The hosts have excellent chemistry, the forward flow of the narratives in the WWI series is steady with satisfying pauses to sketch out the occasional character bio (for a military commander, some journalist, a politician, a historian, etc) or to evaluate the scale of relevant quantities (of an army, a budget, a shipment size, etc) as needed to build immersion in the historical “storyline.”
The value of this podcast is for sure in its commitment to analyzing each standard famous figure/battle/scandal that mainstream liberal historians treat as the “deciders of world history,” bUT here these “great events” and names are analyzed in terms of their 1) relationship to European imperialism and its violent theft of Global South labor/resources, 2) their role in setting up our modern US-dominated “rules-based international order” (where the Gaza genocide is old news), 3) their enablement by preexisting, historically rooted material conditions like beefy naval fleets, ownership of profitable trade routes, and potential benefit from capturing additional territories. So, analysis of modern European political history within the frameworks of settler-colonialism, imperialism, and Third World underdevelopment by the colonizers.
I do wish they developed their own themes for each episode with more narrative finesse though. I get that there’s nationalism, intra-imperialist conflict, the rise of world-systems capitalism, the end of states like the Austria-Hungary and Ottoman empires being shockingly recent, and other themes they mention, but more to better cohere all the events, storylines, and connections to the present would really bring this podcast to the next level.
Speaking of levels (like of annoyance), I will agree with another aggrieved commenter, tho, that Justin giggles like a schoolgirl a bit too much for my stoic martial tastes, rip. Man, I love Justin as a principled comrade and a historian but it do kind of grate on my nerves when he frequently fades his voice into the decibel abyss and starts speaking in more of this (??) ~intimately soft~ voice that sounds like it wasn’t meant to be recorded or heard for our public ears?? Like omg pls speak up and stay audible, sir!
