Video interview: Mike Duncan, history podcaster and author

In which we talk about popularizing history.

For a while now, readers have been asking me to interview Mike Duncan, the creator of the excellent Revolutions podcast series. Well, it finally happened!

I thought this would be the perfect time to interview Mike, since I recently got into a big debate about historians in the public sphere. I think of Mike as sort of my opposite number on the history side of things — not an academic historian, but a well-known popularizer whose role is basically to explain history to the public. So I thought he might have some interesting thoughts about how historians apply the lessons of the past to the issues of the present. And indeed, I was not disappointed.

We also discuss Mike’s recent book, Hero of Two Worlds: The Marquis de Lafayette in the Age of Revolution, which sounds pretty great and which is going on my reading list.

Some key points from this interview:

• The Marquis de Lafayette probably deserves to be thought of as a “main character” of the U.S. and French revolutions. He was pretty awesome.

• Like many initiators of revolution, the Marquis ended up getting “cancelled” by the more extreme people who came after him.

• I think Mike should turn the French Revolution portion of his podcast series into a popular book; he is not sure he’s ready for such a monumental undertaking.

• Mike’s and my thoughts about historians in the public sphere were far more in agreement than I had expected. But he is much better than I am at expressing those ideas in a way that doesn’t seem like interdisciplinary bomb-throwing.

• Though some people (predictably) interpreted my post as an attack on the history profession as a whole, it was not; indeed, I think academic history is great, and we should hire more history professors!

• Mike had a great idea for how historians can be more empirical when making claims about the lessons of history for modern politics: Historians, he says, should partner with political scientists on interdisciplinary projects. That sounds like a great idea to me!

• The tempest-in-a-teacup about the American Historical Association president’s weird, rambling, controversial op-ed is not worth paying attention to.

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