By There's no end of podcasts where someone reads some surprising story to their co-host, who cracks wise and asks the dumb questions you'd probably want to ask in the same position. They're usually white blokes. It's the spine of the podcasting universe. Let's call it The Dollop Paradigm.
This isn't to do down the Dollop, which is ace, but there are loads more podcasts out there exploring untold and unseen stories which you probably never picked up in school. That's where history podcasting really comes into its own.
The BBC has absolutely tons of great history podcasts like In Our Time, You're Dead To Me, 13 Minutes to the Moon and The Bomb, but they're not here. They're over in our BBC podcast roundup, which is right here instead. If you're after something totally different and just wandered in here by accident, the best comedy podcasts are over here and the best true crime podcasts are here. If you fancy just browsing a bit if everything, the masterlist of the best podcasts this year is right here.
The Rest is History
The big beast of British history podcasts, and the first brick in the wall of the The Rest Is... powerhouse which Gary Lineker's Goalhanger productions is proving to be. Historians Dominic Sandbrook (expert on Richard Nixon and Britain in the 20th century, and possessed of a frankly frightening knowledge of public schools) and Tom Holland (expert on the history of Christianity and Ancient Rome, plus part-time cricketer and enthusiastic user of the word 'sacral') are far more inclined to go down the byways of history from the Neolithic to the present rather than spend all their time doing World War Two: you're more likely to hear them talking about the USA's coup in Chile
Human Resources
The reliably excellent Broccoli Productions explores the lingering links between the transatlantic slave trade and modern Britain. If you want to make sense of the ongoing push to decolonise areas of public life and reckon with Britain's role in the slave trade – spoiler alert: we were pretty keen on it for a long time – then this is an engaging, typically thoughtful way of doing it. Moya Lothian-Mclean, journalist and descendent of both Black African enslaved people and white slave owners, presents and takes us on a journey which starts at Lady Hawkin's School in Herefordshire – named for the wife of Britain's first slave trader.
Kink!
Sex educator Alix Fox hosts Audible's funny, thoughtful and unblushing dive into the world of sex subcultures through time. It's a warm and empathetic listen which starts out asking simple questions about what exactly kinks are and why they exist, before heading into exactly what's happening in the brain and, more importantly, what our kinks say about the society we live in. That means, among many other things, celebrating the subversive power which leather bar culture gave some gay men in the Seventies, and learning exactly how kinky things in the Middle Ages, Georgian and Victorian eras actually were. The answer: very.
Transmissions: The Definitive Story of Joy Division and New Order
Given quite how rife with myth, legend, recrimination and petty legacy-claiming the 45-year history of Joy Divison/New Order is, it’s a minor miracle that an official line has been put together, but here we are. All of the band are involved via new interviews – yes, even Hooky – and Maxine Peake narrates the story from their earliest days in the Manchester suburbs, plus there are contributions from famous fans including Bono, Shaun Ryder, Damon Albarn, Johnny Marr, Liam Gallagher, Karen O and more.
Crossfire
However you feel about the Telegraph's cheerleading for Boris Johnson over the last few years, it's still full of proper journalists who know what they're doing, and they've produced this explosive account of the saga over Russia's involvement in Donald Trump's election in 2016. Britain was at the centre of some key moments – even the name of the FBI's investigation had a British connection: 'Crossfire Hurricane', from the Rolling Stones song 'Jumpin' Jack Flash' – and this six-part series explores them using first-hand testimony.
You're Wrong About
Not strictly a history podcast only, but a podcast which demystifies and reexamines figures and events from the recent-ish past who've been miscast or misunderstand. The Huffington Post's Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall, who's working on a book about the Satanic panic of the mid-Eighties, pull apart the myths and perceived wisdoms of stuff as disparate as Princess Diana, OJ Simpson, the break-up of the Beatles, the millennium bug, Marie Antoinette and killer clowns. It's a history podcast, but one that's about why reputations form and how they solidify around events rather than just the events themselves.
The Frost Tapes
David Frost's classic interviews are always worth another listen. Yes, it's archive, but the value of these longform interviews is in their sudden relevance to everything happening now: there's vintage Frost talking to Joe Biden in 1987, for instance, and the last long interview Bobby Kennedy gave in 1968 diagnoses America's faults and neuroses in a way that suggests less has changed in the last 50 years than we'd prefer to think. Elsewhere there are collections of interviews around tensions between Black communities and the police, how to protest, and women forcing their way forward in industries dominated by men.
Wind of Change
Everyone likes a good unsubstantiated conspiracy theory. How about the one that says metal band the Scorpions’ huge 1990 hit ‘Winds of Change’ was actually written by the FBI to destroy the Soviet Union. Mission accomplished, lads. Patrick Radden Keefe, of the New Yorker, goes digging to find out exactly how true it is and where the rumour came from in the first place. Other episodes in the eight-part series will explore more stories of US government meddling in music, including whether a 1961 Nina Simone gig was actually a front for the CIA.
The Anthill
This is the podcast from The Conversation which, if you're unfamiliar, is where academics bring expertise, new research and big-picture thinking to issues that are in the news and could do with a bit of circumspect analysis from people outside the news cycle. Its latest series is all about recovery, and looks back to times when things have got a bit spicy for humanity at large before now – the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, the Soviet collapse – and what lessons we can learn from the rebuilding that followed as we try to sort ourselves out now.
The Rise of the Iron Men
Following the excellent 'Putin: Prisoner of Power', about the rise and rise of Russia’s resident strongman, McMafia author Misha Glenny expands his view to take in six more of the world’s new slew of authoritarian right-wing rulers and explain how the populists claimed and consolidated power. Like 'Prisoner of Power', this is built on Glenny’s storytelling and excellent first-hand interviews that dig into the regimes of Victor Orban, Rodrigo Duterte, Donald Trump, Recip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi and Boris Johnson.
Blind Spot: The Road to 9/11
Not a cheery listen, no. But the most illuminating histories start with the assumption that nothing is inevitable, and given how long and dark the shadow of the attacks on the World Trade Centre is it’s important to remember that they were no different to any other huge moment in world history. Over eight episodes, original reporting and interviews with more than 60 FBI agents, high level bureaucrats, journalists, experts and people who knew the terrorists themselves retell the story. There’s no time as distant as the recent past, as they say.
The Fault Line: Bush, Blair and Iraq
If you thought there was little to add to Jez Usborne’s searing analysis of the Bush and Blair years on Peep Show (“Fuck you, Bush. It’s time to get out of Iraq, Bush. What were you even doing there in the first place, Bush?”) then you were wrong. David Dimbleby presents this examination of the 18 months leading up to the start of the Iraq war and interviews many of the major players: Blair himself, then-Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and CIA agent Bill Murray (not that one) are among those cross-examined. It’s about the war, but it’s also about how states make decisions at times of crisis.
The Log Books
Before King’s Cross was all Thomas Heatherwick swoops and beer cafés, it was rundown and slightly nefarious, and a place where people shunted to the edges of 1970s and 80s Britain congregated. Underneath Housmans Bookshop on Caledonian Road in 1974, a group of gay liberation activists set up a phone line offering advice about gender identity and sexuality called Gay Switchboard, and it’s still running as the charity Switchboard.
Tash Walker and Adam Smith delved into its archives – the log books of the name – which hold details of all the questions, conversations and worries of Britain’s LGBTQ communities at the time. It’s a fascinating social history which helps to assert the vibrancy and humanity of people who were routinely ignored or attacked at the time, and the second season is coming soon.
Queen Mary History of Emotions
The Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary’s is a uni department with an extremely good name, and an appropriately excellent podcast. Its recent The Sound of Anger strand, which won gold in the Wellbeing category at this year’s British Podcast Awards, takes an experimental and multi-layered approach to what anger means and why we need it. Lately it’s switched back to a shortform series with sub-10-minute biographies of emotions including nostalgia, Schadenfreude and loneliness.
Slow Burn: David Duke
The story of KKK member and politician David Duke is never not relevant to America’s conversation on race, but since the death of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and the Black Lives Matter protests, the subject of Slow Burn’s fourth series is almost hauntingly prescient. The idea is to retell historic episodes – Watergate, the Lewinsky affair, the deaths of Biggy and Tupac – without imposing hindsight on the narrative. You're guided through reaction to events as they happened at the time, turning up forgotten pivot points and, in the case of Duke, making clear that his positioning as a champion for resentful ‘forgotten’ whites foreshadowed the current political maelstrom.
Cautionary Tales
Why do we make bad decisions? Is it just a lack of good judgement? Or are our brains hardwired to let us down? Tim Harford's retellings of disasters caused by one catastrophically poor choice suggest it's the latter, but there are lessons about how we live our lives day to day to be learned from them. For instance, the really very, very bad idea of steering a supertanker toward a dangerous reef becomes a parable about not being blinded by the pursuit of a goal, and a story about the time a band of soldiers were gulled into completing a heist digs into how we instinctively trust authority figures. Alan Cumming and Russell Tovey are among the cast for reconstructions.
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