Sunday papers: Dan Carlin's Hardcore History


I love reading about history and especially about military history. It's very satisfying to learn why some things happened rather than just knowing that they happened. How did Genghis Khan mop the floor with the rest of the world, even with his inferior numbers? Why did Japan lose so badly in the Pacific war? I regularly spend hours reading Wikipedia and searching the web about these subjects.

However, there are times when you don't want to do the research and simply digest refined knowledge. That's where Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast comes in. He clearly has a passion for history (he's not a historian though) and together with his experience in radio broadcasting the results are simply amazing. He takes his time (up to 6 months!) to research every topic in detail, stays as objective as possible and wraps these up in a very enjoyable 2-4 hours chunks of episodes. The episodes are not necessarily chronological as he sometimes takes liberty to take a detour and explore a subject in detail before returning to the main course.

Lately, I've been following his "Blueprint for Armageddon" series where he talks about WWI and it's been an amazing journey. I never paid attention to WWI before as WWII seemed much more interesting (being an engineer and all the innovations in WWII are just fascinating), but as I listened to this podcast I understood how much our current world is shaped as a direct result of WWI.

His latest episodes are free, but there's a small fee for his older episodes (understandably). I've listened to the most of them and I can recommend every single one of them if their subjects interests you. The best thing is these are in a podcast form. I mostly got through my backlog as I was travelling or jogging.

If you like Battletech and its lore, you probably also have interest in history. I strongly advise you to check out his podcast!
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About Rak

I'm an engineer who likes to write extremely long articles about games that border simulation and mainstream.
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