Today's post will be focused on the topic of history podcasts that are becoming a popular alternative to listening to music that gives people a way to learn things that interest them about history without having to devote a great deal of time into researching and sitting down to read long documents, which can often be exhausting, overwhelming and can feel like homework to some people. I chose to listen to the podcast titled the “Fall of Civilizations Podcast” and by its name, each episode is an in depth analysis of a civilization and the figures that were important to the time period, taking the listener through their life and the causes that lead to the person they become and how that society lived. I chose the 18th episode which is the second most recent episode to come out and the following episode is part two to the episode I listened to on the Mongols life and culture.
For the purpose of this post I will be covering the first episode only on account of not listening to the second one yet. The episode is almost exactly 4 hours long but the rate at which the narrator was speaking was too slow for me and was making me lose interest but thankfully Spotify has a function for podcasts where you can increase the speed of the narrating, so putting the episode in two times speed makes it easier to stay engaged and it makes the episode less long. The episode starts by going over basic knowledge about the mongolian culture and the earliest reports about them in history. Being a nomadic people who never stayed in one place for too long, they did not originally have their own written history and most information that is known about their early history is taken from their appearances in other cultures' histories. The podcast then starts recounting the life of Gengis Khan, born and named as Temüjin (te-mu-gin), the podcast outlines his upbringing and the build up to becoming the first Khan of the Mongolian Empire. It also goes very in depth about how the Mongols lived as a travelling civilization and the tools they used to survive the weather. Such as the tents they used that were called “yurts” and were structures with no interior support beams making them easier to set up and travel with as a traveling civilization would need.
Even though I have never listened to this podcast before and chose it because the episode in question was on a topic I like learning about, I found that I actually enjoyed listening to the episode. I am not usually someone who listens to podcasts but after listening to this one episode i think it is a very useful tool to learn history in an alternative way to reading, which is a big reason a lot of people do not want to learn about history. Having this resource at the disposal of anyone makes it easier and more straightforward for historians to learn new information fast without the need for excessive reading that takes up valuable time. Listening to music is just background noise, especially when it's songs you already know. With a podcast, especially a history podcast, it makes it so you have something to actively pay attention to and it makes time go by faster. The only bad thing I can think of is the speed in which the narration was speaking. It was much too slow for my personal liking and I had to try different speeds to see which one was to my liking and the talking speed would change for brief moments which would break the immersion in the episode. Not that there are that many negatives but they are extremely minor negatives and should in no way discourage you from checking out Fall of Civilizations Podcast on Spotify from the link in this post.
“The mongols terror of the steppe (Part 1)”, Fall of Civilization Podcast, December 5, 2024, 4 hours 1 minute, https://open.spotify.com/episode/5OJEmyNhSbZr1Qj41o5Kzm?si=dc8278892a324cf3
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