Learning Day: Captivating History

Have you ever wondered about history? Have you ever wanted to know about any historical topic in all of history? Great news: one weird guy, and/or Sentient Amazon Dot Com, is now a top book listing for that history. They’re the history, now.

I hope you haven’t crossed paths with “Captivating History”. Many people have! It’s a bit of a Chicken Girls in its massive reach. But “Captivating History” doesn’t lure folks with post-sponsorship tongue kissing. It lures the world’s History Googlers. Such as me! Your pal Alex Schmidt! I spelunk through history for a living. I read history for fun. The other day, I wanted to know more about the Spanish-American War. So I googled about it, and Google told me I should learn about the Spanish-American War from…someone. Or something? Something threatening me with such captivating history, it will page-turn me into insomnia.

“Captivating History” wrote one of the most popular books about the Spanish-American War. Why? Because they write one of the most popular history books about everything. “Captivating History” is the author of 1,010 history books. One thousand and ten books, printed on demand by Amazon Dot Com. By the time you read my words, there will probably be more than 1,010 “Captivating History” titles. There were less than one thousand books when I started typing this column. According to the publication dates, they often release multiple new titles on the same day. “Captivating History” is relentless. Like every “Captivating History” reader described in the ad copy, “Captivating History” never sleeps. Time marches forward, events occur, and “Captivating History” renders each of them into a print-on-demand book and a Kindle Unlimited ebook. I don’t know exactly how they do it. “Captivating History” is either a maniac or a machine. Whichever they are, we lose. I figure “Captivating History” celebrated their recent ONE THOUSAND BOOKS MILESTONE with a grocery store sheet cake, or a new torso-cavity minigun, or both if cyborg.

“Captivating History” exists because Wikipedia’s reputation is merely good. Most people let Wikipedia cover their brief curiosity on a topic. Other folks who want A Real Source find something good. The rest buy a book from “Captivating History”. This stinks, especially if you remember books are made of paper. Each time somebody springs for a physical “Captivating History”, an Amazon Dot Com Lumberbot cuts down a squirrel’s home. When I bought two books, for humanity, I knew I bought them at squirrels’ expense. A necessary sacrifice. We must understand the enemy to defeat them. First insight: this enemy has the exact same publisher as Morishige Shunsen.

That’s each book’s last page. Which is preceded by six blank pages, due to robot publishing error. Great to know the exact date I hobo-fied a tree rodent. Good luck ridin’ the rails, Nutsy.

Fun fact about me: I more or less got a college degree in the Spanish-American War. I majored in History. I wrote an undergrad thesis about key anti-imperialists of that conflict. I’m bringing a medium amount of skill to my purchase of “Captivating History” Of Spanish-American War. As an expert, I noticed one subtle issue with the book’s Amazon description. Half the description is mis-pasted chapter titles from the “Captivating History” Of Charlemagne.

My Dear Hotdogger, I did not just buy a history of the Spanish-Americharlem Wagne. I decided to give “Captivating History” a fair shake, and buy a book less in my wheelhouse. I told myself I’d also snag the most popular “Captivating History”. So I sorted the thousand-odd “Captivating History” titles by “most reviews.” I should not have sorted by “most reviews.”

“Captivating History” is bad in all the ways artificial intelligence is bad. One of those ways: it’s a mirror of humanity’s most embarrassing group dynamics. Hitler has the most reviews because of people. “Captivating History” book sales fit The History Channel airing up to 12 hours of World War Two material per day, back in the day. The “butterfly effect” of this is bad for every life form, butterflies included. So many History Googlers googled “World War Two Darth Vader.” As a result, I’m deforesting Delaware to use my personal Amazon account to get on a “Purchased Hitler Information” list. Thanks for nothing, My Own Column Idea. How dare me.

Look at that cover. Sincere thanks after all, My Own Column Idea. That’s a funny cover. It reveals the hilarious flaw of the brand name “Captivating History”. It’s not a workable title choice for most of history. “Captivating History” painted themselves into a hellish corner. For branding and SEO purposes, they must frame the life of Hitler as [voice of a gossipy flirt or wine mom] “captivating”. And because “Captivating History” assimilates every historical event, this branding mess repeats itself across every tragedy. The Trail of Tears? Captivating! The Scramble For Africa? Captivating! The Irish Potato Famine? So captivating there's a bonus volume. A discerning “Captivating History” shopper sees this problem right away. Those books I linked are results from my first attempt at a negative search term:

Also, I don’t know if “Captivating History” knows how based these search results turned out to be. Here’s the first Amazon listing when you search the “Captivating” catalog for “massacre”:

That’s bold. Your favorite hardcore historian would never. Howard Freakin’ Zinn would ask you to be a little more respectful of Thomas Jefferson.

Even the logo of “Captivating History” is brutal. And based, I suppose? This is the logo they slap onto everything they do:

That’s their name pasted across a painting. Specifically this painting, of fighting, in the Haitian Revolution. Do you notice any of the details here? At least one of those guys is mid-bayoneting. And if you “read” the image left to right, the first thing you see is a proud decapitation.

Decapitation! In their logo! Nobody does that! You can’t even do that if you’re a media company named "Jacobin". Please don’t buy a thirty dollar “Captivating” deforestation book to learn what a Jacobin is. Follow that friggin’ link. Or don’t! All you need to know is “Captivating History” is the largest media company on Earth with a decapitation-centric logo. And not just because nobody else has one. “Captivating History” is a sizable media company. As I tracked my Amazon package, to gather it off my public-facing porch as fast as possible, I marveled at the goliath I’m exploring. “Captivating History” is more than books. “Captivating History” is a Facebook page, X Dot Com account, website, and YouTube channel. The last part is the most terrifying. More than 386,000 people subscribe to “Captivating History” on YouTube. They’ve watched its videos more than 49 million times. The videos feature no faces, no named creators, and one endless speaking voice. The voice reads you history in a tone that is not quite lively enough to definitely be human, but not quite smooth enough to definitely be A.I.. It’s uncanny squared. I’m brimming with theories. I lean toward thinking a real human narrates the videos, and that’s the more upsetting explanation.

My book purchases have a similar alienating feeling. Despite being printed in the same location on the same day for the same Amazon order, the books are different sizes, different fonts, with different text faintness.

The books’ text is even spookier. It’s both lazier and harder-working than I expected. I’m used to history books by professionals. I’m also very used to “sources” that copy/paste Wikipedia, because basically every podcast except mine runs with those, and then I get asked why I didn’t mention the “inventor” of toasters. Lots of the Internet is Wikipedia clone-spam. So I went into “Captivating History” assuming they pasted Wikipedia into an Amazon Book-er-izer and that’s that. But when I text-search phrases and sentences from “Captivating History”, the books’ text doesn’t parrot Wikipedia. Don’t get me wrong: no one “wrote” these books. “Captivating History” publishes multiple entire history books per day. It’s got to be plagiarized text. But they did it the harder way. They plagiarized a combination of non-Wikipedia sources. You can tell. These books have long bibliographies. Chaotic bibliographies, with obvious issues like printing the same source twice, or printing the partial text version of a hyperlink. The first page of one bibliography lists an article by “Doug Herman” followed by the exact same article credited to “Dough Herman”. It reads like Doug Herman’s jock tormentor grabbed the keyboard.

This carnival of errors is also your experience if you watch “Captivating History” YouTube videos. The vids are definitely the book text spoken out loud. The top comments on videos like this one are all angry corrections. My favorite is this Habsburg video, which is such a mess, “Captivating History” commented (!) to address seven significant errors. People responded to this comment with further errors beyond those seven.

And once again, I ask you: who are these maniacs? If you write history, you have to put your name on it. Historians can’t be anonymous, just like scientists and babysitters and plumbers can’t be anonymous. Nobody’s taking medical advice from the scary side of a one-way mirror. No one’s hiring The Masked Landscaper to prowl their yard. You have to identify yourself, “Captivating History”!

I tried to identify them. I found one false lead and one nightmare. Starting with the false lead: I dug up a name, at the bottom of their website.

A name! A human name! Which “Captivating History” presents as confusingly as possible. It turns out Nedim Maric is not the creator of “Captivating History”. Nedim Maric is a guy who pops up on LinkedIn, as the spender of a maximum of two months making a website.

That’s right: “Captivating History” didn’t put an author name on more than one thousand books, and did put an author name on one freelance web design project.

Moving on to the nightmare: the only other “Captivating History” name that’s popped up, after I pushed Google to its limits, is a mysterious “Matt Clayton”. “Matt” is the credited author of a few of the “Captivating History” titles. The rest, including their Span-Am book and their hit Hitler bookler, are written by “Captivating History”. There’s no name on the copyright listing. Amazon cannot understand this. In lieu of any other author names, “Matt Clayton” is Amazon’s best guess at an author for the whole series.

As I read the bio of “Matt”, his lack of credentials blurs with his lack of personal information. Why are there zero other Google results for this man? Is his biography thin because he’s nonexistent, or merely unqualified to write history books? Is the phrase “reading, eating, sleeping, or working on projects” the longest non-biography ever written? Also, why would a Mythology Take-Haver go on to write history books? Did he forget mythology is much easier to write than history? These aren’t my only questions. They’re dwarfed in importance by what I ran into when I reverse image-searched that author photo. Why is this web page the only result for that photo?

I can see two possibilities here, and I don’t know which is worse. On the one hand, “Matt Clayton” might be a fake identity, invented by “Captivating History”. In that case, they’re using a stock photo or obscure photo, depicting a quilt scrap enthusiast. They’re pretending that guy is them. That would be creepy. On the other hand, “Matt” could be Matt. Matt could be real. In which case “Captivating History” is the sprawling opus of one photogenic resident of a church-affiliated health care center in northwestern Washington State. Is that the answer? Did one retiree with a chronic case of Health Yada-Yada fill his days, and deaden his pain, by overtaking every professional historian in Amazon’s book algorithm? Is free time and limber wrists all he needed to conquer the world? Could any idle elder do this? The more I consider that possibility, the more I want “Matt Clayton” to be a giant army of youthful scammers. I want “Matt Clayton” to be a hundred-man grift, each armed with the vitality and the energy drink habit of a teenage Nedim. If that’s the situation, I can sleep at night. But if one guy borrowing computer time in his facility’s Media/Parcheesi Room bent our collective understanding of the past, I need to double check everything I’ve ever thought I’ve known.

Whoever wrote these books, they wrote parts of them in the anonymous first person. Especially the “Captivating History” Hitler book. If you cut the personal pleas out, it’s pretty short. Our Captivating Li’l Führer taps out at page 149, with a (depersonalized) personal request to leave positive Amazon reviews.

“I read all the reviews myself” has never been more ominous. Of course you read them all, Artificial Intelligence or Scam Army or One Coot. Anyway, that’s not the end of the text of Hitler Book For Human Reader You Buy Now. It’s padded out with “previews” of the first chapters of “Captivating History” books about Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I did skim these previews, because I hoped they’d describe Charlemagne succeeding Pepin The Short or whatever. But I was gassed from reading the main text. These books are tiring. They’re stifling in their professionalism. They’re copy-pasted, from decent sources, with cloddish filler words for some flow… and that’s not as cursed of an experience as I hoped for. It’s like when I read a cat reincarnation book, but it faithfully described Babe Ruth. They’re not wrong. It’s factual stuff. It’s just the exact opposite of the “Captivating History” sales pitch of “YOU’LL NEVER SLEEP, YOU CAPTIVATED CAPTIVE.” The plain facts of Hitler’s story, printed in a font from the first Apple computers, is not the page turner they promised.

The Spanish-American Captivation, on the other hand, was an unforgettable read. Why? I’ll never forget the tension headache I got from the print being so faint. On the plus side, this book chooses a worthwhile way of framing the conflict. Most high school history classes barely talk about the Spanish-American War. Then they skip the long, significant, follow-up Philippine-American War. “Captivating History” does not ignore that story. It presents these two wars as one continuous story, in one book. Is this a brave and thoughtful choice? Or did they run out of stuff to say about the Spanish-American War after just 100 pages…

…and then pad that out with the text of another too-short book? Which probably didn’t sell well on its own because the cover design robot made THE YEARS THE WAR HAPPENED bigger than the name of the war?

Who can say. It’s mysterious. It’s, dare I say it, captivating. I learned nothing from these two books. But I did go down a rabbit hole of the dropship economy, and its clumsy exploitation of our earnest interest in facts about our shared past. That’s the heartwarming element of all this. People are buying history books! Books that cost money, when they could get the gist of the history for free! I think that’s admirable, as an intention. And I think it bonds us together. Bonds with other humans make life worth living, and make me optimistic about our collective future. Which reminds me: I have not stepped outside my home in a week. Turns out you can’t work on your column about a Hitler book AND be seen by other humans holding that book. So thank you, my trash can. I miss people, you’re setting me free, and I can’t recycle whichever plastic Amazon shellacked onto your cover.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Haraka, captivating like Alexander the Genghis who cut the Gordita Knot with Excaliburn.

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