Just curious as to what everyone else’s opinion is on the Armchair Historian, Liveth For Evermore, Simple History and other YouTube history channels? I personally like Armchair and think it could be a fun crossover as he has a pretty good animation team. TimeGhost is by far the most comprehensive but other channels cover some fun things from time to time.
You forced me to actually look at all the YouTube channels I’m currently subscribed to and to pick out just the history-oriented ones? This may take a while…
Start off with a few channels that do some history, but it’s not the primary output of the channel:
- Atun-Shei Films - Andy does a lot of US Civil War and anti-Lost Cause videos and is quite strong on the Puritan period of New England, although he tends to explore those in both serious treatments and in semi-parodic forms.
- Lindybeige - Nicholas does videos on history and archaeology along with living history, swing dancing, various forms of hand-to-hand combat and whatever else strikes him as interesting.
- Overly Sarcastic Productions - “Red” and “Blue” do a wide range of things, where Red does the animation for all videos and she concentrates on mythology, anime, and more modern movie/TV tropes. Blue mainly does history, although with a lot of his personal biases (usually disclosed adequately).
- Townsends - Originally started as the marketing channel for a historical re-enactment supply company, then branched out into more historical content and cooking in the 18th and 19th centuries. Lots of living history as they build a small pioneer cabin in ?Indiana? and try to show how self-sufficient such families had to be in Colonial America.
More specifically history channels:
- British Army Documentaries - What it says on the tin.
- britishmuzzleloaders - Primarily, as the title suggests, British military weaponry from muskets up through to the Lee-Metford and Lee-Enfield rifles. Lots of in-the-field live firing to go with the history.
- C&Rsenal - More detail than most people will want to hear about handguns, rifles, shotguns, and machineguns.
- Canadian Army
- canmildoc - Canadian military documentaries, sadly not updated for several years now.
- Dr Alexander Clarke - Primarily naval history discussion and opinion, although he does range into other areas. I wish he’d get a better microphone…
- Drachinifel - Naval history in both five-minute summaries of ships and ship classes and much, much longer discussions of wider topics.
- Epic History TV - Good survey histories of Napoleonic battles, leaders and campaigns along with other short series. Most recent videos on Byzantine general Belisarius are interesting.
- Epimetheus - Videos on ancient cultures, especially Mesopotamia and the Bronze Age, East Asian cultures, and weapons and armour of various periods.
- Feature History - Multi-episode histories of various periods.
- Forgotten Weapons - Ian “Gun Jesus” McCollum presents detailed histories and hands-on firing and disassembly of weapons from all eras, but usually concentrated on cartridge weapons from the US Civil War and (especially) on the development of French military firearms after 1870.
- Historia Civilis - Primarily Greek and Roman history, concentrating on battles and leaders in basic animated form.
- Historigraph - WW2 battles and campaigns, primarily.
- History Buffs - Reviews of historical movies
- History Matters - Animated British, Cold War, and world history
- History Time - Roman, British and Viking history
- History With Hilbert - Primarily European history topics
- Kings and Generals - Does not concentrate on one region or era. Current series is on the Pacific War.
- Mark Felton Productions - WW2 topics primarily. He also has a podcast series and has authored several books.
- Military History (not) Visualized - Austrian YouTuber who has a distinctive graphic style that he uses in a lot of his (Visualized) videos. The (not Visualized) channel includes visits to historic sites, museums, and joint productions with other YT creators.
- PeriscopeFilm - Period films over the last 100 years. Versions on YT have watermarks, but offers un-watermarked videos on license.
- Polyus Studios - Videos on Canadian aerospace and aeronautical topics.
- Real Time History - The Great War team with a new presenter. Current series is the Franco-Prussian War.
- Royal Canadian Navy
- Sabaton History
- SandRhoman History - Animated treatment of siege warfare and the evolution of war
- Study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages - The host of this channel recently had a serious health crisis, so it’s not clear when he will be able to get back to posting material.
- Tasting History with Max Miller - One of the few cooking channels I could recommend to anyone interested in history. Max researches a recipe from history and reproduces the recipe while telling the history. More entertaining and informative than I’m making it seem, I assure you.
- The Cold War - A side project of the Kings and Generals team.
- The Great War
- The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered - Bite-sized treatments of historical, scientific and cultural topics. Most recent episode was about a Fenian attempt to blow up a lock on the Welland Canal in 1900 (which I’d never heard before, even though I live not far from there).
- The Tank Museum - Weekly videos from the Bovington museum collection. Most are fairly short, dealing with one vehicle or weapon from the collection, others are much longer treatments with much more detail.
- The_Chieftain - 20th and 21st century military vehicles. Several recent videos were taken at my local-ish military museum in Oshawa, Ontario.
- Thersites the Historian - Most videos appear to be lectures from one or another of the courses he teaches. Emphasis on Alexander’s Successors, the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire.
- Timeline - World History Documentaries - Videos that were originally broadcast on TV channels like the BBC, PBS, etc.
- toldinstone - A recent addition to my subscriptions. Primarily Roman history with emphasis on the archaeological discoveries and interpretations.
Wow, that is an impressive list!
This list in no way can compete with @nicholasrusson_58993. But here we go
Oversimplified : Vastly oversimplified but the guy’s humour is amazing.
Potential history : he does tell history using memes, so that makes it interesting. Best series by him was meme tanks. I wish he did that for planes and ships too.
Simple history : well… They make good videos… and tell the basic story asking you to dig deeper. I dislike it when the start listing the details of a ship or plane and that takes up half of the video.
Knowing better - he makes videos on all sorts of stuff, but the history ones he makes are too good.
Civil war week by week - I have watched only one video from him. The production quality ain’t that great… but you can tell that the guy is very passionate in telling the story of the American civil war. I don’t know about the facts. Maybe @NormanStewart can help.
Guy bloke - this guy makes videos very infrequently. But damn is it good.
Batailles de France - this was recommended to me by a French girl. there is only one video in english and rest are french. But I did like how they explained napolean’s strategy and attack and so on. I ain’t subscribed to it as most of it is french. If they do put English closed captions, then I might.
TIK - ignoring the poltical parts of his channel, the history ones he makes are good, such as the rations at Stalingrad, why couldn’t the Germans just make more synthetic oil? are good. I ain’t subscribed to him either
And the rest are in @nicholasrusson_58993 list
Great war
Mark Felton
History buffs
Tank museum
The same guy who considers WWI to not be a world war? No thanks. He has also proven himself to be a coward, as seen in his handling of Columbus. And he’s one of those types who intentionally rile up their audiences for emotional points.
Oh yeah… Ignoring those two outliers. The rest are pretty good right?
You forget TIK (inb4 someone in TG tells us to ignore him despite his workload and sources).
Not really. His videos on feminism, gun rights and the party switch are downright atrocious. Absolutely won’t recommend. Even in the videos wherein he does try to put some effort (his video on Japan), he resorts to what I call “arrogance of modernity.”
I consider him one of the lesser historians on the Civil War. There’s simplification of complicated affairs and then there’s downright manipulation of the narrative and being a weasel, something which Atun engages in a lot especially when talking about the Confederacy (pro-tip: even for a slave-owning state, you have to be neutral in your analysis). He’s also proven to be a coward, in his stance on statues and historiography.
Folks like him are the reason why I know students who nearly quit history class.
Ignore the videos of uh… Feminism and all that… We are talking about history… my friend. And the two outliers
“Arrogance of modernity”. I am not sure what that means.
One of my personal favorite videos of his is his video on the Halley’s Comet sighting of 1910.
That is a history video, he does talk about its history after all.
Time Team Official - rereleased episodes of the classic archaeology series, plus new stuff.
“We are more progressive and more “woke” than our ancestors. [Whatever side we talk about] are a bunch of morons.”
Eh, I don’t know. I found his videos (along with K&G in general) rather boring at best and downright false at worst (his video on the Civil Rights Movement makes TimeGhost’s video on U.S. Army racism look well-researched by comparison).
My list:
- History Guy: History Deserves to be Remembered
- Mark Felton Productions (and also his second channel War Stories with Mark Felton)
- TIK
- Allec Joshua Ibay (if you consider videos on aviation disasters as being history content, which I do)
- Lindybeige
- Townsends
- The Laughing Cavalier (movie/TV review channel, especially those set in the Tudor period)
- The 8-Bit Guy (for some computer and electronics history)
- Montemayor
- Real Time History (highly recommend his videos on the Franco-Prussian War)
- Voices of the Past
- Military History Visualized
- Military Aviation History
- Tasting History with Max Miller
- Jack the Ripper Tour (for Jack the Ripper videos, if you consider true crime history)
- Criminally Listed and Horror Stories (again, true crime and strange events)
- The Great War (some of the time at least)
- Karolina Żebrowska, TheLongHairedFlapper, priorattire (the latter’s my wife’s favorite, for women’s fashion history)
- Forrest Haggerty
- Drachinifel
- Some special videos from Dark Corners Reviews (movie review channel wherein he talks about Old Hollywood history in said videos)
I would put TimeGhost here, but… well…
I ignore him because I find his presentation style to be aggressively abrasive. Even when I agree with what he’s saying, I find I have a very limited ability to watch before I have to stop.
There’s a very intelligent and very articulate chap I often interact with on Gab who holds even stronger anti-Atun views than that. He and I generally agree not to discuss the videos whenever I post a link to them (I sometimes even hashtag the posts that I know will get him angry). Not being American, I don’t always see where the still-active fault lines are in discussing US Civil War topics, so perhaps I am taking more of his coverage at face value than I should, but I’ve generally found him entertaining and only occasionally find his presentation to be unfair or misleading.
I’ve usually seen that attitude described as “presentism”. And I agree it’s a serious issue with a lot of channels.
K&G/CW aren’t the most electric of presentations, agreed. Again, I don’t follow the details of US history as closely, so I’d imagine errors on the Civil Rights movement would probably get past me fairly easily.
I have that issue with TIK as well – I suggest he really needs a script doctor and to be more confident.
I’ve detailed some of that in my criticisms of TimeGhost’s video from months ago.