I've learned to you all. This requires me to know how to read academic works in history, archaeology, and related fields, and

15:49then to have the requisite familiarity and control over that material in order to make its meaning clear. But that's just the baseline for making something that's worth listening to. It's not enough to summarize material, no matter how cleverly you do it or how clearly you communicate what it says. That's what became really obvious to me after I started to consume the work of real, honest-to-goodness, highly accomplished popular historians, whatever the medium they preferred. I listened to all of Mike Duncan's history of Rome.

16:20I read all of Dan Jones's books and Roger Crowley's and Barbara Tuchman's. I went through the whole Oxford history of the United States and read every winner of the Pulitzer Prize in history over a couple of decades. If I was going to make popular history, then I was going to properly learn what good popular history looked like and figure out how and why it worked. I was also extraordinarily lucky that my dad, who passed away last year, was the most intense popular history enthusiast

16:50I've ever met. Every single night, he read for about 30 minutes, working through a book or two every month. They were always history. Because he did that for decades, my dad had an extraordinarily well-developed taste in the genre. He knew what he liked to read, and he wasn't shy about telling me what he thought worked and what didn't. Something my dad said early in that process was that he read popular history for the story. That was totally foreign to me at the time. Everything in my training in academic history had implicitly or explicitly

17:24shied away from what was disparagingly referred to as narrative. What I know now is that I was trained at the high watermark of postmodern thought in my discipline, the time when narrative history had hit its lowest point of acceptability among academic historians. I was taught to distrust narrative. The act of putting events in some sort of order, of picking and choosing what to emphasize and what not to, in service of a broader story, was anathema. In fairness, there were some reasonable concerns at play in this discourse.

17:55What even was an event? Could we rely on the texts that have come down to us from hundreds or thousands of years ago to reliably tell us what happened? How could we separate the underlying information in those texts about past events from the author's presentation and interpretation of those events? Those were the kinds of questions that obsessed historians, especially of the early Middle Ages, which is what I was studying, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That's the kind of stuff I was reading in graduate school and unsurprisingly, that's what I internalized.

18:29So imagine my surprise when my dad told me that he was reading these books for the story. It's not that he didn't care about the underlying information. He was happy to learn about the past, but he didn't want to be bored by what he was reading. He wanted a book that was going to hold his interest. Comanche subsistence practices could take up a page or two, but only if the author embedded that information within a narrative about the last Comanche war chief. German industrial capacity before World War I could occupy a few paragraphs, but

19:03it needed to come in the context of a larger story about the lead-up to the outbreak of the war. What kept him engaged and reading was the story, not the information. In that, I think he was something like the median consumer of popular history. It was a profound realization for me, and I realized that I agreed with my dad and that median consumer. It was, therefore, my job to keep readers and listeners engaged, not just inform them. This meant that if I were going to learn how to do popular history properly, I would need to learn

19:39how stories worked. Then, I would have to learn how to tell them. Not to get too philosophical, but we humans are storytelling creatures. We are wired in some profound way to consume information in story form, with an expected structure and format that goes along with that. Children tell stories instinctively, and the disjointed, jarring way their stories often sound to us grown-ups is a result of our more developed understanding of how stories are supposed to work. We shape our memories and offer accounts of events in story format, often unconsciously, so that we barely even realize

20:16we're doing it. But, here's the thing. Most stories aren't all that good, in the sense that they don't hook your interest as a listener, reader, or viewer. They miss a beat or some development comes in the wrong place, or maybe the underlying stuff being discussed just isn't that compelling. Without necessarily realizing it, people tend to have, in my experience, pretty decent taste in the stories they consume. Something about them works on some level. It's easy to denigrate bad storytelling, but bad long-form storytelling on a page

20:49or screen is still orders of magnitude more difficult than telling a ripper of a one-minute yarn about how you fell face-first into not one, but two different bushes in college. Telling stories well at a structural level, what goes where, and how you move through them, is hard. Telling stories that are structurally sound while ensuring that what they're about is also compelling is harder. If you're listening to this, I'd say you're more likely than the average person to have read and enjoyed a

21:21popular history book or five or twenty. Now, think of one or two you've really loved. I'd say my favorite might be Barbara Tuchman's Guns of August about the outbreak of the First World War. I'm guessing a few of you have read it, and it serves well enough as an example here. So, at the very beginning of the book, Tuchman paints us a scene of the old guard of European monarchs at King Edward VII of England's funeral in 1910. These are the opening words of the book.

21:55Quote, So gorgeous was the spectacle on the May morning of 1910 when nine kings rode in the funeral of Edward VII of England that the crowd, waiting in hushed and black-clad awe, could not keep back gasps of admiration. In scarlet and blue and green and purple, three by three the sovereigns rode through the palace gates with plumed helmets, gold braid, crimson sashes, and jeweled orders flashing in the sun. This is beautifully done. Evocative, full of images, a fantastic bit of scene setting to pull in the reader before

22:29Tuchman begins to dig into the real meat of the book in just a few pages. We get the sense that Tuchman could have drawn such a portrait of practically any event, but this is the one she chooses. That choice is meaningful. Tuchman is highlighting exactly what is going to be lost in June, July, and August of 1914 through the cataclysmic events leading up to and just after the opening shots of the war. The old Europe of crowned heads presiding over prosperous, optimistic, industrial juggernauts is about to breathe its last, and the

23:04world that eventually gave us Hitler, concentration camps, and the atomic bomb is about to begin. The whole big-picture argument of the book is present in the opening scene, encapsulated in the unlikely choice of a grand royal funeral as the reader's introduction to that time and place. It's not an image of trenches, a massed infantry attack being scythed down by machine gun fire, or Gavrilo Princip's assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It's the funeral, the cavalcade of gold braid and plumed helmets four years before a

23:37single shot was fired. Now, I'm not saying academic historians are incapable of writing scenes like this. There is some lovely writing out there, even in otherwise dense and specialized monographs. But they're fluff, or a flourish, or a nice thing to be able to do, not a necessity. I have a distinct memory of my dissertation advisor telling me not to write something like this too well, lest readers think I'm trying to cover up substandard argumentation. For popular histories, scenes like this are the whole point of

24:09the book. They're the hooks that pull in the audience, the anchors that keep the story as a whole grounded, and signifiers of the craft that keeps readers engaged with the subject matter for hundreds of pages. Tuchman understood that at a cellular level. It's why she sold so many millions of books. How and why that scene works in the way it does is the essence of what I had to learn about making popular history. I'm Raza Jaffrey, and in the new season of The Spy Who, we tell the story

24:41of Dr. A.Q. Khan, the spy who sold nuclear secrets to Iran. He was the scientist spy who stole nuclear technology from the Netherlands and used them to give Pakistan a bomb. But he didn't stop there. He became a black market atomic salesman, a fix-it man for rogue states seeking nuclear weapons, including Iran, Libya, and North Korea. And that left the CIA and MI6 in a race against time to put him out of business before the world's most wayward regimes get hold of the world's most destructive weapons.

25:13follow The Spy Who now wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also listen to the full season of The Spy Who Sold Nuclear Secrets to Iran early and at free on Audible. I'm Leon Nafok, best known as the host and co-creator of podcasts Slow Burn, Fiasco, and Think Twice Michael Jackson. I'm here to tell you about my show Final Thoughts Jerry Springer, whose name is synonymous with outrageous guests, taboo confessions, and vicious onstage fights. But before The Jerry Springer Show became a symbol of cultural decline,

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26:19Start your Audible subscription in the Audible app. Every scripted episode of Tides of History begins with a scene for precisely the reason Guns of August begins with its depiction of Edward VII's funeral. Because it's my job as the writer to grab the listener's attention and ideally not relinquish it until the episode is over. Listeners and readers do not owe me their time. They can close the book, exit the podcast app, write a negative review, delete their subscriptions to the Patreon, send me an angry email, and tell everyone they've ever met that my work is garbage.

26:54On a really basic level, academic histories are not subject to those pressures. Graduate students will need to read that monograph, a single topic book, on imperial ideology in the Roman Empire, whether it is a delightfully written, engaging 300 pages or the worst slog you've ever imagined, as long as the arguments are good enough. Scholars will engage with essential arguments contained in books without anything like a narrative or any meaningful attempt to interest the reader because it's their job to understand the underlying material and make their own arguments about

27:26it. Reading these books can be fun and interesting, but that's not a requirement, and I've read more than a few that took my advisors' ideas about not writing too well to their logical and incredibly boring conclusion. Students can get up and leave the lecture hall if it's stultifying, but their grades will suffer. In some sense, the audience for these works has to be there. We've established that popular history and academic history are aimed at very different goals. Engaging and informing an audience on the one hand and producing original insights about the past from new research on

28:01the other. Those goals aren't necessarily in opposition to one another, but it's also not hard to see how they lead to strikingly different priorities in everything from framing a project to its final execution. The best work in both genres, however, utilizes the other to meet its core goals. Academic histories benefit when they consider the reader's interest and genuinely try to keep it because the argument, the intervention in a field of scholarship, sticks better. Popular histories are far more worthwhile and lasting when they engage with academic

28:32work on their topic in a deep, sustained fashion. Not just because that means the reader gets better information, but because it makes the story itself more compelling. That's why some of the very best popular histories have been written by academic historians. Their knowledge of the underlying world is so complete that their subjects seem to glide through it. The Oxford History of the United States series, which includes books like Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson and The Republic for Which It Stands by Richard White, really exemplifies the best possibilities here.

29:06But there are plenty of less compelling ways of doing the job. As a narrative that held my interest, I absolutely loved Empire of the Summer Moon by S.C. Gwynn, which was a finalist for the non-fiction Pulitzer back in 2011. It's the story of the last Comanche war chief, Quanah Parker, and the Comanche as a whole as they clashed with the United States government in the second half of the 19th century. As the story of Quanah Parker and his family, this book is borderline riveting, conveying the experiences of abduction, escape,

29:39and cultural adoption through a personal lens. As history, however, and particularly a history of the Comanche, it's somewhere between disappointing and hot garbage. The reason for that is straightforward. However much work Gwynn put in on the story of Quanah Parker, the book doesn't engage with any recent scholarship on the Comanche and their world. For its accounts of the Comanche, Empire of the Summer Moon relies on a book that was decades out of date when Gwynn was writing in the late 2000s.

30:09That source book itself was written by an amateur historian, not a specialist in Comanche history and culture. Gwynn's ideas about who the Comanche were, what they did, and what they valued are so reductive and basic that they're flat out wrong. I've been told reliably that Comanches today hate Empire of the Summer Moon and it's not hard to see why. Since I first read Empire of the Summer Moon at the time of its release, I've read a lot more about the Comanche and the indigenous peoples of the Americas more broadly.

30:42Knowing what I know now, I cannot believe I ever liked the book at all. Most popular audiences, however, do not have the luxury of the time or the background that I do. Empire of the Summer Moon is a reasonably fair example of the failings of the genre. We could talk about Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, another book that a lot of folks loved and I hated for precisely the same reasons. But the worst offenders are the so-called big-thinking books, like Yuval Noah Harari's Sapiens, where the

31:14author makes a claim to authority but then clearly demonstrates they haven't actually done much reading on the topics they're supposed to know well. I'm going to take you behind the curtain here for a moment and tell you how mechanically books like that are usually made. The named author, Harari is one, Niall Ferguson is another I'd put in this category, and I'm not sure Malcolm Gladwell even rises to that level, isn't usually doing the research themselves. Instead, they have a coterie of research assistants, usually poorly paid graduate students, gathering citations, doing the reading, and then

31:49summarizing it for that named author. There's no guarantee that those grad student researchers, if that is indeed what they are, have any specific knowledge of the topics they're investigating on the author's behalf, and in fact, I'd say that's usually not the case. There's also no guarantee that the author has made much of an effort to read the notes they've been given, whatever their quality. Now, to be clear, this is not a knock on having researchers. I've done plenty of paid research for scholars I respect, and I've occasionally had people gathering research materials for me

32:24over the years. Shout out to Noah Suarez-Sykes and Harrison Diskin, both of whom did great stuff for Tides in years now long past. My objection is to not doing the work yourself, assuming that a cursory glance over materials prepared by other people are enough for you to write and speak knowledgeably about the topic in question. Researchers are a means of saving time and labor for things you don't have time to do, and in my opinion, if you don't have time to properly understand your subject matter, you shouldn't be writing the dang book in

32:59the first place. A lot of these big-thinking authors are fundamentally brands selling a particular form of social currency. Read their book and you, too, will be able to sound knowledgeable to people who don't know anything about the topic. If that's your dream, then I'm not going to yuck your yum, but my guess is that if you're listening to this, it's probably not enough for you. That's not learning, it's signaling, and as much as I blame consumers for wanting that product, I'm also going to feel perfectly free to blame the authors for happily making it

33:33and then slapping themselves on the back for doing so all the way to the TED Talk. I'm pretty convinced that there's a better path. It's one that the authors and podcasters whose work I've enjoyed follow, and again, without slapping my own self on the back too hard, it's basically what I've tried to do over the past decade of making podcasts and writing books. To be as up-to-date as possible on the specialist academic work on a given topic, and then try to place the information I've gleaned from that research into a narrative format

34:07that can hold the listeners or readers' attention. That's why I like composite characters, because the path of their life provides us with a basic story structure for all the rest of that information. It gives the work a spine, so to speak, or a foundation on which you can build. But whether there's a composite character or not, every single episode has to have a narrative spine of some sort. There has to be a story of an ethnic group, an archaeological culture, a conflict, or a portion of a

34:39famous person's life. Something to make all that information cohere and fall into place in ways that make sense to the audience. But from my perspective, it doesn't matter how good the story is if you're relying on out-of-date or incomplete research to build out the setting for your story. Popular history is still history, and it has to get the history part right to have any claim to the genre. Getting it right means reading the specialist work, talking to people who spend their whole lives working on the

35:10topic, and having enough command of the material to speak with those people in the native language of their field. Whatever the subject is, as the saying goes, there is always a literature on it. Credit markets in early modern Europe, brewing in ancient Mesopotamia, baking in imperial Rome, the sex trade in classical Greece, the evolution of the bacterium that caused the Black Death. Now, you don't have to break due ground with original research on any given area, but you do need to understand what we know and what we don't. Your story, the craft you put into researching, organizing, and telling it,

35:47is your original contribution as a popular historian. In an ideal world, academic history is the essential raw material that popular history requires to function, while popular history provides oxygen and audiences for academic history. The two can and should exist in a kind of symbiosis, knowing their separate roles and goals, but communicating and growing together. A lot of people aren't interested, but many people actually do like history. They like reading about it, watching documentaries on it, listening to podcasts about it, studying it in college, talking about

36:18it with their friends, and visiting historical sites. There is an audience. If you're an academic, you should want people to know about the interesting, important things you're discovering about the past. If you're making popular history content of any kind, you should want to get the material right, whatever value you might be adding in story or presentation. That's what I've tried to do for a long time, both here on Tides and elsewhere, and I think it's worked pretty dang well. Next time on Tides of History, we'll talk about some of the broad insights about the past that I've gleaned

36:54from making this show over the past nine years, about the forces that drive history, how we can know about it, and why it matters. Follow Tides of History on the Audible app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to all episodes of Tides of History ad-free by joining Audible. Tides of History is written and narrated by me, Patrick Wyman. Sound design by Molly Bach for Airship. The sound engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Tides of History is produced by Morgan Jaffe. From Audible, the executive producers are Jenny Lower Beckman and Marshall Louie.

37:28Thanks again for listening. Until next time, from Audible, this has been Tides of History.