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- [00:04]
A
This is in conversation from Apple News. I'm Shemitah Basu. Today, two top historians share their favorite surprising chapters from American history.
- [00:23]
Think back to history class. Did you ever have a teacher or professor who really made the past come to life? At a time when historical content is booming in popularity, historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland have become those teachers for millions of people through their podcast, the Rest Is History. In each episode, Dominic and Tom rave, banter, and take listeners deep into the past with surprising details, compelling characters, and engaging storytelling.
- [00:52]
B
We are motivated by enormous kind of enthusiasm for history. That's Dominic, what happened to the people who were in this place before us? And secondly, what happened next? You know, the thrill of the story. You want to know what's going to happen to these characters.
- [01:08]
A
The Rest Is History has just been chosen as Apple Podcasts Podcast of the year. So I wanted to sit down with Dominic and Tom to talk about the thing they know best, history. And specifically their favorite moments from American history. We talk about the dramatic moment when indigenous people first clashed with colonizers, the huge social and political swings of the 1990s, 1960s, and why Tom will always defend Mary Todd Lincoln, no matter how many historians call her a nightmare.
- [01:36]
C
You're just racking up reasons why actually she's tremendous and probably the best woman in American history.
- [01:40]
A
Tom will not change his position on this.
- [01:43]
C
No.
- [01:43]
A
He's unchanging on this.
- [01:45]
C
No. I've pledged my sword to her.
- [01:47]
A
I started by asking Dominic what he thinks is drawing so many people to history right now.
- [01:55]
B
I think there is a massive appetite for history. And I think people always, at any given moment, people say, oh, young people aren't interested in history. And that's just wrong. I think they are. But I think to some extent, maybe a lot of kind of academic historians don't quite reach a mass audience. And I think by putting the stories and the characters first and foremost, we're able to do that. I think, you know, these are great stories that we're telling. I mean, I don't take credit for that ourselves, because the stories exist, existed long before we did. You know, if it's the Second World War or the First World War or the Greek myths or the Trojan War or the rise and fall of Rome or whatever. You know, there's something weird about you if you don't find any of these interesting, because they are. They are what it is to be human. They're the building blocks of our civilization. So why wouldn't you be interested in them?
- [02:45]
C
I think also that when people are students. There is a massive pressure on the curriculum. There's more and more that people need to study. And so the pressure on history is very intense. And before the Internet, there was a sense that if you don't learn it at school, you'll never have another opportunity. But the truth is that now the opportunity to learn about history endures throughout your entire life. So for us, it's like stumbling on an enormous seam of gold, and we just keep hacking away at it, and, oh, here's another great seam of gold. Let's plunder that. The fascination is limitless, I think.
- [03:21]
A
Yeah. Well, let's get to the list at hand. These are some of your favorite bits of American history. You sent these to us ahead of time, and the first one that you listed was the fall of the Aztecs, which I've got to say, I did not see coming. I did not know we were going to go all the way back to the early 1500s. This is the period when Spanish conquistadors, led by Hernan Cortez, brought down the Aztec empire, which was ruled by Moctezuma II at the time. Now, I don't know if many people would plot that on their timeline in American history as one of their early starting points to think about. So why do you choose to start there? Why is that one of your favorites?
- [04:00]
C
Because. Because I think it is the closest to science fiction that world history approaches.
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A
Ooh.
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C
If you like science fiction, the sense of.
- [04:14]
People from different planets crashing into each other, then Cortez meeting with Moctezuma is the closest you get to that in Earth history.
- [04:25]
B
Yeah. And it is a North American story. Right. I mean, Mexico is in North America, so.
- [04:29]
C
Well, the. The Aztecs came from what's now the United States.
- [04:32]
B
They came from Colorado, thereabout or thereabouts. They'd migrated south. It's the great meeting of the Old world and the New World. So, you know, it starts with Columbus in 1492, and then the Spanish start coming in the early 16th century, and there's what's called the Colombian exchange, which is the sort of transfer of plants, of viruses, of habits, of all of these kinds of things actually has a massive, massive impact on the way we live today, even the food we eat and so on. But then the drama of it. I mean, as Tom says, the moment that Hernan Cortez, the Spanish conquistador, basically walks down the causeway into the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan to meet Montezuma, and then what happens next? The high drama of it, you know, the Spanish having to flee the Aztec capital, then returning and sacking it and taking it. And then, I mean, this is the establishment of European colonialism. It's the Old World establishing itself in the new. It's imperialism. It has a massive, massive influence on world history for the next 500 years.
- [05:32]
C
And I think it has both incredibly intense personal drama. So there's the relationship of Hernan Cortez to Malinche, who is the woman he meets up with, who enables him to understand the people that he's talking to, the translator. And the relationship that they have is obviously very deeply personal to the two of them, but also has an enormous political resonance. It facilitates the Spanish conquest, and to this day, it's incredibly controversial, say, in Mexico. But you can pull the camera out even further and say that what you are seeing with that clash is the clash between Eurasia and the Americas. So ways of being human that have been separated for thousands of years and the New world lacks all kinds of things that the old world has in terms of livestock and crops, jobs and technology. And so what you are seeing there is two previously hermetically sealed ways of being human clashing with one another, with the consequences that we know.
- [06:31]
B
And lots of your listeners. I mean, loads of people listening to this will have seen loads of, you know, films about life on the frontier and the American west and kind of Native Americans and the US army and all of that kind of thing. But all of those things are effectively sequels to the Fall of the Aztecs. The Fall of the Aztecs is the first one of those where you have the Europeans arriving with their steel swords and they've got guns, you know, those kinds of things coming up against indigenous people. I mean, that's a story that we played out not just across North America, but across the world for the next kind of three, 400 years.
- [07:01]
C
You know, again and again, there are moments of. Of incredible power, of incredible beauty, but also of. Of pathos. And the moment that always sticks in my mind is that the Mexica, as they're called, the Aztecs, have this ultimate weapon in their arsenal, and it's the owl man. And you always keep the owl man in reserve because it's a little bit like using a nuclear missile or something. It might save you, but it might also precipitate the destruction of the world. And Tenochtitlan is on the verge of obliteration. And so they decide they have no choice. They will bring out the owl man, unleash the owl. And this man appears, and he has his owl feathers and his headdress and he appears on the causeway and, you know, all the machica are holding their breath and the Spanish shoot him. And that's it. It's like the Indiana Jones moment where. Where he shoots the guy with the sword. And with that moment, a whole way of conceptualizing the world collapses.
- [08:01]
A
Just collapses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's. When hearing you two talk about it, it's irresistible. It's so fascinating and so dynamic.
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C
It's sad and tragic and. And tragic, yes, in many ways, and exciting.
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A
But, you know, this chapter of history is also highly contested and debated. A lot of the. A lot of these points. How do you, as historians, putting together this show and deciding how to present this information to listeners, how do you make sense of moments in history when they are so. When some of the facts are so heavily debated and perspectives are kind of have traditionally been left out?
- [08:39]
B
Yeah, of course. So that's a really good question. And obviously, there are different ways we could do this. I mean, what we try to do is to give as much weight to different perspectives as possible, of course, because it makes for a more interesting show, if nothing else. If you're telling the story, say the fall of the Aztecs, for example, we went out of our way to tell it not just from the Spanish perspective or the perspective of the indigenous people, but to give them both equal weight and not necessarily to choose between them. But ultimately we just basically say, you know, there are different ways of thinking about this. Some people say this, some people say that historians argue about this. Here's what I think. And we often say. I mean, it's a phrase we use a lot. Listeners can make up their own minds. You know, you can read up on this and this book or whatever, because there's never a right answer in history. Because even when a historian thinks he's written the definitive book on something, somebody else 10 years later will completely revise it and say, no, you were totally wrong. If you've not thought about all this, that's fine. That's the nature of history. It's a debate. It's a discussion.
- [09:36]
A
Let's talk about the next chapter of American history that you wanted to flag, which is the period of Abraham Lincoln, probably a more obvious choice to a lot of American listeners. And really a chapter that I think a lot of American listeners feel like they know well from their school days. What about Abraham Lincoln himself as a person, but also the time he lived in stands out to both of you as a really. As a favorite moment.
- [10:01]
B
So we're obviously Approaching this, as we always say, we're a patriotic podcast. So we're a very British podcast. So we disapprove of the very existence of the United States as an independent Republic. And this 200, just to remind a lot of your listeners, there's 250 years of back taxes that you owe us.
- [10:18]
A
I do like all the digs that you have to wrote America in your.
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B
Podcast, but I think Lincoln, what's your.
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A
Take on that time?
- [10:23]
B
I mean, Lincoln is undoubtedly he's a world historical figure because he comes to stand for something bigger than himself, which is of course the anti slavery cause and the kind of evangelical impulses that lie behind that. So Lincoln, obviously an enormously admirable character. You know, he's one of the characters we've done on the show. We always love to kind of poke fun at people or to see if they've got feet of clay, but Lincoln really doesn't. So, you know, it's nice to do somebody who's genuinely incredibly admirable. And then we have John Wilkes Booth, his assassin, who is in many ways an absolutely ludicrous figure. And I think we agreed that he let himself down, didn't we? John Wilkes Booth, he behaved poorly. He behaved very poorly.
- [10:59]
A
Okay. The verdict is in, not just in.
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B
Shooting Lincoln actually, but in his subsequent behavior during his escape because you remember he was very unpleasant to some people.
- [11:06]
A
Right, right. You talk a little bit in these episodes about the fact that Lincoln had some premonitions about his own death. Yeah, I don't know if many people know about this, really. What did you learn about Lincoln's ideas of his own death?
- [11:22]
B
So that's fascinating, really. Lincoln is absolutely exhausted in the spring of 1865 and you know, he's been reelected. He's, you know, led the United States or the north through this incredibly traumatic war. And there are accounts of him, for example, going to Richmond to see the White House, the Confederacy, to literally kind of view Jefferson Davis's office. And he's going through the streets of this kind of smoldering captured city. He's being hailed by African Americans as their liberator and their savior. But he strikes a lot of the people that he meets. They say he's haggard, he seems exhausted. You know, it's actually brilliantly captured in the Spielberg film with Daniel Day Lewis. You know, the sense of him being a man who is just utterly worn out. And he does say several times to people, you, I don't know whether I'll live to see this through. I, I feel that you know, my story is ending all this kind of thing. You know, maybe these are the kind of remarks that you make when you're exhausted and maybe. Yeah, maybe. And then if you're not shot, nobody ever remembers them, so nobody calls you on them.
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A
Right?
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C
Yeah, I think that's true. I think that things like that are brilliant for bringing home to you the sense of the strain that these figures who appear to us in the imagination almost as figures hewn from marble. You know, there are so many statues of Lincoln. You think of him as the great figure of the Lincoln Memorial. But there you get a sense of what it would have been like to have been the leader of a part of your country that has inflicted terrible damage on the other part. That, in a sense, you must feel, to a degree, a measure of responsibility for all the slaughter and the destruction that has happened. And I think you get a sense of the strain. And it makes him, I think, even more admirable to me.
- [13:13]
B
Yeah, completely. Agreed. I think it's the humanity of him, isn't it, that shines through. And actually, the most controversial element of those episodes was our discussion of Mrs. Lincoln because his relationship with Mrs. Lincoln is quite complicated. And actually, the one reason that Ulysses S. Grant, General Grant, and his wife don't go to Ford's Theater that evening is because they've basically fallen out with Mrs. Lincoln.
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C
Well, unless.
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B
Unless Tom. Boom.
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C
Ulysses S. Grant is behind the murder.
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B
Yeah, this is. Tom's mad.
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C
But this is.
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B
This is.
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C
This is. I've been in. This is.
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B
I encourage people not to.
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C
This is.
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B
I really urge people not to judge our podcast by this mad opinion of Tom's.
- [13:56]
A
Well, you actually. You have a lot of fun, I should say, talking about Mary Todd Lincoln in these episodes. But tell me a little bit more, because I do think the simplistic narrative of how she's described in the history books is sort of the label of difficult woman.
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C
Well, I think Dominic buys into that simplistic narrative, don't you, Dominic? Whereas I don't. I contest it. That's the difference between us.
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B
Sometimes I think you just have to. You just have to state the truth that's staring you in the face. I think she's obviously a troubled woman. They've lost a child, haven't they, quite recently? There are all these stories about them going off, for example, to visit the army or going to Richmond or whatever, and she will come with them sometimes. And, you know, a lot of the generals kind of live in terror of basically Mrs. Lincoln talking to them or Mrs. Lincoln having a massive tantrum at them or whatever. And she's also furious, you know, that General Grant is getting the applause that she thinks her husband should get. And then of course she does after Lincoln is shot. It's a terrible scene. You know, it's really affecting. Very tragic and very moving. And, you know, even somebody as cruel and cynical as me thinks maybe Mary Lincoln wasn't all bad. I feel sorry for her. And then you discover that she stole all the spots from the White House, didn't she, when she left or something? Or made off with all the cutlery and like loads of laundry or something like, come on.
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C
Oh, come on, Dominic. He who has never stolen a spoon from the White House cast the first stone.
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A
Who among us has a.
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C
Who among us?
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B
She stole like 7,000 spoons or something. I mean, that's a lot of spoons.
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C
Well, she was just very good at it. What can I say?
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B
The Lobelia Sackville Baggins for the Lord of the Rings. Fans of American history, Tom, what's your.
- [15:33]
A
Defense of Mary Todd Lincoln or your. Why does she.
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C
Well, do you. I'm gonna confess that I came to this story not knowing very much about it beyond what I had seen in the film. But I just instinctively like the kind of chivalrous person that I am, leapt at the defense of a lady who was being traduced right. I entirely take on board Dominic's point that she was clearly a bit of a nightmare. But she did, as far as I can tell, play a very important role in providing Lincoln with kind of the security, the self confidence that his role as president was worth carrying on with. That perhaps otherwise, you know, he would. The pressure would have told.
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B
That is very chivalrous of you, Tom. I don't think all of Lincoln's confidence would agree with you about that. But it's nice that you're being so nice.
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C
No, but you could see why if she is sticking up for him, they might resent that.
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B
I think she's not always sticking up for reason. She's often giving him a massively hard time.
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C
Well, he needs to be kept on the straight and narrow as well. I think that you're just racking up reasons why. Actually she's tremendous and probably the best woman in American history.
- [16:38]
A
Tom will not change his position on this. He's unchanging on this.
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C
No, I've pledged my sword to her.
- [16:47]
A
Well, let's move on to the third and last example that you gave us of your favorite chapters of American history. And this one is a meaty one. It's a meaty year, 1968. Lots happened in the year 1968. You did it. I believe it was a six part episode series on it. You call it the most tumultuous year in modern American history. What stands out to you most about this moment? There's so many different things to unpack. So where do you want to start?
- [17:12]
B
Wow. I mean, it's so. It's happening at this kind of peak of the Vietnam War. Tens of thousands of Americans fighting and dying in Southeast Asia. President Lyndon Johnson, who previously seemed all conquering, he'd won massive landslide in 1964. The author of the Great Society, he's consumed by the agony in Vietnam. And then his fall.
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Kicks off this extraordinary year of sort of political turbulence. I mean, it's amazing that so many things happen in such a short period of time. The assassination of Martin Luther King, the assassination of Robert Kennedy, that's another one. You have George Wallace, the governor of Alabama. He's launching this third party campaign to capture the presidency. And Chicago, the riots in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention. And then the great comeback of Richard Nixon. Nixon's rehabilitation and his return as so much happening. And this sort of sense of everything unraveling and the spiral of ever more melodramatic things. And these extraordinary characters, I mean, they're mad, aren't they? Larger than life characters, beginning with lbj.
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C
Who is such a simultaneously impressive and loathsome figure. And again, that's part of the fascination of history. Is that so, you know, you can't divide it up into goodies and baddies. People who do great things are monsters and vice versa. And I think also the other thing about 1968 is that the soundtrack you have in your head is so amazing. I mean, the background of the music is so incredible. The Technicolor quality of the clothing, you can visualize it.
- [18:48]
B
And the sort of the. It's the characters and their narratives, the intersecting narratives and the tragedy and the drama of it. It's supercharged by the fact that it happens against the backdrop of the campus protests of the kind of youth culture rebellion, of the music, of psychedelia, the hippie movement, you know, all of that kind of thing. Which makes it an irresistible subject.
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C
Because the thing is, Dominic, the UG McCarthy is the subject of your doctorate. So in a sense, this is the topic you know, better than almost anything. And yet there must have been a kind of incredible sense of liberation, of not having to do it as a doctoral thesis, but rather as something that is the extraordinary narrative Right.
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B
I did do my PhD thesis on Senator Eugene McCarthy, who's the guy who basically toppled John Snow in the Democratic primaries. He was the anti war candidate. He was senator from Minnesota.
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C
And also, I just want. I mean, I'm suddenly taking you the interview here.
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B
I apologize.
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A
No, no, go for it.
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C
But there are, of course, resonances when you tell the story now that there perhaps weren't when you were doing your doctor so you mentioned student protests and the backdrop of a controversial war. I mean, all these things are.
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A
Are happening.
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B
Completely. I mean, we were recording that, weren't we? We were recording that series in the autumn, the fall, as you would say, of 2024. So the presidential election was kind of nearing its climax, and it was hard to miss some of the parallels between 1968 and 2024.
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A
Well, say a little more about that. What stands out to you? What is worth pointing out from your perspectives that maybe you think most people are not picking up on?
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B
Well, I guess the big thing is the polarization. Right. So people always think that they live in a uniquely polarized age and a uniquely divisive historical moment where the two sides don't listen to each other and they see the other as a threat to the Republic and all of that kind of thing. And that was absolutely there in 68. The same rhetoric often. So we were looking at the speeches of Nixon or George Wallace or something, the anxieties about law and order or the anxieties about values changing and things coming apart, and America isn't as great as it used to be. We need to make America great again, et cetera, et cetera. There are loads of parallels there. There are loads of echoes, I guess, of the past in the present and vice versa. That I thought it was actually telling that story really made me think again about, not just about history, but about how we got to where we are.
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C
Yeah, I. I think history has a kind of kaleidoscopic quality, so that as events in the current world change, so your sense of the past changes and periods and events that might have seemed very distant and alien suddenly start to have a kind of new focus. And you interpret not just the, you know, the current affairs in a new way, but you interpret the past too. So my, My background is late Republican Rome, which provided a model for the Roman Republic, at least provided a model for the Founding Fathers, which is why there's a Capitol and a Senate and all the buildings in Washington have echoes of Imperial Rome.
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A
Yes.
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C
So that anxiety about what happens if a Caesar should arrive has been an enduring one. And it's there in the age of Lincoln. People worry about, you know, that Lincoln might be as one of the things that that Booth is doing. You know, he casts himself as a Brutus murdering a Caesar. And it's something that is obviously quite present in narratives about America at the moment, the notion that the republic might be going through such a process of convulsion and change, that its very future might be in danger. But I think that, that when you place those kind of anxieties in the broad sweep of history, going right the way back to Benjamin Franklin saying, you know, well, it's going to be a republic if you can keep it, you know, I, I hope that it will offer Americans a measure of reassurance that these are enduring anxieties that are bred, I think, of a certain kind of vague awareness that republics necessarily submit to Caesar's. But that's not true. I mean, that's just not true. History isn't governed by rules and laws like that.
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A
Yeah, yeah. I mean, you do have a whole episode. I just wanna spend a moment on George Wallace because you really cast him as a precursor to Donald Trump and an important step in the history books of understanding Donald Trump and today's politics.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Can you say a little bit more about him and what it felt like to talk about this period of history right now?
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B
Sure. So George Wallace is the governor of Alabama and he made his name very famously opposing the desegregation of the school system. And then he runs in 1968 as an independent candidate for the presidency. And actually when you get into Wallace's rhetoric, his appeal and so on, it's not just about race. It's also kind of populism, a sense that people have been ignored, sneered at by Washington. He talks a lot about Washington elites, about pointy headed intellectuals. You know, he effectively says he's going to go to Washington and drain the swamp, all of this kind of thing.
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C
There's something weird about bicycles or something.
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B
Yes. Intellectuals who can't even park a bicycle street.
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C
That's right.
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B
The two things that I remember from that are the business about bicycles, obsessed with bicycles. And also you may remember that at university he had been sneered at by.
- [24:07]
C
His peers for wearing shiny pants. Yes, his shiny pants.
- [24:10]
B
Shiny pants, which to an English ear is very entertaining. Anyway, he, he had, with the shiny pants. He had run for president in, in 68. And actually what he did was he's a crucial figure in taking the Old south, the former Confederacy, away from the Democratic Party and turning it Republican. So although he doesn't become a Republican himself. He's like the way station on the journey from New Deal Democratic politics to much more conservative Republican politics for those Southern states. And actually, every single state that voted for George Wallace in 1968 voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and in 2024. Now, I'm not saying that, you know, that there's a very neat and simple line that you draw from one to the other, but certainly in the rhetoric, there are so many parallels. There are amazing accounts of Wallace's speeches. For example, when he goes to the north, he talks less about race there and he's more populist. And he will go to places like Milwaukee to these kind of German American halls and whatnot, and he'll give speeches that journalists at the time say they go on forever. They're completely rambling. There's no focus to them. He's just saying whatever comes into his head. A lot of it is just kind of abuse of Washington. And almost everything that they said of Wallace in 68 is what reporters wrote about President Trump in 2016. I mean, it's uncanny, the similarities and the echoes.
- [25:36]
A
Wow. And I also want to make sure I don't run past McCarthy and the transformations that were happening in the Democratic Party in the same year. Tell me a little bit about that period of time and how that also, in different ways, is a precursor to understanding today's Democratic Party.
- [25:53]
B
So the Democratic Party, I think, is definitely changing in the 60s. Golly, this is really taking me back to my PhD. So it's becoming much less the party of kind of FDR and his New Deal and the kind of big city mayors, Mayor Daley type people in Chicago, kind of what we used to be called. I mean, in the jargon of the 60s, people would call them ethnic Americans, you know, Italian Americans, Polish Americans, German Americans, and so on. From the Democratic Party is, I guess, becoming slightly more the province controlled by people who are very self consciously progressive, college educated, they live in the suburbs. They want to do good. You know, they don't just want to dispense spoils like they had in the 19th century. They want to do good things in the world. And what you get. And you see it with Nixon, you know, Nixon is brilliant at exploiting that gap between the Democratic activists and the old Democratic rank and file. And he basically says to the old Democratic rank and file, you know, your old party no longer understands you because it's been taken over by those weird boffins who basically, they're drinking their lattes and they're kind of wearing their Birkenstocks. I mean, I'm now now confusing loads of things for different periods, but you.
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A
Know what I mean.
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C
Well, it's the idea, isn't it, that a party that was supposedly associated with the interests of the working classes has now become the party of students and college professors and pointy headed people who can't park their bicycle straight, so to speak?
- [27:16]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. And that's still with us now. Right. I mean, that's the problem the Democrats had in 2016 and 2024 is that they were perceived by people who are not very interested in politics, I would say. So in other words, people who were just getting on with their daily lives, the Democrats ended up. Their danger is always they're perceived as being the party of kind of elitist liberal activists who don't really care about ordinary people in suburban America.
- [27:40]
A
Yes, right, right, right. I'm trying to think of how we interact with these stories today. And I mean, there's certainly people who I'm sure listen to your show who lived through these moments, these more modern moments of American history. Is it difficult to cover those moments when you know that there's some kind of living account amongst your listenership?
- [28:02]
B
It's a great question and I think the answer is it does mean you can get pushback because people often have a feel they've got a massive investment and a stake in something, you know, so they'll say, I lived through this and it was nothing like that. And actually I find your account wrong and you sort of have to be prepared for that. But ultimately it's like when you're talking about anything, you try to inform yourself as much as possible and then you come to a judgment and you just have to have confidence in your own judgment. And I think, of course there is always a danger, you know, to give a British example from our own country, when you're talking about Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, which is still very controversial, everybody has a very strong opinion, sure. But I think it's just about being honest with the audience, telling them where you're coming from, giving them a little bit of space to make up their own minds.
- [28:44]
C
I think also, and this I think is very clear when you study, say the first or the second World wars, for which we have lots of testimony, you know, millions of people fought in those wars. Lots of them wrote accounts of what they had seen and what they experienced. And the temptation is always to privilege them, to say, well, their understanding of the war must be better than the contemporary historians, because they were there. I think this is exactly the opposite. I think you can be too close to something and it requires someone at perhaps a distance of decades to take the totality of witnesses, of personal accounts and to sift them and to merge them together. And I would, you know, I'm going to flatter dominate by saying, I suspect that he has a much better understanding of what was going on in 1968 than someone who was being tear gassed in Chicago.
- [29:34]
B
That's so kind. That's so kind of.
- [29:36]
C
You are welcome.
- [29:37]
B
But that's. But you could argue that would work. I mean, I'm going to repay the compliment. Isn't this lovely? This never actually happens in real life, by the way. I just want to make it really clear moment here that this is entirely contrived and confected. But, you know, Tom's book on, like the fall of the Roman Republic probably would seem mad and baffling to Romans. If they read it, they'd say, it's not like that at all, and we're not like that and all of that kind of thing. But for us as readers, it makes much more sense to have his account because he can see it from our perspective 2000 years on and to see patterns because we know what. What's happened to other republics. We know what was happening elsewhere in the world, things that the Romans couldn't possibly know. We can see patterns that they couldn't possibly see. Now, of course, there's lots that we can't capture because we'll never be there. We'll never know what the smell was. We'll never know what it was really like.
- [30:24]
A
Maybe better off not knowing.
- [30:26]
B
No, definitely better off. We'll never know what it was like to be at a gladiatorial games, let's say. But we can see things and ask questions that it wouldn't occur to them to ask.
- [30:37]
A
Yeah, yeah. What's next for the podcast? Now that you've basically covered all of history? What do you mean?
- [30:44]
C
But we haven't. We haven't.
- [30:46]
A
We have so many. I imagine for both of you, you feel like so many stones left unturned. So many.
- [30:52]
C
And also so many stories. So many stories that we are kind of only part way through. So when we began, we did quite large topics quite briefly. So we did an episode on the French Revolution in 50 minutes. And we then decided that perhaps we hadn't entirely done the subject justice. And so we are now, I think, coming up to our fourth series on the French Revolution, going into it in great detail. And hopefully it's like a kind of, you know, it's like a kind of box set. You know, certain characters will have disappeared because their heads will have been sliced off by a large blade, but others are still around and people can kind of tune in and find out what happened to their favorite characters and things like that. And so it's ongoing.
- [31:35]
A
Well, it's really cool to hear about and it's been really fun to chat with you both about this. You two are like the history professors that many people probably wish they had growing up if they hadn't found you or a figure like you before this. Now they have you in their ears, and I'm sure everyone's glad for it.
- [31:51]
C
Thank you so much.
- [31:52]
B
Thank you, Shamita.
- [31:57]
A
Congratulations again to the Rest is History for being chosen as Apple Podcasts Podcast of the Year. We'll include a link to the show on our Show Notes page. And every weekend you can find new episodes of Apple News in conversation in the Apple News app. Just tap on the audio tab, that's the little headphones at the bottom to find it.