About Mike Duncan and his History of Rome: for what he sets out to accomplish, I thought his podcast was an enjoyable way to take in some Roman history. You just have to be aware of his limited scope at the get-go. His podcast is built around telling a chronological story of high politics from the early days of Rome to the fifth century AD. This is a perfectly worthy goal, but it tends thus to be a parade of consuls and emperors, civil and foreign wars, and not much else. Ok, maybe some palace intrigue too. He's at his best when he's got a good source to work with: hard to be uninteresting when retelling great anecdotes from Livy, for example. But all the way through, he presents a nice and coherent and often entertaining narrative of high politics, and his choices and interpretations tend to stick close to the source material and/or mainstream opinion. His narrow focus on the very top of society of course means that great heaps of interesting Roman topics hardly or never come up. But as a nice and sensible introduction to some of the big players in Roman history, I think it's a good way to go. While he's not presenting a very complex picture of the Roman world, I think the podcast works as a great entry point to the subject. He's a good storyteller and not going to lead you astray or into crackpot interpretations. I think, within its limits, the History of Rome is a very successful bit of work.

there's a section on the askhistorians wiki about Dan Carlin and those comments often segway into talks about history podcasts more generally. That being said i think there is a small but potentially important difference between Carlin's approach and a more by the numbers narrative.

see also this thread

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/33rpmn/i_want_to_learn_by_listening_what_history/

which includes a good amount of this sort of discussion

I think they are generally pretty upfront with how much work they've done. For instance this is basically what Mike Duncan reads for his revolutions podcast

http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/bibliography.html

He's someone without a deep academic background in the subject but who has read a decent amount about the subject and attempts to synthesize and present the information. These sorts of podcasts are pretty factually accurate though they may not give the full picture and may have questionable interpretations.

contrasting to that you have something like "stuff you missed in history class" which can be enjoyable but often feels pulled together from wikipedia and a few other sources (which sometimes is made explicit). For an American political history podcast (my roundhouse) of this sort I've listened to a couple of episodes and I've found fairly important bad history/lazy surface interpretation there.

The key question is, as always, what's the alternative? Good narrative history podcasts mostly function as pseudo "pop history" books and there is real value in reading/listening to those! Once you establish a core of knowledge its much easier to dig into subjects more critically.

askhistorians flair /u/cthulhushrugged runs the great history of China podcast and /u/bemonk runs a few different podcasts. I'd love to hear his thoughts and perhaps that's actually a good way of framing my answer: after they get their sea legs good history podcasts could be seen as

From a personal anecdotal pov: I listened to Mike Duncan's history of Rome podcast knowing nothing about the topic and later took a university course on roman history. I found the podcast very useful in giving me a basic understanding of Roman history/the timeline of Rome and where everything fit relative to each other even if I came away from the course fairly critical of his description of the time period the class focused on.

tl;dr For "higher quality" history podcasts I'd say this is very useful

i recommend the great courses on audible if you want your pods delivered by professional historians instead of a proffesional podcaster. it is just a recorded lecture series. they have everything from the vikings to turning points in american history to a deeper look at winston churchill or islam. i listened to their history of rome one on a road trip and enjoyed it but you should know duncan and carlin make it more interesting, but not significantly.

Follow up question: Any thoughts on The Great War youtube channel? It goes through WW1 week by week and has many special episodes on topics like weapons, tactics and proporganda

Of course it is!! No doubt whatsoever in general. In the specific shows though, not all are created equal. Some are well sourced and cited, others just read wikipedia (same as here, now that I think about it).

But not everyone's a reader, not everyone wants to sit in front of a tv and watch documentaries; but who can't listen to some history while driving, doing chores around the house, or pretty much anything else? History podcasts absolutely rock!

AskHistorians even has it's own podcast! So we're a little biased here. Oh, in fact I do about 6-7 history podcasts myself, over the course of the last few years, so why not check out http://podcastnik.com

What? did you think I was going to say history podcasts suck? They're the absolute, very best. Almost as good as /r/AskHistorians itself :)