So here's my perspective as someone who studied a topic in grad school, but currently does most of their work on that topic as a "popular" podcast. My expertise is the Achaemenid Persian Empire and the single greatest thing popular/public historians could do for my field is tell people about Persia rather than Greece. Greece is an easy touchstone for the average person. Making a connection to a blockbuster like 300 or a name everyone vaguely recognizes like Alexander the Great is an easy way to get attention, but they can be a jumping off point for actually talking about Persian history. Direct interaction with Greece is over represented in the extant sources because the most detailed narrative sources are Greek, but there are Persian stories and a history of the Persian empire that can be teased out of those sources that does not center on Greece.

This same context can be extrapolated for a lot of the Ancient Near East in my opinion. Far too much public presentation of the region and its ancient history is centered around familiar buzzwords. People have heard of Gilgamesh, Hammurabi, and how the Assyrians and Babylonian deported the ancient Jews, but those familiar names and phrases could be used as hooks to get people in the door (so to speak) to hear about the rich and complex histories of ancient Mesopotamia and the Levant. Do what popular YouTube videos do already and make a thumb nail and title that grab attention and then make a video on a tangentially related topic or series of topics.

My second point relates more to how non-academics do historical research. It could be summed up crudely as "read a damn paper," possibly with the addendum "and make sure it's recent." This goes for all topics and time periods. Far too many pop history writers, especially online pop history writers, cite books and newspaper articles almost exclusively, but that is not how academic research is published most of the time. There are, of course, extremely scholarly books that are the product of years of research. There are also books aimed at a general audience written by academics. However, I very rarely see popular/public history that brings up academic papers published in academic journals.

This is a problem (in my opinion) because it severely limits the scholars and topics the writer has access to. This is especially true if you're trying to tell the public about something a bit more niches (say the ancient Near East) where books might not sell in huge numbers and are therefore not published in huge numbers. Papers often contain the bulk of the research on specific topics, and are almost always the best way to keep up with current academic perspectives. Books just take a long time to publish and it can take a long time for someone to publish a new book that takes off enough to become a staple of the field, but there are always new papers pushing scholarship forward.

Finally, I really think popular history should be more forthcoming with its audience about academic debates. There is a desire to tell a single, straightforward, absolute history. That's a bit easier with modern history where hundreds of eye witnesses can reconstruct and reliable timeline, but even in recent events there can be lots of debate between academics. Academically, this all falls into the category of historiography, which people often seem to think is too dry for general audiences.

That has not been my experience. There is a balance, because letting your storytelling get overwhelmed with academic debate can easily distract from the topic you actually want to focus on, but the average person is perfectly capable of understanding how two different versions of an event can be reconstructed from different sources. Let people know there's more than one way of looking at it. It does not compromise your authority as the presenter and can actually open the door to add your own speculation without it becoming just another non-historian wildly throwing shit out there.

Hi, I'm /u/Iphikrates! You might know me as Ancient Warfare Expert Rates 10 Battle Tactics in Movies and TV.

The problem with pop history and academic history is that it is practically impossible to do both at the same time. Popular history outlets like YouTube channels, podcasts or historical fiction aren't just intended to inform and analyse; they are also meant to entertain. These goals don't have to be mutually exclusive, but they mean that the creator will need to spend at least as much time (and usually a lot more time) working on their presentation as they do on the research backing it up. It needs to look good, sound good, hit the right tone, be accessible, be distinct from other offerings, and so on. But we all have the same number of hours in the day. It follows that no piece of popular history is ever going to be as thorough and well-founded as academic history. Indeed, even if a content creator is an expert in one historical field, it is very likely that they will have to branch out to less familiar areas to keep their product fresh, and the balance will then shift in favour of entertainment value. This is not to discredit anyone's work; it is a simple practical fact that these forms of media pursue different goals and must therefore have different priorities.

With this problem in mind, what popular historians and content creators need to elevate their work is a quick path to the latest expertise. They somehow need to reach the understanding of cutting-edge researchers without putting in the years of work those researchers needed to get there. One of the most frustrating things I see history Youtubers do is research a topic with their own limited access to academic materials and limited perception of a particular research field. Their resulting understanding of the subject can be decades behind the curve from an academic perspective. This is not their fault - how are they to know? But it means they are effectively regressing their audience's knowledge rather than advancing it.

There are two obvious ways to address this: first is to read the latest work, and second is to consult academic experts. But the former is hard without a guide to tell you which are good and which are themselves the product of bad research. The second, meanwhile, is hard because academics are overworked and exploited on the regular and generally don't like to be asked to do more stuff, especially for people/media they're not familiar with. That video above? Yeah, Insider didn't come to me with that idea. They came to my PhD supervisor, who is a world-leading expert on Greek warfare, but he turned it down and told them to ask me instead.

So I'm afraid the best way is to become, to some extent, an expert in your own right. At the very least you would need to familiarise yourself with open-access review platforms so you can track the latest publications in a given field and see how other academics respond to them. It is also often possible to get younger academics to consult on your work by offering them a fair remuneration. The worst thing you could do is to bypass all this and get straight into writing your scripts on the assumption that you already know enough to speak on it with authority.

I’m a PhD in historical social science and active in both research and practice worlds in my field. I think to answer your question you should analyze first the assumptions you carry with respect to the public. In my view (and most of my colleagues would probably agree), the American public sphere is fracturing and Balkanizing, with the big political cleavage reproduced fractally across many micro-public spheres. That sort of meta-awareness of the changing structures of social life can help you see that there is not much any given academic can do to shape “the” public and much of the cultural froth that is naively taken to be the whole of the public by any given observer is probably pretty puny and irrelevant. For example, Reddit is itself profoundly fractured along subreddits, and AskHistorians, though taken by some readers (and moderators) as an immensely impactful and authoritative arena is actually quite a small niche with very little influence over broader patterns of public understanding. Thus, too, academics shouldn’t lie to themselves about the impact their popular outreach actually has. Only the rarest of the rare popular content cuts across the deep grooves separating cultural spheres these days, so if you speak out and find there’s an eager audience, you’re probably just entering an echo chamber.

Nevertheless, it is always worthwhile trying to elevate any given discussion you find yourself in or drawn toward. This comment will likely be pulled down for some reason or other, but it’s still worth my time typing it if it helps inform you or simply the moderator who pulls it down!

Methodologically, I think any attempt to bring honest and rigorous thinking into a micro-public is always valuable. Pedantry and using academic credentials to browbeat others is not helping anyone and can further undermine confidence in academia. The better choice is almost always to provide evidence or more rigorous reasoning and let others take or leave what you have to say. Ultimately the language and our many overlapping cultures are living things and so processes of misprision and appropriation should themselves be acknowledged (and historicized) as legitimate things. For example, Machiavelli means one thing to rappers, another thing to political scientists, but also another thing to psychologists and Renaissance historians. The meanings multiply and are not limited by the historical record / facticity. Academics are of course not neutral observers and should challenge what they view as harmful mistreatment of historical evidence (eg Neo-Norse racist stuff), but the bar should be high for pedantic quibbling.

People are so hyper critical these days that you just need to roll with the punches whenever you engage with anything.

I don’t have flair on here, but I’ve answered some questions. Here’s my two pence!

I’ve got a BA and MA in Modern History, with a focus on Welsh history. I’m published, and I taught history for years in Welsh schools. When it comes to Wales, there isn’t a great deal of pop history to choose from, but what does exist is mired in pre-conceived notions of Wales as a reluctant partner in the British Empire, when in actual fact the Welsh were willing and eager to both exploit the economic opportunities brought on by the industrial revolution, and contribute militarily and logistically to the success of the United Kingdom abroad.

Welsh pop history is largely politicised along nationalist and unionist lines by default, and tends to focus on symbolic events such as the Edwardian conquest of Wales, the drowning of Capel Celyn, the Miner’s Strike and the de-industrialisation of the 1980s to paint a dramatic top-down picture of the story of Wales. From a popular historical perspective, this is somewhat understandable. Such events are colourful, relatively concise, and easily explained to an audience - especially young people.

I’d like to see much more of a focus on impartial social histories of Wales. I’m not talking about any requirement to adopt grand Hobsbawmian theories or fall into the trap of relating everything to class ala Stearns and co. All that’s needed is to stop viewing events through the lens of class and status, and instead appreciate just how much agency the Welsh people had once they’d cast aside their agrarian economy - wether that’s political agency or economic agency. Welsh history is as incremental as any other nation’s history. It’s a story of gradual change over the course of a millennia following the Norman conquest of Wales in around 1080.

It’s all well and good giving a jazzy interpretation of the same seminal events, but there was actually a fair bit that happened in-between. It’s just harder to articulate, and the sources are harder to explain to the general public.

Popular history has much to offer though. It’s a LOT better at explaining narratives. Historians are generally not very good at telling stories. Shelby Foote’s treatment of the American Civil War, whilst academically flawed, is far more accessible to a layman than high-brow academic works.