This subreddit has previously been asked about thoughts on Dan Carlin, with some interesting responses (although that post is now seven years old). However, I'm interested in a more narrow question - how is his content from an accuracy perspective? When he represents facts, are they generally accepted historical facts? When he presents particular narratives, are they generally accepted narratives? When he characterizes ongoing debates among historians, are those characterizations accurate? Etc.
Let's talk Caesar at Hastings. While it's a heavily speculative episode, I think it highlights Carlin's weakness when it comes to history quite well, since the speculation relies on his ability to read and analyze academic history. Let's start with the bibliography for the episode:
As you can see, there's a grand total of one current academic work on the Normans, supplemented by an Osprey book from the 1980s and a chapter in John Lynn's book (and Lynn is not an expert on medieval warfare). There aren't any primary sources on the Battle of Hastings, or any other Norman battle, there isn't a biography of William the Conqueror, there isn't an academic work specifically on Norman warfare and there isn't even a book on the Battle of Hastings itself. Caesar, though? He gets a biography, primary sources, a recently published book on the Roman military, a chapter in Lynn's book and Hans Delbruck.
It's not like there aren't a lot of books that focus on the Normans or medieval warfare in general. Clifford J. Rogers' excellent Soldiers' Lives Through History: The Middle Ages uses Hastings as a model battle, following it through the various stages of battle in a "Face of Battle" style reconstruction, Stephen Morillo has edited and translated a collection of primary sources and articles on the battle (The Battle of Hastings: Sources and Interpretations), Matthew Strickland's Anglo-Norman Warfare has many excellent articles, including several on Hastings and William in particular, and M.K. Lawson's book on Hastings has been free for some years now.
As an aside, although I'm not a student of Caesar or late Republican warfare, Graham Webster's The Roman Invasion of Britain, Sam Koon's Infantry Combat in Livy's Battle Narratives and Michael J. Taylor's Visual Evidence for Roman Infantry Tactics would not have been amiss, either.
When constructing the battle, Carlin gives Caesar more than twice as many soldiers as William (25 000 legionaries and 2000 cavalry vs 11-12 000 men total for William), rather than using Caesar's first invasion force (hypothetically ~10 000 legionaries), and not only has Caesar land first, but gives him time to chose his position and fortify it. Right from the start we see Carlin stacking the odds in Caesar's favour, and as the episode goes on it becomes more and more clear that he started the episode thinking Caesar would win and then shaped the entire episode around this outcome. This isn't the first or most harmful time he's done this, as /u/libertat breaks down re: Carlin's claims of a Celtic genocide, but it does show the problem with Carlin. He doesn't approach the episodes from a research driven point of view, but a combination of "what books can I get my hands on by tomorrow, regardless of their quality" and "here's what I think, now how do I prove it?".
In this case, the end result is the Normans being entirely ignorant of Caesar (in spite of William of Poitiers making multiple allusions to Caesar's invasion of Britain), the Normans are incapable of doing anything except engaging in a pitched battle against superior numbers (despite William's military career so far revolving around him not engaging in pitched battle against superior numbers, but harassing them until he could strike a telling blow), the Romans miraculously have more skirmishers than the Normans (five thousand, despite Caesar not having any when he invaded Britain), William's archers just stand there and don't shoot back at Caesar's skirmishers, the Norman bows are "weak as anything", the Norman infantry are incapable of moving without their formation disintegrating and the Gallic cavalry have just been hiding the whole time and only appear at the end to deliver the coup de grâce (which is not how Caesar used his cavalry). This might not be bad history, the scenario being speculative, but it is bad interpretation of history.
TL:DR
Not only doesn't Carlin do sufficient research with the appropriate sources, but he tends to approach his episodes with an endpoint in mind, and then focuses on ensuring his research fits that narrative rather than building a narrative from the research.
"Could we be able to suck up the kind of casualties they could? Could we handle that?" Dan Carlin, episode 33, Hardcore History, Old School Toughness
Today was the first time I've ever listened to an episode of Hardcore History, despite listening to several hours of history podcasts a week (shoutout to the AH podcast!) and recording my own. Meanwhile, if I'm going to listen to 5+ hours on the same historical topic, I'm going to listen to an audiobook on that topic, not a podcast, especially one who is known for declaring "I'm not a historian" and thinking modern historians don't offer their opinions or takes on history* (I attended a talk of his at an educational podcast conference in 2018 where he made the claim. You can watch it here, the thoughts he expresses in the first chunk are very similar to what he says in episode 33.)
So, I'm not going to make the claim that his podcasts are bad as I only listened to a few. I'm not going to say his historiographical practices are less than ideal - because he says that himself and it's mentioned in that older thread. And I'm not going to pretend I have a neutral take on his podcasts, especially episode 31, which is in my wheelhouse. I do, though, want to speak to some tensions about the way he approaches narratives and how that relates to accuracy. If you do elect to watch the video or listen to the episode, one of the things you'll notice is how he talks about the nature of "hardcore" and how he sees it as helping us, as humans, reframe what happened in the past. My sense is he believes his approach to history is a way to help us better appreciate the modern era.
Yet, I noticed there is no episode on what is easily the most hardcore, toughest things a human being can do: give birth. And I recognize that fans of his can easily say, "well, that's not the point of his show." And yet, if an alien were to come down (to borrow one of his verbal shortcuts) and used only his podcast episodes to understand human history... what do you think they'd conclude about the "toughness" of half of humanity? Would they even know that women have played significant, meaningful roles in every single event he's talked about? This isn't to say he has an obligation to do a six-hour episode on the history of childbirth, but rather, to offer that the things he deems "hardcore" are seemingly focused on the actions of one small group of humanity. In that same vein, I remember him mentioning his love for The Story of Civilization and Will Durant in his talk and went back to confirm. He raves about Will but doesn't mention Durant's wife, Ariel, who was a co-author and researcher on the series; the project was very much theirs, not his. (They both won the Pulitizer in 1968 for one of the entries in the series.) And again, Carlin has no obligation to namecheck Ariel. That he doesn't do so, speaks to the tension in how he approaches the narratives he creates and how he conceptualizes humanity.**
Which leads us to specific issues of accuracy. I tracked down two episodes that I thought would include content I could confidently fact check and seemed to have a particular narrative bent I am familiar with. I started his episode 31 (Blitz) Suffer the Children (2009) a relatively neutral observer. I ended episode 33, (Blitz) Old School Toughness (2009) fairly confident I'll throw my drink in the face of anyone who recommended those episodes to me in a conversation about history podcasts at a post-pandemic party. Unless it's Mr. Carlin himself, and in that case, I'd thank him for the suggestion and invite him to reconsider re-recording episode 31 and this time, seek out historians of women's history, education, and childhood.
I cannot speak to the accuracy of the Spartan history he talks about, but /u/iphikrates does a very detailed job addressing the whole "throw the bad babies off the cliff" narrative here. And it's also worth reading this answer, also by, /u/iphikrates on issues of child mortality. (Were said aliens to listen to episode 31, they would think the leading cause of infant mortality until the modern era was unfeeling mothers. Which... grrr. Argh.)
I cannot speak to the history of Marie Antoinette and her children, but /u/sunagainstgold does a wonderful job here explaining that yes, parents have always loved and cared for their children. (I suspect the person who asked this question heard Carlin's episode 31 as he makes that very claim.) It's also worth reading Sun's answer on mental health throughout history as it challenges some of the claims Carlin makes. Finally, Sun also does an amazing job on this answer about parents mourning their children.
I can, however, speak to claims Carlin says in the episode. At length. But I want to focus on just a few. He offers a fair amount of detail on how parents would take children to executions and frames it as, "aren't we glad we don't do that anymore in the modern era?" And yet, one of the details that make commemorative postcards of lynchings of Black men in the American south in the first half of the 20th century so hard to look at is, in addition to the harm done to a person, there are usually children in the crowd. White parents routinely took their sons and daughters to bear witness to the brutal murder of a human being. Many of those children are still alive.
He talks about the maternal death rate (though that may have been in 33, about toughness) but again, frames it as something in the past as something pregnant people in modern America don't have to worry about. Meanwhile, the maternal death rate of Black women in America is astronomically higher than the maternal death rate of white women.
Finally, he ends the episode by talking about the sexual assault of children. In his effort to contextualize it, he presents it as something that would seem normal to those of the era but mortifying to those of us in the modern era. As of today, child marriage is legal in 46 American states.
All of that said, lots of people find their way to history through Carlin, which is something to be celebrated. The challenge is that the accuracy of his podcast is fairly meaningless if he selects facts and information in service to a particular narrative. The challenge is the unintended consequences when is his hardcore fans listen to every single second and the overwhelming majority (if not all) of the historians he namechecks are men. The challenge is when he suggests we're somehow so different in 2020 than we were in the past, and we're doing the same things people did during the pandemic in 1918. He claims we're "too different" from the people in the past to be able to understand them... and yet parents still grieve when their child dies. Women routinely die in childbirth. Crowds of people protest mask orders during a pandemic.
My hunch is that the best way to listen to Carlin's podcast applies anytime we listen to or learn any history. We need to consider whose story isn't being told, exactly what narrative the speaker is advocating, and who benefits. Who is left out. Who is minimized and who is centered.
*One thing that makes your question interesting is Carlin himself clearly struggles with the role of accuracy in relating history. In both the talk linked above and episode 33, he airs his thoughts on modern historians' reliance on facts. In the episode, he comes down a bit harder and makes a crack about "carbon dating" and my hunch is, if asked to rank them, he'd say an accurate narrative is more important than accurate details based on how he describes his podcast as "art." (See my comments above about episode 31) Additionally, he seems to think modern historians are compilers of timelines, dates, names, and nothing more. Yet, if I look to the bookcase to my left, I see Blaming Teachers, an academic history that philosophies on the professionalization of American teachers. There's also Democracy's Schools, an academic history book that philosophies on the role of public education in support of democratic societies. And not to put too fine a point on it, The Allure of Order is a fantastic book by a historian that philosophies about America's love for standardization and efficiency.
**It is very possible that childbirth comes up in one of his episodes. I did not listen to every episode. And to be clear, this isn't a comment on Mr. Carlin as a person. Rather, it's to raise the tension of the unintended consequences when a hardcore history of humanity is almost exclusively focused on decisions made by men.
Content Warning, this post will discuss some sensitive material relating to sexual assault and violence and I will note those sections in advance
This is an adaptation of something I had written for /r/badhistory earlier this year on how Carlin treats the "Rape of Belgium", otherwise known as the atrocities and war crimes committed by the German military in their invasion of Belgium. There have been a number of already great posts in this thread breaking down some of the major problems with Carlin's work, this will essentially be adding to that.
Dan Carlin's work Blueprint for Armageddon is one of his most popular series, and one I see recommended the most, even in contexts where people aren't looking for podcasts recommendations. Safe to say it has its fans. I tend to be less charitable than my colleagues about Dan Carlin because of this section of his podcast and how, unintentionally or intentionally, it plays with war-crime denial.
Dan's Research
Firstly, I would like to open up with Carlin's sources. This episode has 21 sources, with just under half (10) relating specifically to the First World War. The other 11 are varied works, mostly general books which don't focus on the First World War, and seem mostly be to woefully outdated. Out of his books on the First World War, only 4 were published after the year 2000. Some of his sources, Niall Ferguson in particular, are controversial. He has a 15 minute section on the German Atrocities, but neglects the single best source on the atrocities, John Horne & Alan Kramer's German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial, or even one of their other books or papers which discuss them. This source list is not the mark of someone who has done their due diligence to try to research the conflict. I'm essentially just echoing /u/Hergrim, /u/xenophontheathenian, and /u/kochevnik81's points, but it needs to be stated. His research is sloppy and incomplete.
Dan's Discussion
The first episode of Blueprint has an approximately 15 minute section on an event popularly called "The Rape of Belgium", although some scholars opt for terms like "German Atrocities". No matter what you call it, 6,500 Belgian and French civilians were deliberately murdered by the German army in August 1914. Additionally, villages and cities were burned, an untold number of women and girls were sexually assaulted, and Belgians would become a source of forced labor for the German government and military. The actions of the Germans were war-crimes, and were not isolated incidents. This was institutionalized, and many times the orders came from officers and generals.
Dan Carlin starts his discussion with this line:
Do the people who are producing such cutting edge higher culture, how do they miss something that’s likely to be as damaging to your international reputation as what history now calls “The Rape of Belgium”. Now the Rape of Belgium, I should point out, a little bit is a propagandist's fantasy. I mean they've made it practically a movie. The "Rape of Belgium!". Go see the Rape of Nanking in your history books and then you will see something propagandists did not need to magnify at all to create a world class historical, atrocity killing field. Belgium wasn't that. But it was something. And that something would come back to haunt the Germans in ways they almost seemed ignorant of.
The discussion of the murder of 6,500 men, women, and children is started with a hamfisted comparison to another awful event, and stating that Belgium can't be all that bad because Nanking was worse. This sort of rhetoric is commonly known as "whataboutism" and is a tactic often used by atrocity and genocide denialists to downplay the severity of whatever event is being discussed. Do I think Dan Carlin is purposefully downplaying the Atrocities? No. But his intent doesn't matter as much as his words, and his words have that effect.
He then jumps into quoting Hitler about propaganda, which is the other major strand of Carlin's segment on the Atrocities. Carlin focuses much of his 15 minutes on propaganda spawned by the event. Propaganda is an aspect of the story, but it is dangerous to front-load the propaganda as it places doubt in the reader/listener's mind. This was a real event where real people were actually murdered, sexually assaulted, and had their homes destroyed and by focusing on how the Germans were "blindsided" by propaganda, the reality can be muddied.
One of the more atrocious lines in the segment comes immediately after:
but the Germans tended to you know, set examples of people that did things that the Germans had said you shouldn't do.
Here, Carlin's wording justifies the actions of Germany. “people that did things that the Germans had said you shouldn’t do”, “if they catch you trying to blow up a bridge”, “when people did stuff anyway, they killed the hostages”. Dan Carlin does not outright deny that people were killed by the Germans here. However, he has selectively sided with the Germans in most of their actions. All of these are presented as legitimate collective punishments towards the Belgian population. They are not presented, as they were, the collective myth of a “franktireurkrieg” where friendly fire, drunken German misfires, French and Belgian rearguard actions, bodies mutilated by shrapnel shells, and successful Belgian and French defenses, were all the “stuff” that caused these “collective punishments”. The executions that the Germans carried out were predicated on a collective myth, a collective myth that influenced both officers and enlisted alike.
Perhaps I should back up however and explain what “Franctiruerkrieg” was. It was, in essence, a “people’s war” where armed, non-uniformed, citizens rose up in defense of their country – either behind or in front of the lines. The German military had over the decades fostered a culture where this was feared and was expected to be dealt with harshly. By 1907 the Hague conventions had made large strides to protect civilians from the sort of collective punishment that the Germans were utilizing. However, the German military had rejected these terms and within their handbooks had provided guidelines that very clearly authorized German soldiers to disregard those sections of the Hague agreements. It wasn’t just that the Germans believed in “collective punishment”, it’s that the German military was fully against civilian participation in war, and rejected international calls to protect civilians and their right to resist an invading force.
Even with the Hague protections for such an uprising, it never happened. There was no great uprising of Franc Tiruers. The Belgian population, on the whole, handed over weapons to their local government officials, and tried to keep their heads down. While, as Horne and Kramer point out, may have been a handful of instances where an individual or two did fire at the Germans, it was no greater than that, and the instances where that may have happened were not near the sites of the largest executions.
Dan Carlin does not directly address the idea of a "Franctiruerkrieg" until 8 minutes into a 15 minute section.
Some historians say these are a bunch of gun shy soldiers who've never faced, you know live-fire where someone was shooting at them. They may hear some German soldier’s gun go off from the other side of town and start killing civilians. It's a very controversial issue. Some historians still foam at the mouth about it. John Keegan strikes me as somebody who's who feels this absolute need to defend this idea of German, you know, Devilishness.
“The Rape of Belgium”, in 2013 when his podcast was published, was (and is not) a “contentious part” of the scholarship. John Horne and Alan Kramer published their book which put to rest any doubt on the subject in 2001. The only people who say it’s “contentious” these days are actively denying war-crimes. Horne and Kramer’s book was published twelve years before the podcast aired. Thing is though, it was published after Dan Carlin’s sources. Carlin sources three authors in this section: Lyn MacDonald, John Keegan, and Niall Ferguson. MacDonald is not listed in his sources for the episode, however I suspect it is her book on the opening phases of the war. That was published in the late 1980s. John Keegan and Niall Ferguson’s books were published in 1998. Ferguson does not deal heavily with the atrocities, referencing them in regards to propaganda. Niall Ferguson is very controversial and should be taken with some grains of salt.
What would be a good alternative podcast that is historically accurate? I am a history major but I enjoy podcasts over audio books.
Dan Carlin is awesome! Ive learned more about history listening to his podcasts than i did over the course of my entire life before listening.
His delivery and style make the learning experience exciting and keeps the listener hungry for more.
I WISH we had more Dan Carlin types in the halls of academia.
