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.
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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.
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".
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,
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?