Americans going ashore at Daiquiri by James Burton
Just a tad behind this week, but I hope this recommendation will make the wait worthwhile. Yes, I got held up by the Superbowl, but I also decided I wanted to relisten to the show before I wrote it up. And if you get familiar with this particular podcast you’ll know that can be a bit of a commitment.
Hardcore History is a pretty lame title for a show, but don’t let it throw you off. Dan Carlin’s shows are intelligent, eclectic, and broad (like really broad). But most of all—they’re just really fucking fun. The perspective leans pretty heavily toward military history, but he does a good job of presenting the political and social moment in which the stories occur. At this point there are still fewer than sixty episodes at this point, but Carlin has been at it for about a decade. That’s because the episodes only come out about one every three months. And that’s because they’re monumental. The last episode on the Achaemenid Persian Empire is three and a half hours long. The six episode series on World War One clocks in right around twenty-two hours—the production took him almost two years.
Colonel Roosevelt and his Rough Riders at the top of the hill which they captured, Battle of San Juan by William Dinwiddie
The episode I’m suggesting this week is the one that immediately precedes that WWI series. It looks at Teddy Roosevelt and the U.S. on the verge of becoming an imperial power. It stretches from the explosion of the USS Maine in Cuba through the Spanish American War and it explains the role this moment played in shaping American attitudes just ahead of WWI. In every episode Carlin builds a narrative full of colorful asides and interesting historical connections. There’s William Randolph Hearst suggesting a brigade of the country’s athletes would be enough to overawe and defeat the Spanish military. There are comparisons between late 19th century jingoism and present day neo-conservative foreign policy.
Clearly, if military history is not your thing, you won’t love everything Carlin does, although there are plenty of interesting episodes that depart from the battlefield. But the thing that keeps Carlin so interesting is his ability to retain and impart a healthy skepticism of the motivations behind conflict. There are interesting ruminations on how the country’s racism prompted paternalistic efforts to expand borders. But at the same time that racism elicited fear of the increasing dark-skinned population that would come with imperialism. Carlin considers Roosevelt’s full-throated (and frankly insane) nationalism, and he gives him credit for participating in the conflict rather than sitting on the sidelines. But he also talks about how much that aggressive posture cost Roosevelt later in life. The episode depicts Roosevelt’s boy-like desire to prove himself brave and gallant in battle with little if any thought for consequences. The country’s foreign policy at the time parallels his story as easy success in Cuba gave way to a bloody, stubborn conflict in the Philippines.
This episode is just over four hours—so yeah, probably not great for a single sitting. But it’s one of my favorite examples of a stand-alone Hardcore History episode. If you like it there are a handful of really good multi-episode series. In addition to the one on WWI, there is another about the Mongols that’s still available. The ones about the fall of the Roman Republic and The Punic Wars aren’t available on iTunes any longer, but they’re real goodies if you can track them down. Stay tuned—there will be more to say about roman history.