Crash Course World History is a video series a few of my teachers had us watching to condense a large subject, like the French Revolution, down to our average level of thinking. I've shown my ten-year-old niece quite a few episodes as well, and she enjoys and understands it.
How well does it hold up? Do you have any objections to it? Anything to comment on?
Since you're asking how we feel about it and not explicitly whether or not the information is accurate, I'll throw in my 2 cents. First of all I have to give credit to crash course because their bite-sized and colorful medium make their content easy to consume. Considering the videos sometimes cover topics spanning many centuries in only a few minutes, the target audience is clearly people who don't know much about world history. For such an audience, it's extremely important to be able to keep the content quick and general. When I stumbled on to his videos as a young adult, their quick style and colorful graphics kept me hooked, and watching the entire series definitely left me feeling a fascination with history and a desire to learn more. Overall, I'd say if you're trying to get a young person interested in history, it's a great place to start.
However, as someone who's been studying history as a hobby for a few years since watching the videos, looking back now there are definitely a few issues I could point to. The first one is Jon himself. He seems like a genuine guy, but his own worldview definitely influences how he relays the informaton. You can probably tell within a few videos that he's a pretty progressive guy. Nothing wrong with that, but it shows up as a bias in the way he presents some things. When he does a presentation on the mongols, he really tries to dispell the "barbarian" stereotype, focusing instead on how they connected west & east, how influential they were politically, how tolerant they were religiously, etc. Then in passing remarks he'll scoff at the Romans for the way they treated women, ignoring the fact that women in Rome were treated better than in many comparable societies, like Greece. Overall it's really not a big deal, but you kind of get the sense that he's much harsher in judging "western" cultures than those of the east, most likely influenced by a subconscious desire to be progressive or politically correct.
Jon also sometimes comes off as a bit smug with the way he talks, which is usually used in a sort of tongue in cheek way of bringing comedic relief to the audience. It's understandable, but history can be a rather subjective field, and being overly confident or smug in the way you relay information, especially when some historians might disagree, serves more to make the audience laugh than to encourage open-minded discourse.
Perhaps the biggest problem with the show is also its strength- it's bite sized format. A thousand years of Roman history just don't fit into a 10 minute video. Plain and simple. Any information you take away from a video like that may be true for one period in the empire, but not another. Glossing over centuries and the lives of millions just doesn't produce a nuanced view of history. There's a reason people can dedicate their lives to studying just a short period in the history of any civilization, these things can be almost irreducibly complex. So I would say the videos can be a fun starting point to jump into the world of history and get a feel for things, but certainly shouldn't be taken authoritatively.
Edit- This post got me thinking about crash course so I went and watched the video on Rome and the video on the Mongols. In the video about the Mongols Jon quotes the famous Genghis khan line "The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms." In reality, this quote is disputed and many people doubt the Khan ever said it. Similarly, in the video on Rome Jon mentions that Caesar was born of a Cesarean section, again, almost certainly not true. Cesarean sections in the ancient world were a last resort to save the baby when it seemed the mother and child wouldnt survive the birthing, and the mother almost always died from the procedure. Caesar's mother was alive for much of his life. He also says that most historians agree that the death toll of the mongol conquests was "in the millions." Considering the actual postulated numbers are usually between 40 and 70 million it's.... a bit of an understatement. We're talking up to 5% of the global population at the time, killed.
Its not a bad place for a beginner-- a place to get a taste of history-- or to brush up very broadly on a topic. I've known other faculty who use them as supplemental material or a resource for students to use when they just don't understand a topic in class.
Like /u/Bunyardz says though, you lose a lot of depth in order to condense complex topics down into bit size morsels. We usually debate this in class at some point-- the effectiveness of reduction-- usually though memes or other tools wherein complex stories like Spanish conquest of the new world, or child labour during 19th century industrialization, are boiled down to an image and a line or two of text with an often overtly political bias. (we also take on things like mass media presentations and fictionalizations). Yet, in even in the class I reference, a World History Class, I warn students about the lack of depth in what we cover; that we will stop and tell interesting micro stories sometimes, but for the most part, every single topic, even ones we spend just a day on-- or half a day in the case of the French Revolution (as it shares the stage with Pacific voyaging and the Haitian revolution)-- could be an entire semester's course (or even an entire career). I usually suggest thinking of these broad overviews as menus to find and pick out the topics that interest students and then pursue them.
Crash Course videos exist in that same vein-- they are like appetizers meant to whet your appetite for more.
Certainly some value in the series but I think there is a pretty low standard for it because its short and any attention given to history that's not horrible is seen as a good thing by the community.
Because I'm not a fan I've only seen about a dozen of the videos (which isn't that much compared to the total) so I can only draw criticism from what I've seen:
Dark Ages Video had some serous problems with his comment on how social mobility was low and his generally strict drawing of the difference between peasants and nobility contradicts the evidence. There was also a failure to engage with the substance of why historians avoid value judgments in periodizations.
His "Mongols are the exception" bit is sometimes inaccurate and I'm not a fan of that sort of "quirky" history act since is sacrifices accuracy trying to be weird in a good way. For example he perpetuates the "Afghanistan is the Graveyard of Empires" myth that's been addressed in this subreddit a few times.
He also has a bit of a noble savage thing going on when talking about hunter gatherer societies and civilization.
Those are from the videos I did watch. Since I didn't enjoy or learn from them I avoided the rest so I can only say so much but I would give a word of caution to those who take them too seriously.
I think it also depends on your view of casual history, how stringent should we be considering its better than nothing? What standards should we have for pop history?
That being said I enjoyed his economic videos a lot more so its not like I hate the guy too much.