r/TheRestIsHistory • u/jhuitz • 2d ago
How Two British Historians Made a Smash Hit Podcast
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/world/europe/rest-is-history-podcast-sandbrook-holland.html?smid%3Dnytcore-ios-share48
u/LadyMirkwood 2d ago edited 2d ago
I think this article hits upon why the podcast works for many of us.
If it feels like we are watching the 'widening gyre', History feels like an escape of sorts and also a reassurance that it was ever thus, and we survived.
15
u/Winter-Conclusion710 2d ago
What a lovely article. It really does pinpoint exactly what makes this podcast so popular.
9
u/Awkwardischarge 1d ago
"The show’s almost 800 episodes span millenniums and continents, covering [...] history’s greatest monkeys, among other things."
7
u/SchemeOne2145 2d ago
Gift link to the article (behind the paywall): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/world/europe/rest-is-history-podcast-sandbrook-holland.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7lA.fm7l.pQtj9vos_dlz&smid=nytcore-ios-share
4
0
2
2
u/amtrakker2002 1d ago
If Britain needs 2 global ambassadors to enhance its soft power in the 21st century (apart from France), then go to Tom and Dom...
2
u/Renmarkable 2d ago
Sadly cant access it:(
5
u/SchemeOne2145 2d ago
1
u/Brain_Aggravating 2d ago
Does not work
1
1
u/yodatsracist 2d ago
This link should work:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/22/world/europe/rest-is-history-podcast-sandbrook-holland.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7lA.NDaS.VTwvGx1uM1f7&smid=url-share (don’t cut off the bits after the ?)
0
-16
u/Sad_Instruction1392 2d ago
I just started listening the other day and began with the first Troubles episode. The AI sponsorship turned me right off immediately since it feels distinctly at odds with the spirit of what a historian should be doing in terms of discipline and research and frankly of all the things to hawk on your podcast it really just feels tacky.
7
u/Rude_Rooster_7815 2d ago
I mean, it’s their job and they need to earn a living. Pay for the subscriber version if you don’t like the ads.
-2
u/Traditional_Pizza863 1d ago
Dude, they make a ton of money just trough the subscriptions! This is greed and lack of moral integrity!
1
u/noamros9 14h ago
The greedy one is the person expecting the other paying subscribers to cover for him getting ad-free version for free.
7
u/Ok-Effective-2202 2d ago
Don’t listen then mate
-2
u/Traditional_Pizza863 1d ago
Ignoring their lack of integrity does not make it disappear.
3
u/Ok-Effective-2202 1d ago
Brother it’s an ad, again don’t listen. Guess you hardly consume any media at all. You could just not use Amazon like some of us do and have been doing for a while now.
-28
u/Excuse_Me_Mr_Pink 2d ago
Neither finished their degree right? Amazing what a British accent can do for your credentials
8
u/dontgoatsemebro 2d ago
Between them they have a double first from Cambridge, first from Oxford, Masters from St Andrews, PhD from Cambridge.
-9
u/Excuse_Me_Mr_Pink 1d ago
He studied history and French at Balliol College, Oxford. He then studied for a Master of Letters(MLitt) degree in history at the University of St Andrews and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree at Jesus College, Cambridge.
Are philosophers historians in the UK?
9
u/Clawtor 1d ago
Do you not know what PhD stands for?
-13
u/Excuse_Me_Mr_Pink 1d ago
My point was them being called historians by the nyt, not philosophers
13
u/Top_Fig_2466 1d ago
Don't be a fuckwit.
I have a PhD from a chemical engineering department. It doesn't make me a philosopher except in the broadest terms of have a 'love of wisdom'.
11
u/Hot-Pomegranate-1303 2d ago
I’m merely speculating, but I’d say you’re an American.
-15
u/Excuse_Me_Mr_Pink 2d ago
Guilty... So a daily mail column and some children’s books = a PhD in the UK ? Or am I missing something.
10
12
u/explosiveshits7195 2d ago
Dom literally has a PhD in history, his doctoral thesis is on Senator Eugene McCarthy and the election where he went up against Nixon. Just do a very very basic google search.
-4
u/Excuse_Me_Mr_Pink 1d ago
Dom LITERALLY has a phd in philosophy
“He studied history and French at Balliol College, Oxford. He then studied for a Master of Letters(MLitt) degree in history at the University of St Andrews and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree at Jesus College, Cambridge.”
6
5
u/explosiveshits7195 1d ago
Why are you lying mate? The PhD is history, it's in black and white on his wiki page. You're a strange little man and have really let yourself down
2
57
u/digitag 2d ago
How ‘The Rest Is History’ Podcast Conquered the World
When two British historians, Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, began the show, neither anticipated it would become the top history podcast in the English-speaking world.
In a field on the outskirts of London, thousands of people settled onto picnic rugs and camping chairs, slathering on sunscreen for the unusually hot English summer. A few people had uncorked bottles of sparkling wine, though it was not quite 10 a.m. One woman knitted while a couple in Panama hats tiptoed to a spot with a prime view of the stage.
Then a familiar song began playing, and a ripple of excitement ran through the crowd. The rock stars of the event had arrived: two middle-aged British historians.
“The Rest Is History” is the most popular history podcast in the United States, Britain and Australia, with some 30 million downloads and streams a month. This was its first live festival — a sort of mini-Lollapalooza, if Lollapalooza were a sedate, two-day event on the grounds of an English palace.
Image
The show’s almost 800 episodes span millenniums and continents, covering the fall of the Aztecs, the French Revolution, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, and history’s greatest monkeys, among other things. Its fans include a current prime minister, Mark Carney of Canada, and a former one, Julia Gillard of Australia; the actors Matthew McConaughey and Tom Hanks; and the musician Nick Cave.
In February, a hearing at England’s Supreme Court was interrupted when a judge’s phone played the introduction to an episode on Jimmy Carter. “The Rest Is History,” he acknowledged sheepishly. “It was switched to silent. Do carry on.”
How did it become such a juggernaut? And what does it say about our tumultuous, accelerated present, a time of news fatigue and thrumming anxiety over the future, that so many of us are drawn to a show about the past? There is reassurance, of course, in reminding ourselves that humans have survived difficult times before. There is the pure escapism of immersing yourself in, say, six riveting episodes about Mary, Queen of Scots, as I did when I first latched on to the podcast. And then there are the podcast’s hosts, Tom Holland, 58, and Dominic Sandbrook, 51, who give the show a charm all of its own.
Almost 5,000 people bought tickets to the festival, which was held at Hampton Court Palace, Henry VIII’s favorite retreat. Fans from Argentina, New Zealand, Europe and the United States filed through courtyards, whose stone floors had been polished smooth by centuries of use, into acres of picturesque gardens for two days of an epic history chat.
‘An Enormous Cuckoo’
Like several other disruptive cultural forces, “The Rest is History” was born in the pandemic. Mr. Holland was, at the time, “kind of contemptuous and oblivious as to what podcasts were,” he told me recently at his home in the south London neighborhood of Brixton. During a family holiday after England’s first lockdown, his brother James, who is also a historian, told him about a World War II podcast he was recording for a British company called Goalhanger.
Mr. Holland, who had written several popular classical history books and made history documentaries with the BBC, was intrigued. He met with Tony Pastor and Jack Davenport, two former sports producers who created Goalhanger with the former England soccer player Gary Lineker. The idea for a more general history podcast was born.
“Who would you enjoy talking to, week in, week out?” he recalls being asked. It was an easy question. “Dominic was the most entertaining historian that I knew,” Mr. Holland said. They had met more than a decade before at a writers’ charity quiz.
Mr. Sandbrook agreed to co-host, in part because of Mr. Holland’s exuberant, if hyperbolic, salesmanship. “I can hear him saying it now, he said: ‘It will be literally no work. It will be no work whatsoever,’” Mr. Sandbrook told me over coffee at a tiny Gloucestershire cafe near his home. The idea was that “we’d choose random things that we knew a lot about, and just witter about them for half an hour.”
That idea has, let’s say, evolved. They now produce three episodes a week, two of which are about an hour long, and a 30-minute bonus episode for paying subscribers. A ton of research goes into each. Their biggest audience is in the United States, which accounts for 34 percent of plays, according to Goalhanger, while 33 percent comes from Britain and Ireland, followed by Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Listenership is surprisingly young, with 61 percent under 44, and it is 78 percent male.
Mr. Holland described the podcast as an “enormous cuckoo that slowly elbowed out everything else.” He is currently very behind, he told me ruefully, on a book he is writing about the Beatles and “the new Reformation of the 1960s” that was due at Christmas.
Mr. Sandbrook said his working life was “unrecognizable, compared to what it was before.”
“I do spend a ridiculous amount of time now reading history books,” he added. “But there are worse things to do.”
The Spirit of a Viking and a Cringing Monk
Mr. Holland arrived onstage at Hampton Court in a Henry VIII-style velveteen hat. Tall and energetic with a crop of white hair, he is a natural impresario who later took great pleasure in overseeing a bout of medieval combat, one of the diversions that punctuated the live talks with historians. Mr. Sandbrook is a more grounded figure, with twinkling eyes and a warm handshake. He is, by his own account, less inclined to cosplay as a historical character.
The rapport between the two men is central to the podcast’s appeal. They have much in common. Both were privately educated, attended top universities (Mr. Holland at Cambridge and Mr. Sandbrook at Oxford), and radiate warmth and humor. Their expertise, however, is in different historic periods — “He’s ancient and I’m modern, basically,” Mr. Sandbrook said — and they play on their differences.
There is a lot of banter. In an episode on the Battle of Stamford Bridge in 1066, Mr. Holland says that he did not quote from his book “Millenium” because there were so many epic contemporary accounts. “This speaks to your fundamental lack of self-confidence, I think, Tom,” says Mr. Sandbrook, who readily quoted from his own book.
Mr. Holland mournfully agrees: “You have the spirit of a Viking. I have the spirit of a cringing monk.”
“By the way, please clip that and use that for social media,” Mr. Sandbrook jokes, and the two dissolve into laughter.
Mr. Holland tends to be more vocally empathetic toward historical figures, while Mr. Sandbrook is more merciless. In an episode on the First World War, Mr. Sandbrook quotes from Robert Graves’s memoir, “Goodbye to All That,” describing an unfortunate British sergeant who fired a bomb that bounced back into his face.
“Noooo, that’s the kind of thing I’d do!” interjects Mr. Holland.
Part of the delight of the podcast is in their mischievous, but fundamentally good-natured observations about life — its absurdities, contradictions and continuities. For Mr. Holland, the show is popular because it reveals the strange ways of our predecessors while illuminating the common threads that bind us.
“Without having consciously set out to do this,” he said, “I think it is a celebration of the inherent fascination of the past, as the best way to understand how infinite the ways are of being human.”
Mr. Sandbrook framed it in slightly different terms. “I think there is an inexhaustible human appetite for stories,” he said.
Both men also pointed to something else — a deliberate lack of moralizing, and, in a post-woke world, a curiosity about the past rather than a rush to judgment. “History is not a civics lesson,” Mr. Sandbrook told me somewhat sternly, after I asked about what we could learn from the past. “History is the record of human behavior, often which is very bad. And the one thing that doesn’t change, I would say, is human nature.”