{"id":37,"date":"2026-05-26T22:13:20","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T22:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/businessmovingservicess.com\/?p=37"},"modified":"2026-05-26T22:13:20","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T22:13:20","slug":"the-rest-is-history-hosts-talk-rome-trump-vs-obama-and-whats-next-for-maga","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/businessmovingservicess.com\/?p=37","title":{"rendered":"\u2018The Rest Is History\u2019 Hosts Talk Rome, Trump vs. Obama, and What\u2019s Next for MAGA"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n\tTo the surprise of everyone, most of all maybe themselves, historians Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland have become the Jagger and Richards of the nerd podcasting world. Their show, The Rest Is History<\/em>, was Apple\u2019s Show of the Year in 2025, and boasts over 20 millions streams a month. There\u2019s a Rest Is History<\/em> club, a Rest Is History<\/em> tour, two Rest Is History<\/em> books, with another coming this fall, plus a spinoff The Rest Is History<\/em><\/em> Book Club<\/em> podcast. These are very big doings for a couple of middle-aged Englishmen delivering deep dives into everything from the fall of Carthage and Crazy Horse and Custer, to the life of Samuel Johnson and the Iranian Revolution of 1979.<\/p>\n

Read more If MAGA Is a Cult, What Happens When It Crumbles?<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tAt the heart of this very British invasion\u2019s appeal, beyond the revelatory historical detail and sharp insights, is the friendship and repartee between the two hosts. Sandbrook, the more acerbic of the pair, is a historian who wrote a biography of the 1968 antiwar presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy (\u201cNobody else had written about it!\u201d he says), and has authored many books on modern English history. He\u2019s also the author of the Adventures in Time <\/em>series for children. His counterpart, Holland, focuses more on the classical world, and is the author of the books Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic<\/em> and Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind,<\/em> among many others. Holland brings his deep knowledge of Christianity and a touch of the spiritual to the discourse \u2014 or, as Sandbrook will often playfully bemoan, \u201cthe sacral.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\tLaunched in late 2020, The Rest Is History<\/em> offers listeners hundreds of hours exploring the murders of Jack the Ripper or the fall of the Aztecs, the meaning of the Mona Lisa or Margaret Thatcher\u2019s England. This is time very well spent. The banter between the two hosts is lively. (Dom: \u201cThat\u2019s just woke tosh, Tom!\u201d Tom: \u201cDominic is pulling a very Protestant face.\u201d) The obvious joy, curiosity, irreverence, and rollicking humor Holland and Sandbrook display while spelunking into the past brings electricity and life to events both near and long distant.<\/p>\n

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\nRolling Stone<\/em> caught up with the hosts over Zoom to discuss Rome, Disney, why Donald Trump is a more consequential historical figure than Barack Obama, and how nakedly pro-King George III agitprop masking as a history podcast came to rule streaming.<\/p>\n

\nOne of the things that I love so much about the show is when Tom asks, \u201cWhat\u2019s going on here?\u201d right before you dive into a deeper explanation of a historical event. How long does it take before a historian can really put that in perspective? What\u2019s the window?<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>There\u2019s no formula. Depending where you are in history, depending where you are in time, you\u2019re always going to ask different questions and you\u2019re going to see different things in the past. The things that interest us about the Sixties now won\u2019t be the things that interest people in 100 years\u2019 time or 200 years\u2019 time, because different things will jump out at them. By and large, I think it\u2019s good to have a tiny bit of distance. One tends to be implicated in, or emotionally invested in, events that you\u2019ve lived through as an adult, and it\u2019s harder to write about them with a degree of distance.<\/p>\n

\nHolland: <\/strong>There\u2019s a kaleidoscopic aspect to history. Current affairs as they evolve will not just change your understanding of the future, but also of the past, because aspects of the past previously might have seemed occluded or not to have the salience that they have when suddenly new events happen. Our understanding, say, of the fall of the Roman Republic is going to be changed by events in American history. So over the course of my writing about Rome, my understanding of the fall of the Roman Republic was massively affected, I now realize, by the events of 9\/11 and the wars that followed, and now is being affected by the anxieties around Donald Trump\u2019s presidency.<\/p>\n

\nYou get asked about Donald Trump and the fall of Rome all the time. And I don\u2019t want to make you repeat yourself, but comparing America to Rome is almost a historical clich\u00e9, isn\u2019t it?<\/strong>
Holland: <\/strong>It\u2019s inevitable, because the Founding Fathers modeled their dream republic on the kind of primal republic that the Romans had founded when they expelled their king. And so the anxiety about what might happen to the American Republic is rooted in the knowledge that the Roman Republic fell. So when Benjamin Franklin comes out, after they\u2019ve been drawing up the Constitution, and is asked, \u201cWhat kind of constitution is it?\u201d Franklin says, \u201cA republic, if you can keep it.\u201d So the anxieties that swirl around the prospects for the American Republic now, 250 years on, were there right from the beginning because of that consciousness of the Roman archetype.<\/p>\n

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\nWhat do you think explains some of the success of the podcast? I have a theory that maybe people are really enjoying disappearing into the past because times are so chaotic right now.\u00a0<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>I don\u2019t think there\u2019s ever a point when people are not<\/em> interested in history. Twenty years ago, when things were a little bit less chaotic, history book sales were great. I think we were really lucky because we started the podcast at a time when the conversation about history on both sides of the Atlantic was sort of troubled \u2014 impassioned, very febrile, lots of arguments about taking down statues and changing street names and all those kinds of things. We definitely weren\u2019t reacting against that; that\u2019s not really our vibe, as it were. We tried to celebrate\u2014 that\u2019s the wrong word. We don\u2019t try to celebrate the past so much as we just enjoy it. We\u2019re not trying to turn it into some kind of moral one-upmanship.<\/p>\n

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\u201cWe don\u2019t try to celebrate the past so much as we just enjoy it. We\u2019re not trying to turn it into some kind of moral one-upmanship.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\nHolland: <\/strong>When you do a podcast, and particularly when you do a podcast for as long as we\u2019ve been doing it, you cannot disguise from yourself the wellsprings of your inspiration. It\u2019s the same for both of us, which is that we\u2019ve loved this stuff since we were very young, when we were off looking at castles or reading picture books with Elizabeth I knighting Francis Drake. That ultimately is the sustenance for what we do: a deep sense of fascination and excitement when we contemplate the past, because the stories are so manifold, so gripping. And so it has something of the quality of fantasy or of science fiction, and yet it\u2019s true, it happened.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nYou both embrace narrative, but have academics dropped approaching history as narrative?<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>Yeah, it\u2019s a really good question. It\u2019s funny because when I was a student doing history at Oxford, I remember my main tutor saying to me, \u201cYou would be quite a good historian if you could cure yourself of your addiction to narrative.\u201d And I actually did manage to cure myself, though clearly not completely. I taught history at the University of Sheffield briefly, and I can remember talking to some colleagues [who were] asking about what my then-girlfriend and I had done [over] the weekend and I said, \u201cWe went to this amazing castle.\u201d And one of my colleagues said, \u201cA castle? But your specialism is the 20th century. Why would you go to a castle?\u201d And I was like, \u201cFor fun? Because castles are kind of cool. Normal people go to castles, they think it\u2019s nice to walk around it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd, I remember my colleagues muttering, \u201cWell, I hope you didn\u2019t forget the castles were tools of oppression\u201d or something, and I was like, \u201cDo you know what? I didn\u2019t think about that at all. I just walked around and thought, \u2018This is a brilliant castle. I like castles. I\u2019m happy.’\u201d And I do think there is a slight spirit sometimes in the academy of being very quick to identify all of our ancestors or our forebears\u2019 moral failings, and to judge them accordingly.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\n\tTom mentioned quite rightly that one of the things about The Rest Is History<\/em> is that we fell in love with history when we were kids. The thing that gets you interested in history when you\u2019re small is wanting to know what happened next in the story. Is Henry V going to win the Battle of Agincourt? Is Julius Cesar going to survive the assassination plot? That\u2019s what keeps you reading. And if you lose sight of that when you\u2019re trying to teach history, then I think you miss part of the beauty of it, part of the joy that brings people to it in the first place.<\/p>\n

\nHolland: <\/strong>This may be more true in the United States than in our country, because the United States was founded as a kind of moral project, and therefore [there\u2019s] the sense that history can operate as a morality play. I think that over-moralizing history, that\u2019s something we consciously try to avoid. People in different periods operated according to different moral standards.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nDominic, you\u2019ve said a couple times that you think Trump is a more consequential president than Obama.<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>Yeah, much more.<\/p>\n

\nBut historically, wouldn\u2019t you rather, going back to the Roman emperors, be, say, a Trajan versus a Nero \u2014 a ruler who is very successful but doesn\u2019t get all the ink?<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>Oh. I mean, that\u2019s a fair point that obviously a boring ruler and a period of great stability and prosperity, that\u2019s what people want, right? That sounds like what people want.<\/p>\n

\nHolland: <\/strong>To be consequential isn\u2019t necessarily a positive.<\/p>\n

\nSandbrook:<\/strong> Yeah. However, you are asking about who matters and who people will write about in the future. Let me be completely frank. Obama will go down in American history quite rightly \u2014\u00a0he\u2019s the first Black president. And there\u2019s something very moving about some of the stuff with him and his family in the Oval Office, and when he has civil rights veterans come and visit. I remember some of that footage, it\u2019s quite tear-jerking.<\/p>\n

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\u201cTo be consequential isn\u2019t necessarily a positive.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n\tBut in terms of Barack Obama\u2019s influence on the world, on the destiny of the American Republic, on American political culture and all those things, he seems a tiny figure compared with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is colossally consequential. His war on Iran, his attitude to NATO, to the Western Alliance, but also Trump\u2019s effect on political culture. People will follow his example, I would imagine, for years to come \u2014 the way he\u2019s changed so many of his phrases, his tics, his mannerisms are embedded in our imagination now. Trump is a larger than life figure, far more so than George W. Bush, than Obama, than Biden, than Hillary Clinton.<\/p>\n

\nHe\u2019s a colossus, yes.<\/strong>
Sandbrook:<\/strong> For as long as the American Republic exists, people will write biographies of Donald Trump. And by the way, what an amazing subject. When you think of Robert Caro doing that life of Lyndon Johnson [book], imagine someone doing the same for Donald Trump, what a project that would be, taking in the wrestling and The Apprentice,<\/em> and the real estate, and the casinos. And that\u2019s even before you\u2019ve got him entering politics.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\nTrump is in some ways our most pop-culture president. How much does pop culture play a role in history?\u00a0<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>Oh, huge. Yeah, massively important.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nWhen did that start?<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>Well, it\u2019s always been there. First of all, most people at any given moment are not very interested in politics. The moment we\u2019re doing this call, there\u2019s a political crisis in Britain. The prime minister might fall. People are jostling to replace Keir Starmer. If you\u2019re interested in politics, it\u2019s probably very exciting. Most people in Britain are not really following that. They couldn\u2019t care less. They\u2019re much more interested in their own lives or in pop-cultural things.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tGoing back to the 19th century, it might be the music hall of vaudeville, it might be the cheap newspapers that people were reading \u2014 the jokes that people tell, the conversations they have in a pub, those things are a brilliant window into the minds of our predecessors. Often much better than electoral politics. I mean, people who are interested in politics tend to be a very small, unhealthy minority of any given society. I\u2019m sure you\u2019d agree with me about this, Tom, that culture is often much more interesting than high politics, and much more revealing about a society.<\/p>\n

\nHolland: <\/strong>And our sense of what popular culture is and whether it matters also is subject to historical processes. In Athens, before it becomes a democracy, the elite sneer at popular culture. When it becomes a democracy, the culture of the people comes to be the very essence of the state. And in Rome, likewise. You mentioned Nero. The reason that Nero is a radical figure as an emperor is because he takes the popular culture of the masses seriously and makes himself its hero.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tOne of the things that Dominic\u2019s books are so good on, is the way that in the modern period, pop culture evolves all the time, and particularly in response to technology. So, for instance, what we would call pop music is only really possible in the modern sense once you have the technology that can sustain it, the infrastructure of the radio stations and the television stations and the vinyl and the transistor radios and so on. And it creates a common culture through the Sixties and Seventies and into the Eighties that now seems completely dissolved. I\u2019m two years off my 60th birthday, and one of the things that I mourn is the sense of a shared common national popular culture, because it\u2019s all dissipated.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nIt\u2019s been a huge problem trying to run a popular-culture magazine.<\/strong>
Holland: <\/strong>Well, because Rolling Stone<\/em> is [founded in] what, is it 1967? You have that sense of a common popular culture, a musical culture in particular, that is both innovative and genuinely popular. And of course we still have innovative and popular musical culture, but it\u2019s so dissipated now. And in part, that\u2019s because the technology that sustains it has become so complicated and so complex that no one can be across all of it.<\/p>\n

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\nThat\u2019s very true. One of the reasons our founder, Jann Wenner, started Rolling Stone<\/em> was that he thought you had to report about the Beatles or the Rolling Stones as seriously as you would Richard Nixon. But who has more staying power, the Richard Nixons of the world or the Rolling Stones and the Beatles? Which has a more lasting effect?<\/strong>
Holland: <\/strong>We probably have different views on this.<\/p>\n

\nSandbrook: <\/strong>Nixon is an unusual example, because Nixon does last. Nixon \u2014\u00a0almost uniquely among American presidents \u2014\u00a0is a sort of comical style icon, because he looks so awkward and he\u2019s quite amusing. But to your point about who\u2019s going to last more, that\u2019s a slightly hard question to answer. High culture becomes canonized and the popular culture that\u2019s set in the 19th century, the popular music, for example \u2014 I mean, we don\u2019t listen to that anymore. So will people in the 24th century listen to the Rolling Stones or the Beatles? I\u2019m not sure. However, what is certainly true is this: When Tom and I [examine] the 18th century or the 19th century \u2014 Charles Dickens, Gilbert and Sullivan \u2014 we know loads of our listeners know what we mean by it. But we could take the vast majority of British politicians and prime ministers and indeed an awful lot of American presidents from the 19th century, and people would be like, \u201cWho the fuck is that? I\u2019ve never heard of Lord Derby or Zachary Taylor. Who\u2019s Millard Fillmore?\u201d So, actually, most politicians who\u2019ve ever existed are completely irrelevant. You could be prime minister of Britain for eight years and, frankly, in 200 years\u2019 time, you\u2019ll be completely forgotten. Whereas Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart will live on for as long as there are human beings.<\/p>\n

Read more Dana White: \u2018Legacy Doesn\u2019t Mean Shit to Me\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n

\nHolland: <\/strong>I\u2019m slightly biased on this, and there are two shades to my reply. The first is, I do think that, say, the Beatles have broken through the barrier that marks whether you\u2019re going to survive or not. They retain their popularity. There are certain songs they made that will become part of the popular canon of music. And I say that as someone who interviewed Paul McCartney last week in Abbey Road, which was a dream come true.<\/p>\n

\n\tAlso, I am in the midst of writing a book [All You Need Is Love: The 1960s & The New Reformation<\/em>] about the 1960s, in which I am precisely making the argument that the music of that decade had a seismic impact on all kinds of ways in which we see the world today, that it lit a fuse that is still very much burning, and that, yeah, absolutely, the Beatles and the Stones and Dylan do matter more than Harold Wilson or LBJ or whatever. And that in that sense, dare I say that Rolling Stone <\/em>sheds more interesting light on not just the culture of the Sixties, but its impact on the way we live now than The<\/em> New York Times<\/em> might.<\/p>\n

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\nI\u2019m sending you a contract tomorrow.<\/strong>
Holland: <\/strong>Yeah, you\u2019re welcome. I have the introduction to the book to prove it.<\/p>\n

\nBut the power of the protest song today, say, is so diminished, simply because it\u2019s so hard for something to break through.<\/strong>
Holland:<\/strong> I think protest songs in and of themselves actually have very little impact because they are overtly polemical. The really influential music is the music that impacts you without you necessarily being aware of it.<\/p>\n

\nLike \u201cBlowin\u2019 in the Wind,\u201d you wouldn\u2019t necessarily know as a protest song if you were coming to it without context?<\/strong>
Holland: <\/strong>Even \u201cI Want to Hold Your Hand,\u201d which seems to have not a political bone in its body, is nevertheless conveying to an entire generation of teenagers a perspective on relationships and sexual relationships and sexual love that is very corrosive to the kind of moral standards that had prevailed previously. And although the temptation now is to laugh at all the preacher men fulminating against the Beatles and Stones and so on, they kind of had a point. I mean, it did change. It did rewire the way that countless numbers of people thought about relationships and morality and all kinds of things. And it\u2019s precisely because it\u2019s not overtly polemical that it has the impact that it does.<\/p>\n

\nSandbrook: <\/strong>We live in an age when people don\u2019t like being preached to. If try to preach to you, you resent it. That might be Trump voters who say, \u201cI feel that Hillary Clinton talks down to me\u201d in 2016, or it might be people saying, \u201cRich rock stars shouldn\u2019t be lecturing me.\u201d Your Hollywood actors and your rock stars who tell people, \u201cDon\u2019t vote for Trump,\u201d I understand why they\u2019re doing it, of course, but often it can be very counterproductive.<\/p>\n

\nPolitics in the U.S. has become almost a religious divide.<\/strong>
Holland: <\/strong>It always was.<\/p>\n

\nBut, going to British history, in the U.S. we seem to be in an almost Protestant-Catholic political divide. There seems to be no willingness to acknowledge the essential humanity of the other side at times.\u00a0<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>Well, the stakes are very high if you frame your political opponents as enemies of the republic. You hear people saying, \u201cEverything that America means and stands for is at stake in this election. These people are un-American, they don\u2019t love our country,\u201d blah, blah, blah. If you phrase it as that, then of course it\u2019s going to feel apocalyptic to people. Maybe there have been times \u2014 perhaps in the 1980s, where Margaret Thatcher was prime minister \u2014 but very rarely is it ever really apocalyptic in Britain, because ultimately it\u2019s an argument about who\u2019s going to collect the bins.<\/p>\n

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\nHolland: <\/strong>Always a brave thing to do when talking to an American magazine, I\u2019m going to stand up for the idea of constitutional monarchy. I think in Britain, the legal system is a lot less politicized because [of] the notion that it is all about the crown \u2014 it\u2019s the crown that does the prosecutions, it\u2019s the crown that organizes the prisons, and so on. Whereas in the United States, that is politicized. Sheriffs are elected and people are nominated by presidents to the Supreme Court and so on. So for people who want to politicize the legal system, it\u2019s easier in the U.S. And there again, there is a parallel with Rome, where in the last century of the Republic, the law was massively, massively politicized, and it\u2019s going be interesting to see whether you can row back from the degree to which Trump has politicized the legal system.<\/p>\n

\nWith a loosely based ideology like MAGA, it\u2019s really a cult of personality. What happens to these sorts of movements throughout history when that kind of magnetic leader dies or leaves the scene?<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>Yeah, good question. MAGA is a loose coalition anyway, and you see with the war in Iran how already it\u2019s fraying. Trump has had a lot of grief from people in his movement who thought he was an isolationist and they\u2019re shocked. So there\u2019s a tension within MAGA, but also, as you rightly say, a personality cult. MAGA would need to become institutionalized, it would need to become a political party. And the issue with that is that political parties and political institutions have been in decay across the Western world for decades. So will it survive Trump? I don\u2019t think the movement itself necessarily will survive, but the impulses will survive. What Trump represents is deeply rooted. It\u2019s been there in American politics for a long time. We did a series a couple of months ago about the Ku Klux Klan. And when we were doing that series and thinking about the rhetoric of the second Klan and the kind of demagogic speakers that they had, we deliberately were not really explicit about, like, \u201cOh, this is like MAGA.\u201d But it\u2019s kind of hard to miss the parallels. So something like MAGA, those impulses, I mean, they\u2019ll be there for the rest of our lifetimes.<\/p>\n

\nThey may have always been there too, right?<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>Exactly.<\/p>\n

\nHolland: <\/strong>When you think of Trump as a consequential president, one of the reasons why he\u2019s consequential isn\u2019t simply the actions that he\u2019s taken, the policies that he\u2019s adopted or whatever. It\u2019s because he\u2019s cloaked himself in a vibe, that\u2019s quite rare in history. You can think of some very, very significant historical figures who have projected a vibe as well as through their actions.<\/p>\n

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\nMostly bad ones.<\/strong>
Holland: <\/strong>Well, I mean, Napoleonism is a word, Caesarism is a word. You say the name and you don\u2019t have to know much about what these characters did to have a sense of what that is about. And I would guess that MAGA, Trumpism, whatever, will survive Trump as a kind of a mood, a style of politics, a way of talking and presenting yourself. But I think it will dissipate because it kind of needs Trump to do it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nI found your episodes about Walt Disney particularly interesting. How important do you think soft power is to an American empire?<\/strong>
Holland: <\/strong>Hugely, I would say.<\/p>\n

\nSandbrook: <\/strong>Massively important. During the Cold War, people at the top in American politics thought it was really important. That\u2019s why the CIA invested all that money in promoting Jackson Pollock or promoting American culture. Walt Disney himself thought projecting an idea of America and his view was really important. He saw himself as an American storyteller. I do think, though, that as the world becomes very globalized and fragmented, the hold has loosened. [Disney] has competitors now. Korean culture, let\u2019s say, or the Japanese. I mean, nobody cared about Korean culture [in England] when I was a little boy. It was America or nothing. But as the 21st century goes on, it\u2019s only a matter of time before people actually start consuming Chinese culture.<\/p>\n

\nHolland: <\/strong>I wonder about that, because Disney\u2019s career covers that moment where the American hegemony replaces the British hegemony, and it\u2019s crucial that both superpowers speak the same language. People in India or Australia would be familiar with figures from English history and English folklore and so on. And it really struck me when I was doing the preparation for that episode on Disney\u2019s life, how many of the Disney classics drew, of course, on European culture, but more specifically on English culture, so Robin Hood <\/em>or The Jungle Book<\/em> or Mary Poppins<\/em> or whatever. And there\u2019s a sense in which he is culturally the link between the British and American ages of global supremacy.<\/p>\n

\nSpeaking of the British empire, the Revolutionary War episodes were a good bit of pro-King George agitprop. What kind of reaction did you get in the States? I mean, my God, making fun of Washington\u2019s teeth, calling us tax dodgers\u2026<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>Yeah, I love this, because we have a lot of American listeners, and of course our American listeners are very dear to our hearts. But I don\u2019t think there were many examples where the Atlantic yawned quite as wide as it did with that series. Reading a lot of the comments from the American listeners, they said, \u201cThis is just pure British propaganda, blah, blah, blah. They don\u2019t get it,\u201d all of that. And yet the mad thing was all the books that we had used \u2014 and indeed we had a guest on, a professor at Oxford, all the books that he reads, that he engaged with \u2014 are by American historians.<\/p>\n

\n\tI know this will sound heretical to an American audience. [The Revolution] is not actually regarded as very interesting in Britain. If they want to do the late 18th century, they do the French Revolution and they do Napoleon because that\u2019s the glamorous, exciting story. The stuff with a load of people wearing wigs moaning about taxes just isn\u2019t seen as very glamorous. So the books we were using were by American historians, but because a lot of our listeners perhaps have never read those books, they don\u2019t know what American academics are saying to each other. They\u2019ve gone on the Freedom Trail in Boston and they\u2019ve seen Ken Burns\u2019 documentaries. And so they\u2019re like, \u201cWho are these sneering British guys in glasses being mean about the Founding Fathers? What\u2019s all this?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\nHolland: <\/strong>Just to preview, we have an anniversary treat for our American listeners.
Oh, for the 250th?<\/strong><\/p>\n

\nHolland: <\/strong>Yeah. We\u2019ll be doing Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton. They will be coming. One of the things that struck me in the Black Lives Matter sense of engagement with American history was the improbable casting of the British Empire as woke because there was a lot of stuff about from\u2014<\/p>\n

\nSandbrook: <\/strong>The New York Times.<\/em><\/p>\n

\nThe 1619 Project.<\/strong>
Holland: <\/strong>Yeah. So academics on the left and newspapers and so on, essentially saying that the American Revolution was all about slavery and that Britain was allowing the slaves to be freed, and all of this, so hooray for Britain, which was a very improbable development. So that was nice.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\nOne of my favorite fictional characters, Harry Flashman, shows up on The Rest Is History<\/em> all the time. He\u2019s a British cavalry officer who\u2019s a coward and a cad, yet eventually rises to become a general. He\u2019s the ultimate antihero \u2014<\/strong><\/strong> a Zelig-like historical creation. I think George MacDonald Fraser is a fantastic writer. But could those books be written today?<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>No. I think they are brilliant books. I also think the Flashman books are as morally subtle and sensible an audit of the British Empire as you can find because Flashman as a narrator is very aware of the hypocrisies and cruelties of the Empire. He simultaneously believes in it as a project and he\u2019s patriotic, and yet he\u2019s not blind to the darkness that imperial power necessarily involves. But you\u2019re dead right. There\u2019s no way that they would be published.<\/p>\n

\nHolland: <\/strong>I think Flashman is a Regency figure who is fighting against the encroachment of Victorian moralism and as he would see it, hypocrisy. And that was the charge and excitement of the Flashman novels appearing in the Sixties when something very similar was happening. People felt we\u2019re casting off all this kind of priggish, prudish, finger wagging hypocrisy. But in Anglo-American culture, periods of libertinism are followed by periods of restraint. And clearly I think that the fact that the Flashman novels couldn\u2019t be published now is a reflection on the fact that that sense of libertinism and free speech that was a very electric part of the Sixties is now fading and we\u2019re kind of entering a new Victorianism.<\/p>\n

\nOh, no. Really?<\/strong>
Holland: <\/strong>Oh, yeah. And I think it\u2019s really good because it teaches us to be more sympathetic towards the Victorians, because if you are sitting there and saying, \u201cHa, they covered up piano legs and we\u2019re so much more advanced and superior,\u201d but then you think of all the the reasons why George McDonald Fraser\u2019s novels wouldn\u2019t be published now, and you think, actually, yeah, I can see why it\u2019s probably not good to write in that way. And it\u2019s always good to be reminded that people have moral taboos for what seem at the time very good reasons.<\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

\nYou\u2019ve done so much since the podcast was launched during the pandemic. What comes next?<\/strong>
Sandbrook: <\/strong>We\u2019ve got so much history left to do. Just to give you an example of three big subjects that we\u2019ve never really done: We\u2019ve never done what we used to be called the English Civil War. So, the civil wars of the 1640s. Massively important in Britain, but also they generate the ideas that lead to the American Revolution. We\u2019ve never done the Crusades. We\u2019ve never done the Russian Revolution. So, there\u2019s a lot of history left to do, actually. And when we contemplate how much history we\u2019ve done and how much history there is, we could be doing this for decades.<\/p>\n

\nI certainly hope so.<\/strong>
Holland: <\/strong>And the thing is, it keeps giving us experiences that you have to pinch yourself to think that you are having it. I\u2019ve sung off-Broadway. I can now say I\u2019ve done that. We\u2019ve been in the Sydney Opera House. I\u2019ve just interviewed Paul McCartney. These are all things that, if you told me even five years ago that these would be possible, I would\u2019ve laughed. So part of the excitement of doing it is never knowing quite where it\u2019s going to lead.<\/p>\n

Read more Pope Leo XIV Warns of Dangers of AI, Need to \u2018Disarm\u2019 the Technology<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘The Rest Is History’ hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook turned a childhood love of history into a chart-topping podcast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-37","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-listen-up"],"yoast_head":"\n\u2018The Rest Is History\u2019 Hosts Talk Rome, Trump vs. Obama, and What\u2019s Next for MAGA - Business Moving Services<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/businessmovingservicess.com\/?p=37\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"\u2018The Rest Is History\u2019 Hosts Talk Rome, Trump vs. Obama, and What\u2019s Next for MAGA - 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