We live in the greatest era of knowledge in human history; it has never been easier to both access and spread information. With just a few quick taps of your fingers and clicks of the mouse you can have access to a depth of knowledge that would have put the Library of Alexandria to shame. In reality, much of this potential is wasted. Humans are fundamentally inquisitive beings, we enjoy learning things and discovering knowledge but, we are also fundamentally impatient creatures. This is a particularly frustrating combo: we want to know things and get the rush of absorbing new information, but we don’t want to dedicate inordinate amounts of time to get that. What we want is for information to be provided to us in easily digestible nuggets that we can consume and process. This, to be clear, is not a bad thing. It is utterly fantastical and unrealistic to presume that everyone should investigate every nuance of something to understand it. I don’t need to know the exact particulars that govern the theory of gravity, it’s sufficient for me to just have a general grasp over the broad ideas.

This same motive (wanting the satisfaction of the thing without committing a lot of time to it) is why we’re so amazed by works of art. Creativity is a natural human impulse, but it takes a lot of effort to produce something genuinely creative. Who hasn’t listened to the Rolling Stones, Slipknot or whoever, and thought “man, in another life I would have shredded on the guitar”. Or read a particularly good book and though “I really must get around to writing that awesome book idea I’ve had for years about that teenager in a dystopian future who rebels against the machine in order to break it” (please don’t, we have enough of them). But we don’t get around to writing that book, and we won’t have another life. So, we satiate those needs in other ways, we admire art, music, books, paintings, whatever medium you like, we admire these things because we are able to live vicariously through that artists creativity. We admire their ingenuity and inventiveness and that stimulates our brains in a similar to way as if we ourselves had created the thing. It’s a shortcut.

This puts an incredible amount of power in the hands of those few individuals who actually do dedicate their lives to the process. A musician is more than just a person playing an instrument well, they become, in some way, an extension of their audience. When someone accuses your beloved Pirate Metal band (genuine genre) of sucking, you take it personally. It feels like an attack on you yourself, because it kind of it is. You are living vicariously through that band, you identify with them, you imagine yourself being like them, so an insult to them is an insult to you. We use these artists as a shortcut for creative satisfaction and so we become deeply attached to their music. A similar mentality is at work when it comes to history.

Studying history is a years long process requiring endless hours of effort and dedication, involving all kinds off weird minutia. For example, let’s say you want to study Alexander the Great. A good start would be reading the primary sources, right? Well, first you’d have to understand what those primary sources actually are. A lot of people are going to say that the primary sources are the likes of Arrian, Plutarch and Diodorus. These people are wrong. Those are secondary sources, the primary sources are the likes of Ptolemy, Lysimachus and Callisthenes. So, first you have to understand those guys and the period they were writing in, so that you can then appreciate why they were writing what they did. Then you need to look the secondary sources (Arrian, Plutarch etc.) and study what their motives are. Are some of these guys even historians in the first place? What was the purpose in their works? Etc. All this stuff takes time, it takes effort and knowledge. We don’t want to go through all at, we want just want the end product. This is where the modern historian comes into play. They are our shortcut historical knowledge. At least, they should be.

Our conception of what a ‘historian’ actually is though, is a bit odd. If you ask people, they’ll generally give a definition somewhere along the lines of “someone who studies the past”. An awkward thing here is defining exactly what people mean here by “study”, and if pushed, people will generally agree that someone who writes/speaks about the past is a historian. Kings and Generals are historians, Historia Civilis is a historian, some random bloke who reacts to historical content is a historian, and so on and so on. Spoiler alert: they’re not, and very few ‘historians’ on YouTube actually are.

Already, some people reading that will think I’m being elitist. Perhaps I am, but I don’t mean to be. Reporting what happened in the past is not being a historian, that’s being an annalist. There is a very particular detail that separates historians from annalists, and the clue is in the term ‘history’. ‘History’ derives from the Greek, istoriai, which basically means “to question/enquire”. So, a historian is not someone who records the past, a historian is someone who asks multiple sources what happens and then determines which is more accurate. Fundamental to that is the idea of the historical method, the process of working out what sources should be considered more reliable than others. If a person is not doing these things in their work, then it is not history, even though the subject matter might be historical.

Some examples will be useful. Let’s go back to Alexander again. There are five Alexaner ‘historians’: Arrian, Diodorus, Plutarch, Curtius Rufus and Justin. Arrian and Curtius Rufus both get a pass as historians: they tells us who their sources are and why they are preferring them over others. Diodorus is a bit debatable: he does mention some sources and there seems to be a method behind his work, but there’s some compelling arguments that he was basically just copying the work of earlier historians, not doing the method himself. Plutarch, by his own admission, was not a historian, he was a biographer. He was not interested in telling the most probable or reliable version of events, he was interested in using historical figures as moral exempla. He doesn’t really bother doing source analysis, because he’s not really interested in whether the information is correct or not, he’s interested in what that information reveals about his characters. Justin is not a historian; he is an epitomiser. What does that mean? Very simply, it means that Justin was just writing a summary (an epitome) of a bigger work (written by Pomey Trogus). It’s similar to a Wikipedia synopsis of a book’s plot: the writer of that synopsis is not themselves an author, similarly, Justin is not a historian.

Let’s take another, more well-known example: Shakespeare. Shakespeare wrote a number of historical plays, such as Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, and we know that he used Plutarch as a source. So, we’ve got someone who is telling us what happened in the past and is even using a source to do so. But no one considers Shakespeare to have been a historian, right? Why is that? Because he didn’t do source analysis. He didn’t look at multiple sources and then use historical methodology to determine which he considered more likely: he used Plutarch because Plutarch tells good stories.

This difference between a historian and ‘non-historian’ is one that we do in so many other aspects of our lives. We don’t, for example, consider a cinema critic to be a director, or a food critic/reviewer to be a chef. They obviously know about food, they’re talking about food and communicating information about food to the public, but that doesn’t make them a chef. When we think of a ‘scientist’ we don’t think of someone who makes videos about science, we mean someone who practices the scientific method, someone who is actually doing the research. An excellent example of this is the wonderful Potholer54. His channel focuses almost exclusively on scientific matters, but he is very upfront and honest about the fact that he himself is not a scientist, he is reporting the work of scientists.

So, this raises obvious questions about what I do: am I a historian? The answer, I think, is that it depends. At times, yes, I am being a historian. For example, when I’m writing my thesis or articles, I am engaging with the sources, explaining why I am preferring one source over another, all that good stuff. What about when I wrote scripts for Kings and Generals? In that capacity, no, I don’t think that I consider myself a historian. To be clear, I did do a lot of research for those scripts and I did do source analysis, establishing which narrative was the most likely. However, especially in the series about Julius Caesar, I did not include these details in the actual script. The audience is often not being made aware that there are conflicting sources and that I have selected a version based on a number of factors. As I matured as a writer, I tried to include more transparency in my videos on Alexander, for example, trying to show that there were multiple sources and explaining my analysis of them. I’m still hesitant to say that I was writing as a ‘historian’ in that capacity though. The reason for that is that I tried very hard in those videos to avoid giving my own opinion or analysis of events. I wanted to provide the viewer with an overview of what had happened historically and what some of the modern historians thought about them. I was reporting what others had written, I was not giving my own analysis. I was doing to history what Potholer54 does for science.

This is the case for the vast majority of ‘historians’ on YouTube: they are either simply describing the past, or they are reporting what scholars have written. Neither of these things is being a historian: it’s more akin to historical journalism. Most of the people who describes themselves as ‘historians’ are not. They might have an interest in history, they might talk about history, they might even tell you what scholarship says about history, but they’re not historians. A vast majority of them are not trained as historians either. They’re information analysists, business managers, etc. Some of them might have a BA in history, but just pause and think about that. Imagine if I had a BA in music theory, and I did videos reviewing music. Does that make me a musician? No. Unless I’m playing an instrument and actually making music, I’m not a musician. Apply the the same logic elsewhere. My sister has a BA in astrophysics and can talk very knowledgeably about space. That doesn’t make her a fricking astronaut. If you were on trial and asked for a lawyer, you’d be rather annoyed if you were provided with someone with a BA in law who just made videos reporting on various legal outcomes.

Why does any of that matter though? Who cares if some people call themselves ‘historians’? It matters because these people are our shortcuts. These are the figures who many people entrust with the incredibly powerful tool of informing them about how the past happened, and they are being imbued with a false level of authority and credibility. Most of these people are literally no different than talking to someone to some random person at the pub about history. Maybe they’ve done a bit more reading around the subject than most, but they’re not authoritative.

This is painfully transparent when given a bit of thought. If you’ve ever met a genuine historian, I mean someone who publishes research about a certain time period, they will be – by their own ambition – niche. They will be excellent at a time period or culture, but outside of that time period and culture, they’ll be little better than any vaguely intelligent person. An ancient historian has no more clout talking about, for example, the Crusades, than a zookeeper who reads medieval history books in their spare time. Yes, the historical method is constant across all time periods, but the amount of knowledge and background that is needed to talk intelligently about any one bit of history is basically a lifetime dedication. If you can think of someone who is apparently an expert in Roman, Mongolian, American and French history, I’m sorry but they’re chatting shit. I remember going to see a talk about Ptolemaic Egypt from Prof. Toby Wilkinson, one of the leading Egyptologists alive. A member of the audience asked Prof. Wilkinson a question about Hellenistic Macedonia, and he immediately responded that he was not a Hellenist and would not be able to give an accurate answer. And yet it is so easy to find ‘historians’ on YouTube who can apparently talk knowledgeably about all manner of cultures and time periods.

The benefit they have is that the audience is usually ignorant. It is, surprisingly, worryingly, dangerously, easy to appear ‘expert’ in history to a non-expert. This sounds mean to the audience, no one likes being called ‘ignorant’, but it’s true, and I include myself in that. I am painfully ignorant about most areas of history. I’m great at a couple of select time periods and cultures, but I couldn’t tell you jack or shit about, for example, ancient Egypt. Give me a week though, and I could swat up on some stuff, read some articles and make a video that sounds like I do. And if I call myself a historian, are you, the viewer, going to know if I actually know my stuff or not?

Of course not, I’m your shortcut! I’ve provided you with your nugget of information, and you get the benefit of feeling good that you’ve learned something new, and you trust me to have communicated that knowledge accurately. Why though, why do you trust me? I’m just some person on the internet. You trust me, because I’m a ‘historian’. And I can get away with claiming that title, because most people don’t actually know what a historian is supposed to be doing. I’m talking about the past, I’m telling you what happened, and I might even have a couple of quotes from sources. I’m now as much a historian as Einstein was a scientist or as Kurt Cobain was a musician.

And with the title of ‘historian’ I graduate myself from just some person on the internet, to one of those shortcuts. Through me, you live vicariously and learn about areas of history you always wanted to, but never quite had time to. Who cares if all I do is repeat other people’s analyses? Who cares if I don’t explain why I use this source over that? I am your gateway to the past: I choose what areas you know about and which you don’t, I choose how you understand things to have happened, I choose what characteristics historical figures had, I choose all these things. Because I’m a historian…right?