Public History is not Pseudo-History
A rebuttal to: The Dangerous Rise of the Podcast Historians from The Atlantic
Recently Arash Azizi wrote an article for The Atlantic titled: The Dangerous Rise of the Podcast Historians, which starts off strong. I was nodded along at the subtitle which summarized the article as “If professional scholars don’t engage the public, charlatans and Holocaust deniers certainly will.”
As it turns out, it summarized the article poorly.
First of all, his complaint centers around…*checks notes* podcasters and writers who are not, in fact, historians. Starting with Darryl Cooper, a known Holocaust denier who was recently a guest on Tucker Carlson’s show (the first red flag to know this guy wasn’t actually a historian). It isn’t the rise of “Podcast Historians” that we should fear, it’s the long-term platforming of pseudo-historians that has been a problem since long before the internet, podcasts, or TikTok existed.
From Graham Hancock’s absurd “Ancient Aliens” schtick to that one nut on TikTok who claims the Roman Empire was an invention of the Catholic church, there have always been pseudo-historians, and when you scratch the surface of their pseudo-history theories, you’ll usually find white supremacy at their core.
This makes this article in The Atlantic a problem from the title onward.
That said, let’s discuss my major gripe with the article.
In the midst of deriding Cooper’s pseudo-history and the popularity of pseudo-history on online platforms, Azizi write this:
Writing in Cosmopolitan magazine, a teacher from California recently celebrated this supposed democratization of the public sphere. She praised TikTok for offering “women and non-white scholars direct access to an audience and a platform that encourages collaboration, while dismantling much of the tedious, inaccessible, othering BS of the Ivory Tower.” But TikTok’s algorithm privileges sensationalism—even the Cosmopolitan author conceded that “a video on Jack the Ripper might pay off, but one on Middle Eastern art may not.”
To be fully transparent, a big chunk of my frustration with this article stems from the fact that I know the “teacher from California” and I am actually named in this article (alongside various other public historians I know) and I feel that the way Azizi chooses to comment on the article (and context in which he places the article in his own) is close to defamatory in reference to the work that “women and non-white scholars” are doing in democratizing access to historical content.
So yeah…
The placement in the article puts the creators mentioned in the same echelon as the Coopers, Rogans, and Hancocks, even if that’s not what the author intended to do.
Though paragraphs like this make me feel it was intentional.
Far from making audiences more informed, a world dominated by TikTok and “popular historians” is rife with pseudo-historical revisionism such as Cooper’s. People presenting themselves as authorities play on prejudices and replace complex and multifaceted accounts with simple, scapegoating answers. Actual historians find themselves at a disadvantage when they try to confront sensationalist pseudo-scholarship online.
It is true that what other public historians and I do with our public engagement does not “pass through editorial or vetting processes,” but that does not make it pseudo-history. Peer review certainly has its place, but the idea that historians cannot share their work or research unless it has passed through some review mechanism is absurd. Of course, we have to do research, share sources, and be open to correction just as anyone in academia should be, but to imply that somehow teaching history through a podcast or TikTok is inherently “shortcut learning” or peddling pseudo-history minimizes and insults our work as public historians.
I know dozens of historians (both with and without letters after their names because we don’t gatekeep good historical research in this house) who are actively working to engage with the public using those exact same platforms that he derides.
And yes, it’s an uphill battle. I have around 18k followers on TikTok, and my videos, depending on the topic, are lucky to have 500-5,000 views. For every quality historian struggling to share nuanced and researched views on history, there are a half dozen pseudo-historians in party city costumes and another half dozen white supremacists making incendiary and poorly researched “history” content. That sucks, I agree.
That doesn’t mean that we abandon the entire platform of online education because it’s an uphill battle. Azizi believes the solution is to “restore the place of reading—and therefore the primacy of real scholarship—in American education,” which seems like a far more uphill battle than the fight to create accessible history content where the eyes already are.
According to Pew Research, an increasing number of Americans (nearly a third of those between 18 and 29) are getting their news and other information from TikTok.
In the Gen Z Podcast Listener Report from Edison Research, they found that “Gen Z's monthly podcast listening has risen by 57% over the past five years.”
This isn’t some temporary trend we can just ignore. If historians abdicate our responsibility to the public sphere, we will fail.
It is the ultimate irony that the conclusion of this article says this:
Doing so would require academics to leave their narrow cocoons and boldly engage the public and its narrative wars. For decades, scholars in the humanities have tended to put little effort into writing for the public or trying to speak to crowds beyond their immediate surroundings.
…
Similarly, in 2019, Jill Lepore took her fellow American historians to task for leaving the work of constructing a national narrative to “charlatans, stooges and tyrants” since the 1970s.
How Azizi can unironically end his article with a call for actual historians to step out of their “narrow cocoons” after spending several paragraphs minimizing and deriding the work that is already being done by historians online would be hilarious if it wasn’t so confusing.
While he isn’t wrong that pseudo-history is a problem and that it has an unfair advantage online with its click-bait approach to “history,” he is wrong that we should abandon these platforms and try to pretend that we can force historical education back into the traditional box of textbooks and classrooms. That war was lost on February 14th, 2005, when YouTube first came online.
We either adapt or hand digital engagement with history over to Joe Rogan and Daryl Cooper. I, for one, can’t accept that.
I’d like to end this article with a list of fantastic content creators creating quality history and humanities content on TikTok. This list is by no means complete, but it includes folks I have spent a lot of time talking to and working with over the past few years since I started making content of my own.
And honestly so so many more that I am probably forgetting.
We’re in this fight together and we aren’t going to give up.