Looking for good youtube channels doing long form videos on older history (pre-1700), one I binged through recently was Ancient Americas (https://www.youtube.com/c/AncientAmericas). They don't need to be leftist, just well-sourced and not obviously chuddy.
Historia Civilis is great. He started out mostly doing Roman stuff, but has since branched out into other topics. He's currently doing the Congress of Vienna (which is technically post-1700), but prior to that he was doing a pretty detailed play-by-play of Roman history towards the end of the republic, starting out with covering the tenures of a bunch of important consuls, and moving onto Caesar's campaigns and eventually the civil wars. He also has a few interesting one-off videos, like Can Animals Commit Crimes? about some historical legal trials of animals, a two-parter on the trial of Charles I, videos on the politics of Athens and Sparta, a fascinating look into Bureaucracy in Cleopatra's Egypt.
Epimetheus has a ton of stuff on a wide variety of topics, although most of the videos aren't really long-form.
SandRhoman History mostly focuses on the pike-and-shot period of warfare.
The Historian's Craft has a ton of stuff on a wide variety of topics, both ancient and modern, although I haven't really kept up with his content for some time.
life in ancient rome was really about what a few great men did in their political maneuvering or whatever. and that’s what Historia Civilis does
but... he doesn't? He has video covering Roman Elections, his earliest stuff covers the Cursus Honorum, the "His Year" series also covers a lot of election business. He has videos covering holidays like Saturnalia. Outside of the specifically Roman context, he also has stuff like the Can Animals Commit Crimes? about weird legal trials, the Bird Mania, Strongboys, and Tunnel Bears which has an adorable section about a Greek guy gushing over his dog, the last section of The Longest Year in Human History covering the creating of the Julian calendar
an economy geared for total war so that he can bring home loot and glory from plundering and conquering… is bad actually
Which he points out, saying that Alexander "only had enough money to sustain like one month of warfare", "after that the Macedonian state would become insolvent", "the whole endeavour was built on a financial house of cards" and "defeat would mean financial ruin".
Caesar the Innovator introducing more stringent means-testing for the grain dole as a way to control costs
The "means testing" was cutting out rich families who were still collecting benefits, and the reform was broadly popular amongst the people :shrug-outta-hecks:
Historia Civilis Sparta video doing basically the lie
"There are no stories of any significant legislatory accomplishments", "when the Romans started getting their hands dirty in Greece, Sparta was nothing more than an insignifacnt village, a curiosity", "Despite their worst fears, the Spartan invaders were never overthrown by a Helot uprising, or by a coalition of angry Greeks. Instead they allowed themselves to wither, and atrophy, only to be conquered by another set of invaders, who saw them as nothing more than a bunch of archaic freaks" hardly seems like that.
we’re supposed to be on the edge of our seats hoping for the chungus 100 hero to get out of the latest scrape
In Vercingetorix he specifically calls Caesar's campaign in Gaul genocide, and says "The use of that word makes others upset, but I don't think there's any question that Caesar deliberately targeted specific Gallic tribes for the purpose of making them cease to exist". Caesar as King? portrays Caesar pretty badly, saying that his decisions "would lead to untold human misery and death in the years to come, and the horrifying fact is that even if Caesar could have known this, I'm not sure that he would have cared". Sextus Pompeius and the Sicilian War says "Ever since Caesar crossed the Rubicon 10 years ago, Rome had entered into a death spiral of civil war after civil war after civil war", and does a bunch of dunking on Octavian, particularly on his handling of Sextus Pompeius.
Like, Historia Civilis is still a lib, but claiming that his videos are framed in a way to make you root for the "protagonist" just seems like a "Starship Troopers was cool actually" level of misinterpretation to me. His earlier stuff perhaps - he was a Caesar fanboy in his earlier videos where he focused mostly on the military history angle. But unlike a lot of people, he actually started focusing on non-military topics as well, and has clearly changed his tune now that he's openly calling out the Gallic campaigns he gushed about earlier as genocidal.
unquestioning focus on the exactly the segment of society that the upper crust has always been enthralled by: itself
There is a bias towards elites in history, but it's not just because historians are all libs who hate poor people - there are a lot more sources on elites and high-level political machinations than there are on common people's lives. And Historia CIvilis does cover stuff like that - perhaps less than he does big battles and political machinations, but claiming that he's all about how "Caesar can just save the day by dramatically charging into the lines to rally his troops" just seems... incorrect.
Caesar had ulterior motives- the masses of hungry urban plebs flocked en masse to his new colonies across the Mediterranean, draining the city of a demographic which was far in surplus of the needs of the ultra-elites ...
Well, okay, I didn't know that, and I'd be interested in learning more. It might have been useful to have the gist of that in the original post - I responded with a glib one-liner and shrugs emoji because you delivered your point as a glib one-liner. The misinterpretation line was perhaps harsh, but again, I was responding in a snarky tone because I just came into a thread where someone asked for some youtube channels and specified that they didn't need them to be explicitly leftist, and then someone dropped 3 paragraphs of "yeah, the guy you recommended is shit" on me.
There’s no way that you can watch those Alexander videos without getting the sense that the narration wants you to root for him
I, just... still continue to not get your point about rooting for protagonists. I don't consider myself a particularly smart analytical guy, so presumably I should fall for this, but I just... don't get it. A protagonist is not a "good guy" - they're simply the driving factor in a narrative. When Alexander destroyed Thebes and sold off the population into slavery, I wasn't rooting for him - Historia Civilis even plays the little piece of music he has for whenever something sad's happening, and he paints it as Alexander having hoped for this brutal outcome in order to get the funds now that he had abolished taxation back home. When he caps off his victory at Granicus by... enslaving a bunch of the Greeks he was supposed to be "liberating", that hardly seemed like glorious deeds.
You say you don't need to be reminded that things are bad every minute, and yet you're missing all of these parts of the videos where things are shown to be bad. What degree of condemnation do you require? Do you need history to be like that person who'd end all of their tweets with "ICE must be destroyed"? Can an audience not be trusted to read between the lines every now and again? This is barely even between the lines, it's explicitly "yeah, this guy just sold tens of thousands of people (his fellow Greeks even) into slavery to fund his war of, uh, checks notes... 'liberating' Greeks".
The comments I saw certainly bore that out
How is judging things by the fucking youtube comments in any way fair? People comment memes and all kinds of dumb shit, many of them comment before even having seen the video. You can go to some Gregorian chant and see the comments flooded with tradcath chuds and fascists, which has absolutely fuck all to do with the contents of the video. If you judge things by the standard of whether the dumbest, most fascist dipshit on the planet managed to get it, you basically have to ban any form of art - I brought up Starship Troopers, and yeah, there were people who missed the point and somehow managed to get a pro-war message out of it. There's a reason Truffaut said there was no such thing as an anti-war movie.
Like, I'm not here to defend Historia Civilis' honor - he's a lib and he does lib stuff, like ending the Cicero video with how great Cicero was, which... yeah, I'm not going to give that much of a shit about some aristocratic Roman prick. But how the hell is he "regurgitating Caesar’s own propaganda" when he's openly calling him a genocidal egomaniac? How is he "making heroes out of monsters" when he repeatedly points out the human costs of these people's actions? I just feel like we're arguing about two separate people... which we basically are - you're arguing about the subset of videos which serve your point, I'm arguing about the subset which serves mine, and since probably neither of us is going to go back and watch like 30 hours of content to make sure we're arguing about things that actually happened instead of vague emotionally-colored memories, this is pretty much a pointless endeavour.
Anyway,
Libs treat history like some kind of lore, almost like a different world with different rules
I don't really understand what you're trying to say here. The past did have different rules - different rules about religion, war, politics, different social and gender norms, different notions of belonging to a group. That doesn't mean we can't morally condemn the actions of historical people, why would it? But how the hell can we hope to understand them without recognizing the different rules they operated under? How can we hope to understand the significance of the Catholic Church as an institution in Medieval Europe without understanding the (very different compared to today) role of religion in that society? How can we hope to understand all the various civil wars and succession crises without understanding the (again, very different to today) concepts of political legitimacy in the past?
Libs' issue is that they treat history as a thing that just happened back in the day, and as such they're ignorant of how those past events still deeply affect things today - we abolished racism in the '60s after all! Except to actually do that analysis properly you obviously need to recognize the different rules that past societies operated under, so you can understand how these events came to be and what their repercussions were.
In general, I don't understand the standard you're holding this content up to. This is, fundamentally, entertainment - it has educational value, sure, but it's meant to present said value in an interesting and entertaining manner. This is not rigorous academic work - even the longer videos are still obviously quite limited in runtime. The effort to produce a coherent narrative out of history which often doesn't lend itself very well to that, and constrain it to a length short enough that viewers won't just skip the video, means that many details and context will have to be omitted.
If one wants to learn history properly, they should start reading books or watching lecture series, where the material will be covered over the course of tens of hours, not tens of minutes. You linked those ACOUP articles, and yeah... Bret "forced Uighur assimilation" Devereaux has 7 parts of like 5000 words each to make his point, while the Historia Civilis video is less than 25 minutes and specifically focused on political wonkery, not Spartan society as a whole. You can perhaps argue that history shouldn't be treated in this manner - there are credible arguments to be made here, about how all this easy-to-consume slop (which will inevitably end up misrepresenting some things as a consequence of the format) is giving people incorrect and misrepresented historical knowledge (although I kind of doubt people's historical knowledge was in any way better or less wrong before - perhaps they're more smugly convinced that they actually know things despite being wrong than before, but I doubt that as well). But I just don't understand what you actually expect this content to be - like, if there was some alternate-universe Cistoria (heh) Hivilis without these flaws, how would the videos actually look?
Can I repeat the ask but for a more specific period? 1600-1750 is a really neglected period but covers the rise of merchantalism and the core of the merchantalist-absolutist-aristocratic/capitalist conflict and there is literally noting on the thirty years war, let alone the dutch-anglo conflicts.
Uploads slowly and very long documentary-esq vids but I love The Histocrat
The greatest thing is for both his vids and his podcast (also uploaded to the channel) is he and his cohost cite themselves relentlessly
Audio only but Justin Podur at podur.org has a bunch of history. I’ve listened to a few episodes of the Anti-Empire Project (podcast), but the RSS feed is missing a big chunk of the early episodes; it just starts in the middle.
Anyway, I started the Civilizations series yesterday, but haven’t gotten used to in-browser audio tbh, it acts a little funny. But it’s meant to be a World Civ course essentially, that “doesn’t gloss over the imperialism”. Although this series starts in 1492.
Worth looking around, a shitton of history, all put out after Covid apparently. Some of the episodes do have youtube video versions, but they appear to just be the people talking
