How Do We Really Know What Happened in the Past When Many Historians Were Propagandists and AI is Fabricating Everything Else?
History Unplugged Podcast17 Heinä 2025

How Do We Really Know What Happened in the Past When Many Historians Were Propagandists and AI is Fabricating Everything Else?

“History is written by the winners.” This aphorism is catchy and it makes an important point that a lot of what we know about history was written with an agenda, not for the purposes of informing us. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. There are many times that the so-called “losers” wrote the histories remembered today. After the American Civil War, Southern historians like Edward Pollard crafted "Lost Cause" narratives, romanticizing the Confederacy despite their defeat. Similarly, Chinese and Persian accounts of the Mongol invasions, such as those by Zhao Hong and Ata-Malik Juvayni, detailed Mongol brutality and cultural impacts from the perspective of the subjugated, challenging the victors' dominance.

But this statement still gets to a fundament question: What if the history you learned was deliberately shaped by people with their own agendas?

This question drives today’s guest, Richard Cohen, in his book “Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped The Past.” We explore how historians and storytellers, from ancient Greece to the modern era, shape our understanding of history through their biases and agendas, featuring figures like Herodotus, who blended fact and fable, Edward Gibbon, whose Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire reflected his personal perspective, and William Randolph Hearst, whose yellow journalism distorted historical narratives.

No history is truly objective, as personal, cultural, and political influences inevitably color the accounts of chroniclers like Thucydides, Tacitus, Voltaire, but we can still construct an understanding of the past that brings us closer to the truth.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Jaksot(1073)

Why Was Africa Never as Developed as The Rest of the World?

Why Was Africa Never as Developed as The Rest of the World?

Today's question is a tricky one that has to do with global politics, colonialism, and threatens to enter the minefield of race. Why do so many African nations sit at the bottom of global development ...

21 Kesä 20179min

Did King Arthur and Merlin Truly Exist?

Did King Arthur and Merlin Truly Exist?

Did the greatest king who ever lived ever live? That's a tricky question. The fabled first king of England, the mythological figure associated with Camelot and the Knights of the Round Table, may have...

20 Kesä 20178min

What the Saints Drank and Monks Brewed—Michael Foley

What the Saints Drank and Monks Brewed—Michael Foley

Michael Foley loves contradictions. He is a Catholic professor of patristics—a study of the lives of early Christian theologians—at a dry Baptist university. That didn't stop him from writing a book t...

19 Kesä 20171h

Who Built the Pyramids? Aliens?

Who Built the Pyramids? Aliens?

Today's question comes from Nayeli Carpenter She asks about lost civilizations: pyramid builds, Egyptians, Mayans, Incans, especially the ones where cultures disappeared mysteriously. I'm going to con...

16 Kesä 20177min

Can You Explain the 1915 Armenian Genocide?

Can You Explain the 1915 Armenian Genocide?

Today's question comes to us from Kevin deLaplante, creator of the Critical Thinker Academy and host of the Argument Ninja Podcast. Can you tell me about the 1915 Armenian Genocide and why today's pol...

15 Kesä 201713min

How Important Was the Spice Trade to Medieval Europe?

How Important Was the Spice Trade to Medieval Europe?

Today's question comes from Jaime Martínez Bowness: Hi - here's a quick list of topics I thought of:  The importance of the spice trade in Medieval times   TO HELP OUT THE SHOW Leave an honest review ...

14 Kesä 20179min

What Happened to Places Like Catalonia After Rome’s Fall?

What Happened to Places Like Catalonia After Rome’s Fall?

Today's question comes to us from Nate Finch: I would love for you to do a podcast (series?) on Mediterranean "empires" after Rome (e.g. the Catalonian "empire", which extended all the way to Italy, t...

13 Kesä 20177min

Was Hitler a Christian, Atheist, or Something Else? — Richard Weikart

Was Hitler a Christian, Atheist, or Something Else? — Richard Weikart

No matter how little you know about history, you know something about Adolf Hitler. And if you want to shut down an opponent, you can claim that Hitler said/did/believed the same thing. Godwin's Law e...

12 Kesä 20171h

Suosittua kategoriassa Yhteiskunta

olipa-kerran-otsikko
sita
i-dont-like-mondays
siita-on-vaikea-puhua
kaksi-aitia
gogin-ja-janin-maailmanhistoria
uutiscast
poks
antin-palautepalvelu
kolme-kaannekohtaa
aikalisa
yopuolen-tarinoita-2
mamma-mia
rss-murhan-anatomia
rss-nikotellen
rss-haudattu
meidan-pitais-puhua
rss-palmujen-varjoissa
loukussa
taskula-trishin