It really is fundamental to understanding why people like Columbus and de Gama were the way they were from knowing the state of Europe at the time. They were violent and desparate mercenaries from a violent and desparate place, when they arrived anywhere their first thoughts were "ok, what can I immediately loot and sell here, if I don't come back with something good my debtors are gonna cut my balls off"
https://www.reddit.com/r/BlackWolfFeed/comments/oj7mzt/540_its_coming_rome_feat_patrick_wyman_71221/
I love it when Patrick Wyman or Eleanor Janega show up on a podcast.
Patrick used to have a podcast called "History Matters" with his friend / former classmate / fellow historian Keith Plymers (sp?). It was really great, they got into the nuts and bolts of how historians view things. Real inside baseball type stuff but meant for a non-historian audience. It's a shame though, looks like Patrick took down most of the episodes. Would be nice if he reposted it at least just for posterity.
Curious if he found that having an inside baseball podcast up was hurting his academic career. If that's the case I don't blame him at all.
Yeah possibly. Although I remember he wasn't all that controversial in his complaints about the history profession, his big thing was there's too many historians who are happy to toil in minutae and not focus on telling narratives (using that word in a positive sense) for the broader public. And he has a point, if the real historians don't do it, the fake "historians" with zero credentials like Anne Applebaum end up filling the void.
I honestly don't know how you can even teach without a narrative. Like usually you need to come up with a broader narrative for even pure math classes, otherwise good luck keeping your students interested for several months when it seems like you're just talking about a bunch of disjointed ideas.
If my high school education is anything to go by, you build your curriculum around hitting factoids for standardized testing questions, and make the work of identifying figures, dates, and events into busywork of rote copy onto worksheets done in silence, skimming pages of a McGraw-Hill textbook for the right bolded words for an hour at a time.
What are some good Tides of History episodes to listen to?
He's done some cool stuff about early Human history in the past months. Stuff like early Banana cultivation in New Guinea and the Indo-European expansion. Personally I'm more interested by some of his earlier episodes about Renaissance Europe. If you've listened to and liked this new Chapo where they talk about finance and mercenary armies being pivotal to European state formation and incipient capitalism, he did an ep or two on Condottiero, the captains of renaissance mercenary companies and two episodes on Jacob Fugger, perhaps Renaissance Europe's wealthiest banker and merchant.