Topic Vote! What history do you want to learn?

Being Danish, I grew up knowing about her. She's one of our major historical figures and a point of national pride since she marked the height of Danish power. She was one of the two suggestions I considered the first time I got to send in a suggestion and I missed the second time, so I'm really tempted to send her in next to get some women going.

Christina Maria Jessen

She would totally be eligible if you wanted to send her in as a suggestion next month after the Suleiman series! I hadn't heard of her yet myself, but a quick Wikipedia search tells me that I would enjoy seeing her get her own series very much. :D

Extra History

I think the issue with missing major topics like Caesar and the American Revolution is that the people voting here are interested in history themselves and probably already feel like they know a lot about those topics. Also, while it is in Europe, I have a suggestion for a woman who'd be quite worth a spotlight. Queen Margaret I, the founder of the Kalmar Union which is really one of the big what-ifs of European history that could have reshaped the power and politics of Europe had it lasted. In a way it did through how it broke up too, since it meant that Denmark and Sweden, two of the larger medieval European kingdoms ended up spending their energy fighting each other for centuries instead of something more fruitful or productive. There should be a lot of material to work with in her political machinations to make her union happen and the collapse that followed her death.

Christina Maria Jessen

Me too! And I'm sure Catherine will come back someday... as will the rest!

Extra History

Back in college, one of my professors (I studied Classics) offered us an optional essay where you could make your argument about whether the Fall of Rome did or did not have direct parallels with the current state of American society. I talked to him about it years after, and he told me it was one of his favorite questions to ask students, since pretty much every one had a completely different argument and advocated for it passionately. His was a very good class.

Extra History

I've mentioned this in the other thread, but we can't do them back to back because that would mean depriving patrons of their vote after the next series, and we don't want to do that to everyone. But, although I don't yet know when, we will definitely bring Catherine back sometime for another go!

Extra History

THIS WAS THE CLOSEST VOTE EVER. I couldn't even watch.

Extra History

Everywhere a Walpole!

Extra History

And it came down to just that one vote...

Extra History

Just gonna give a big thumbs up to Trevor's suggestion. Mike Duncan's History of Rome podcast is a favorite for the EH crew. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History is another one that I personally enjoy! And if you haven't checked out Crash Course World History on YouTube yet, I think you'll find it's a treat. -Soraya

Extra History

I stepped out for a few days so my apologies for being late to this one. Considering how passionately you all feel about this, though, I did want to take a moment to weigh in. Personally, I love that the viewers of our show have such a strong interest in history that isn't covered as part of the traditional Western curriculum. You've all pushed us to cover topics from the Zulu Empire to Admiral Yi, and the show is much better for having that variety - AND for having that variety keep recurring, so it's never just a "token" series about this or that non-European culture. But we ALSO want this show to provide resources for teachers and students, and since most English-speaking teachers and students study Western history, the fact that some of the most "famous" topics like Caesar or the American Revolution consistently lose on the votes makes that aspect of the show a bit hard to achieve. That, along with the lack of women who've headlined their own spotlight series (Mary Seacole was a more of a "mini" series), is one of the things that we're keeping a very close eye on. For me (Soraya), ideally, I hope we can strike a good balance. I never want us to only cover Western history, but I do want to make sure we talk about important moments in Western history. My dream is that students who come to our show to learn about the Punic Wars for their history class will find so much to enjoy that they stick around to watch the Sengoku Jidai, or maybe one day Catherine the Great. If even one of those students then decides to research history - from whatever period or region they like - on their OWN, then I will be happy forever. Then I think we'll have done a good thing. And so far, I have to say, I think we have seen a really good balance overall. We do tend to swap between Western history and "non-Western" history (such a broad oversimplification that I felt I had to put it in quotes), and that does mean the show leans Western, but to my mind that makes it more likely that students and teachers will find the show, so it's a trend I'm willing to accept. But we do continue to push for non-Western history topics, non-war history topics, and non-traditional history topics in our choice of voting options. They wouldn't all be there if we didn't want to them to win! As a patron, all we ask of you is that you vote for whatever you're most interested in. If that's non-Western history topics, then that's fantastic! We love bringing those stories to an audience that doesn't often get to hear them (and may, as Christina pointed out, underestimate them as a result). The seven-week cycle of our show means that it takes us more time to cover a wide variety of topics than it would take a show that does single episode overviews, but over time, I think we're going to build up a really good library that showcases history from around the world and gives a lot of students an entry point into what we really hope will become a lifelong love of history.

Extra History

For what it's worth - I'd support this idea. They're ONE VOTE apart.

Nessf

But was it really the Gracchi's fault that the Republic fell? Or had the patricians already necessitated an eventual shift to empire, hundreds of years before the Gracchi were even born? All this and more...!

Avery

Wow, that was really close! I'm really looking forward to learning about The Brothers Gracchi.

Given that it is tied percentage wise, and only one vote apart will you just do both back to back?

Joshua Kristoff

Looks like The Brothers Gracchi won! I'm so excited! I think that this is a very important story to tell, especially now. Present -day America is disturbingly similar to Late-Republic Rome, and I believe that the Bush family are the new Gracchi, and Mr. Trump is the new Sulla, using their precedent and his own demagoguery to win power and topple the Republic.

Trevor Sullivan

I understand the motivation, but the stories that are being told here that are part of Western History are just as rarely told as the ones that aren't. The Gracchi is one of the most important untold stories in Western History, especially since a copy/paste of the Gracchi are alive and in power in America today.

Trevor Sullivan

Mike Duncan's History of Rome Podcast. It gives you a complete overview of just about everything, in a very accessible manner, while also being historically honest and complete. It's still one of the most popular podcasts out there, it's the one that introduced me to podcasts in general. I can't reccommend it more highly.

Trevor Sullivan

It's literally 4 votes away!!!

Bothelwhoe

And Avery, a lot of those things are hardly unique to the west. I mean, imperialism is obvious, given how many mighty, expansionist empires have risen outside Europe such as China (particularly Han and Qing), Achaemanid Persia, the Delhi Sultanate, the Gupta and Mughal empires, the first Caliphate, the Incas and the Aztecs to just name the ones that immediately spring to mind and counting both Russia and the Ottomans as European. Similarly, Edo period Japan had a greater degree of capitalist development in 1800 than pretty much any part of Europe except England, the Scottish lowlands, the Netherlands and northeastern France. Reading about it is quite fascinating, given how many similarities you'll find to pre-revolutionary France, as well as to the economic conditions in England at the start of industrialization. It just really challenges the idea that modern, monetized economies are unique to the west and others had to learn from us. China also has a history of nationalist rebellion against foreign conquerors that could draw massive popular support from the peasantry and an idea that China ought to be one state going all the way back to the Eastern Zhou period of the first millennium BCE. The Ming Dynasty was founded by a peasant rebel opposed to the foreign occupation by Mongols and during both the Warring States period, the Three Kingdoms period and Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, there was constant laments from the educated elite that All Under Heaven was shattered for lack of a single emperor. As for science...The history of science as it's usually told is a mess that largely fails to grasp what science even is. Expression of the basic idea of science, the search for greater understanding of the world through logic, math and empirical collection of data, has been found everywhere from European antiquity to the Muslim world of the Middle Ages to Song dynasty China and the court of Ulug Beg in 15th century Samarkand. The greatest institutional expression of science is the European university as it developed from the mid-19th century onwards, but the basic idea is pretty much universal to well-educated people for about as long as we've had writing. And even this had more to do with possessing the technology and resources to delve into questions that could previously only be guessed at, rather than any change in the theory of the field. I'll give you democracy, though.

Christina Maria Jessen

It's not so much that I think people shouldn't learn about the west as it is that I'm trying to use the platforms I have access to, to try to push for adding some stuff about other places. I mean, even if Extra History never talked about Western Europe or North America again, even people following it religiously and who lives in a western country will still have learned more about Western European and North American history than that of the rest of the world. And I'm just one person, I couldn't enforce that and I wouldn't either, I'm simply trying to do mine to make sure the rest of the world gets its due. Beyond that, learning about the rest of the world helps us understand the west. Both by letting us see the contrasts and the similarities and by better understanding a number of the forces acting on western politics and societies today. With the significance of the Chinese economy and the tensions in the South China Sea, learning something about China's historical experiences and intellectual traditions can help better understand the position we find ourselves in. Something similar can easily be said about the Middle East, especially in light of the current European crisis triggered by an increase of Syrian refugees. Learning some about the origins of the conflicts in the region in the Ottoman administration and how the Ottoman empire was dissolved is pretty directly relevant. And if you want to understand industrialization, Edo period Japan is a very useful place to study to see why industrialization didn't start there despite a highly monetized economy full of advertising, regional specialization and massive urbanization. The rest of the world is not just immediately relevant, even for people in the west, it also helps better understand what was unique about events in western history and what was just business as usual for humanity. The narrower your knowledge, the more likely you are to take something specific as universal and something universal as specific, the more knowledge you have for comparing and contrasting, the better you are at understanding any given thing. I'm a pretty strong believer that broader knowledge is more useful in building understanding than deeper knowledge, at least after a certain point. And, of course, there are almost certainly backers who aren't white Americans or Western Europeans who would like to hear about their own cultural backgrounds or at least something other than the Anglocentric hegemony in history writing.

Christina Maria Jessen

It's not so much that I think people shouldn't learn about the west as it is that I'm trying to use the platforms I have access to, to try to push for adding some stuff about other places. I mean, even if Extra History never talked about Western Europe or North America again, even people following it religiously and who lives in a western country will still have learned more about Western European and North American history than that of the rest of the world. And I'm just one person, I couldn't enforce that and I wouldn't either, I'm simply trying to do mine to make sure the rest of the world gets its due. Beyond that, learning about the rest of the world helps us understand the west. Both by letting us see the contrasts and the similarities and by better understanding a number of the forces acting on western politics and societies today. With the significance of the Chinese economy and the tensions in the South China Sea, learning something about China's historical experiences and intellectual traditions can help better understand the position we find ourselves in. Something similar can easily be said about the Middle East, especially in light of the current European crisis triggered by an increase of Syrian refugees. Learning some about the origins of the conflicts in the region in the Ottoman administration and how the Ottoman empire was dissolved is pretty directly relevant. And if you want to understand industrialization, Edo period Japan is a very useful place to study to see why industrialization didn't start there despite a highly monetized economy full of advertising, regional specialization and massive urbanization. The rest of the world is not just immediately relevant, even for people in the west, it also helps better understand what was unique about events in western history and what was just business as usual for humanity. The narrower your knowledge, the more likely you are to take something specific as universal and something universal as specific, the more knowledge you have for comparing and contrasting, the better you are at understanding any given thing. I'm a pretty strong believer that broader knowledge is more useful in building understanding than deeper knowledge, at least after a certain point. And, of course, there are almost certainly backers who aren't white Americans or Western Europeans who would like to hear about their own cultural backgrounds or at least something other than the Anglocentric hegemony in history writing.

Christina Maria Jessen

Christina, I understand your grievance and agree to an extent. Westerners are naturally gonna prefer their own history and will make it sound more glorious than it actually is. Learning about the failings of Western civilization to counteract the watered down history of Western success, I think is just as important as learning about other cultures, maybe even more so since it is directly relevant to Westerners. I'd love a series about Catherine the Great, but not as much as I'd love one on The Grachii Brothers. Of course, as a Romanophile, I'm rather biased. ; )

Stephen Watson

I will agree that the Extra History episodes about non-Western history have been great in spreading awareness of stories that other cultures consider extremely important! But on the other hand, if people want to learn about where all this crazy stuff we deal with in our modern life came from, like science, democracy, nation-states, capitalism, imperialism etc. you can't do better than to learn about the West. All of the options are good!

Avery

*Sees the Jacobite Uprisings* Walpole.

The Cayute

Because of the immense institutional bias towards only teaching the history of Western Europeans, particularly the line leading to the modern English-speaking world. Getting some word out about something else is important in both countering a number of myths with severe political consequences and just in telling people interesting stories they're less likely to have heard about before. Eurocentric and anglocentric history has lead to highly distorted understandings of the world and is pretty much endemic. I mean, how often do you hear that the single largest army in WWII was that of the Guomindang or how the Mughal Empire was larger, wealthier and better educated than the Ottomans, to say nothing about Christian Europe? How many people have even heard about the kingdoms of Makuria or Benin or the great Kongo kingdom that fractured due to internal warfare and foreign aggression from other Central African powers? For an extreme example of this cultural myopia and tendency to only tell the history of the west, I can point out how a respected history professor made the assumption that since the Han dynasty left effigies as grave goods, surely a model ship bought in Shanghai in the early 1930s must have been one as well. There was also the time when our entire segment on Japan in the basic world history lecture series got cancelled because the lecturer on medieval Europe insisted that she needed three lectures for the high middle ages, instead of two and the one solitary lecture on Japan got cancelled to accommodate her. And she mostly had to teach stuff not in the core world history book, A History of World Societies, used by most universities for world history courses because it was written by somebody who only bothered to talk about England. Or to use an example from gaming, Crusader Kings imposes the British system of local, titled nobility with local sovereignty on everything from the Qinghai province of modern China to Ghana, even though the only medieval region to have something remotely similar to England was France. I'm doing this to try to do my own little part to counteract this bias, although it doesn't hurt to learn about things that haven't been talked about to death as part of my own education.

Christina Maria Jessen

I just came in to check this to update some non-patron but curious friends and: YOWZA this is close! At time of posting, the two most popular options are ONE VOTE apart. Be interesting to see how this pans out.

Nessf

I've been wanting to learn more about early Roman and European history, are there any books or texts you would recomend?

GrayMorality

That's a surprisingly complicated question. ;) Normally I say "Sure if you suggest it through the $15 patron option!" but... Our current cut-off for periods we'll discuss is the 1920s, and the Spanish Civil War was in the 1930s, but I do know James wants to talk about the Spanish Civil War someday. So... I don't really know, right now!

Extra History

Why do you feel this way?

Stephen Watson

Time to follow my basic principle of always voting for whichever is the least Western European. I mean, Russia is still white, but it's white people who have been considered only barely so and it's certainly less so than Rome or England.

Christina Maria Jessen

Please please can you do anarchist Catalonia in the Spanish civil war! It inspired George Orwell's philosophy as well as being a great story

Noah Dunbar

Agreed! And whatever wins this time around, I'm looking forward to seeing it.

Extra History

I always feel that way too. I want them all to win!

Extra History

Safe to say there is no wrong answer here, and in time hopefully all 4 will be covered.

Ambiguous64

It feels like I've waited so long for next vote, and now it's here and I don't even know who to vote for.

GooGhoul

+Stephen Approval[/Range2] voting is better at picking a condorcet winner than condorcet voting: <a href="http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVcond.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.rangevoting.org/rangeVcond.html</a>

GooGhoul

Well, it's approval voting so you could vote for all of them.

GooGhoul

The Brothers Gracchi are definitely fascinating characters. I highly recommend a Wikipedia dive for them.

Extra History

While I personally want to see all of them win, don't lose hope yet, especially for second place! We've definitely seen comebacks.

Extra History

I will say it was chosen to be on the list for that reason. :)

Extra History

Well, yes we can... But not at the same time. ;D Catherine was here in the last vote and didn't win, so perhaps she spent the off-season campaigning.

Extra History

Not to dis Catherine the Great, but the Brothers Grachii sound <i>fascinating</i>. "How Democracy Falls Apart"? I'd <i>love</i> to hear about that, given all the monarchy-related dirty laundry history likes to air.

Timothy McLean

I'd still prefer some sort of condorcet voting, but I understand you want live results to be possible for just after we vote which... Tends not to be so easy with condorcet...

Stephen

I went with Gracchi - I'm both sad and happy to see it's second right now...

Porcupine

You are killing me here. Gracchi is just so... important. What little I know from school paints them as the harbingers of the fall of roman democracy. At the same time, Catharine the Great is tragically under-appreciated. Can't we have both?

TerraN0va

I'll be excited no matter what wins the vote!

Extra History

Lots of good story for Sir Francis Drake!

Extra History

Yeah, James mentioned on the Q&A that he was thinking of putting the Gracchi in the vote for just that reason. But I'm pretty excited for all of these, so now comes the part where I obsessively check voting results several times a day in my impatience to find out what's gonna win. ;)

Extra History

The only wrong choice..... its not to vote! I've always believed in mandatory voting as a civic duty.

Raspberyl

The gracchi brothers has so much to learn from that is applicable, especially in a time like now. I would rather do that then one of the more common topics ou might learn more easily

Tyler Henderson

I mean, I want to see them all, so I happen to agree that there's no wrong choice!

Extra History

eh was more like I know very little about any of these so whatever it is I'll probably learn something.

Raspberyl

Awesome topics! Any one of them should make a great series.

Jeffrey Schneider

I'm personally interested in the Pirate here, for multiple reasons.

Aaron hutchinson

That was the patron suggestion for this month! Gooo patrons!

Extra History

I'd personally prefer the origins of the Jacobites (Glorious Revolution -> Battle of the Boyne -> Penal Laws) over the actual rebellions, but that's just me. I'm not surprised the Grachii are pretty popular. It's been a time of demagoguery, so theirs is a story that resonates and make you wonder what we can learn from them. But I'm fine with Catherine as well. Even in my Eurocentric background, I need to brush up on Russian History.

RMS Oceanic

I'm so glad we were able to fix it. Phew. Had me sweating for a while there.

Extra History

Ah, the wheel of fate...

Extra History

A patron actually reached out to us very early on to recommend approval voting! They made a clear case and we've used their suggestion ever since. Very happy we did so!

Extra History

Exciting bunch of topics! C'mon Jacobite Uprisings!

Oliver Nilsson

<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=orybDrUj4vA</a>

RMS Oceanic

Good on you lot for using approval voting. It's the most appropriate system for this sort of task.

rohit Ramesh

Picking one at random.... Catherine the Great sure lets go with that

Raspberyl

YAAAAY we got it!

Extra History

Oh good, it works now

DasGuardians

Yep, already collecting quite a few votes.

L Tantivy

Ah, this one works.

Brian Rose