From the early days of podcasting, History has been an extremely popular podcast genre. Consider Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcast, which began in 2006, developing its current long-form, immersive format that explores major historical topics with a punk sensibility. Episodes can run as long as four hours and still attract over 300,000 downloads.
While exact download shares are elusive, data from Edison Research and Buzzsprout shows history’s strong presence, with top history podcasts drawing substantial listenership and the genre experiencing significant growth.
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Switching to the present, a show like The Rest Is History is drawing millions of monthly listeners, winning Apple Podcasts’ 2025 Show of the Year, and the prestigious British Academy’s President’s Medal in 2023 (the first podcast to do so), earning a Webby Award People’s Voice Winner (History) in 2025, and garnering nominations for other honors like The Lovie Awards, and the iHeart Awards.
Hidden behind the current love fest with The Rest Is History, are thousands of History podcasts that have carved out popular niches in the historical record or what is missing from that record.
Why are there so many History buffs?
Why are people so interested in History podcasts? Let’s hear first from a History podcaster, Emily Ross, who is the creator/host of the popular Why Wars Happened podcast. Ross says, “I’ve been absolutely obsessed with history and how wars happened for probably well over a decade at least. I endlessly read about them and am just fascinated by them. Furthermore, I want to teach people about history in a way that gets the concepts across, rather than overloading with names and dates and irrelevant information.”
Consider that most nations teach History throughout their levels of education, yet how much can a student learn when a broad topic such as The History Of Western Civilization can be taught in a few months covering thousands of years of history? Too often, history is reduced to remembering dates and names. In what year was the Glorious Revolution in England? 1688. Even if you answer correctly, do students comprehend the magnitude of that uprising, where the embers of democracy began to burn as parliamentary supremacy was established, leading to the Bill of Rights and limiting the monarchy’s power.
In Why Wars Happened, Emily Ross spends an entire season discussing the American Revolution, and she begins that narrative almost 200 years before 1776. Why?
History podcasts do not just focus on the history that we know, but also on the history either hidden, neglected, or intentionally altered.
Philip Gibbons
“The eddies and flow of history are complex, sometimes contradictory, and often presage future events,” says Phillip Gibbons, creator/host of Byte Sized Biographies. “History is not only about what happened, but why it happened.”
Even though history is always positioned as a nation’s shared experience, every nation tends to hide its historical dirty laundry. For example, A podcast such as Echoes in the First Person by Michael Washington was developed to reclaim overlooked narratives and breathes life into the forgotten and the misremembered. Anyone who has ever had a blood transfusion owes a debt to Black physician Charles Richard Drew. In the Revolutionary War, did you know that thousands of Latino men fought for American independence, a massive contribution often omitted from history books, with Latinos making up about 12 percent of the colonial army?
You’ll find those facts in History podcasts.
Could be there a History Con one day?
History is a major business, rivaling institutional audio brands and fostering dedicated fandoms, with shows exploring diverse topics from major events to overlooked stories. In fact, about 25 percent of all books sold are History books. How does that popularity translate to History podcasts? First, podcasts humanize complex historical events through engaging narratives, making learning easy and fun, filling gaps left by formal education. Second, people often turn to history for context during times of significant political, technological, or social change. Third, History podcasts build strong communities, with hosts gaining celebrity status and selling out live events, much like musicians, and History shows cover everything from broad overviews to deep dives into overlooked subjects like women’s history, LGBTQ+ issues, and cultural oddities.
Podcasting’s enduring strength is its ability to niche-cast, even with broad topics like History. For example, Trapped History with Oswin Baker and Carla O’Shaughnessy, focuses on the interstices of history. The stories you don’t know and aren’t told. Co-host O’Shaughnessy explains, “At times, this podcast presents heroes as villains and villains as heroes.”
America: A History is a History podcast with a twist. The narrator is British. Hosted by Liam Heffernan on the Mercury Podcast Network, America connects the U.S.’s past, present, and future, helping listeners make sense of the nation’s complex and compelling story. Why does this show work? Because History is best interpreted by those with the distance to maintain a semblance of objectivity. Otherwise, we revert to the phrase widely attributed to Winston Churchill,”history is written by the victors.” meaning winners control the historical narrative.
History podcasts as contributors to the historical record
Truth be told here, unless you are a history major in college, most of us end our academic career woefully ignorant of the historical narrative except for dates, names, and catchphrases such as “Give me liberty or give me death.”
History is such an expansive topic for podcasts, encompassing the history of other disciplines, such as Philosophy, Astronomy, Physics, Psychology, and even the modern sitcom.
San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
But curiosity is a powerful human emotion. History offers context for the present, teaches lessons from past successes and failures, builds identity, and offers compelling stories of human drama, struggles, and triumphs, connecting us to the collective human experience and helping us understand who we are and where we’re going.
History podcasts, because of their ability to plunge into the crevasses of history, the power of the audio narrative, and the intellectual resolve of entrepreneurial podcasters have become a popular and formidable resource.
As President Harry S. Truman once said, “The only thing new in the world is the History we do not know.”
Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankracioppi/2026/01/27/history-is-hot-in-podcastingand-has-been-since-the-beginning/
