Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TotoHorner 1268 days ago
How do you compare Fall of Civilizations to Hardcore History?

Big fan of hardcore history (listened to all of the multi-part series several times), but never heard of Fall of Civilizations.

1 comments

Pretty sure r/AskHistorians considers Hardcore History to be really innacurate.

BBC’s In Our Time podcast is a far superior counterpart, where academics from leading universities discuss a chose topic. It’s well moderated and beautifully informative.

Yeah I'd second In Our Time, it's a long running Radio show and covers culture, science, religion, philosophy and history. Really great nuggets on loads of topics. Plus they provide a full reading list for each show.
I love hard core history, but I recently discovered The Rest is History and it takes the number one spot for me.
Thank you for this! Exactly what I needed
source?
It's on Spotify. And on BBC sounds. And I think it's on iTunes. You might just be able to download it for free too. It used to be available like that years ago.
Nah I meant kranke155's claim that AskHistorians says Hardcore History is inaccurate.

That's not true.

However, I would agree that Hardcore History leans more towards the entertainment side, so while the overall picture is inline with what historians say (Cyrus the Great as a leader vs Darius or the effects of the Gracchi brothers), the specific stories that Dan Carlin says may have other interpretations or other versions.

Obviously, it would interrupt the flow to say "Oh but XYZ disagrees and says this specific story actually happened 5 years earlier", so Dan prefaces it by saying that it's one interpretation.

Saying that "AskHistorians thinks Hardcore History is really innacurate" is completely false.

A couple of years ago, there was a discussion thread in AskHistorians of "How do you feel about Dan Carlin, accuracy-wise?": https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/k6jyx7/how_d...

>...Saying that "AskHistorians thinks Hardcore History is really innacurate" is completely false.

I think the overall opinion is quite a bit more nuanced than that and in general historians appreciate anyone who helps get people more interested in history. Though, in terms of accuracy, as one commenter wrote:

>...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.

Maybe I got this wrong but my feeling is they don’t like it over there. I’d have to check on why exactly.