
Why the history genre is big business right now

Remember how a few months ago it seemed like everyone was talking about the Roman Empire after a TikTok meme? It might be a sign of a broader interest in history at this time.
As Will Dunn wrote in Bloomberg, books, podcasts and newsletters about history are superpopular — and, therefore, profitable — right now. “Marketplace” host Kai Ryssdal spoke with Dunn, business editor of the New Statesman magazine in the United Kingdom, about the trend. The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.
Kai Ryssdal: Give a sense, just as a ground truth here, how well is history doing as a genre in the business world?
Will Dunn: It’s doing incredibly well. So you might have noticed that in bookshops across the country, and indeed around the world, lots of books aren’t selling that well, but the one shelf you will always see in every bookshop is a well-stocked history shelf. That’s been true for a long time, but now it’s really swelling in popularity. So in the U.K. and Ireland, history book sales are the highest since records began. And in the U.S., the whole U.S. book market is pretty much flat apart from a few genres, one of which is history, which has grown by about 6% in the last year. And in podcasts, it really is exploding. The biggest history podcast in the world is “The Rest Is History,” and that’s getting 12.5 million downloads a month.
Ryssdal: Also just for public radio listeners here in the United States, to put this into context, “The Rest Is History” gets more downloads than “This American Life.” Why? Why is this happening?
Dunn: I think there are a few reasons. Like I said, history has always been popular. I suspect it has something to do with the current moment that we are in. In moments of profound political or technological or social change, people often look to the past. So this was true of Victorian Britain, for example. Their society was changing. They had the Industrial Revolution, they had new technologies. And they were obsessed with Egyptology. They were obsessed with the ancient world, and so I think it’s a lot to do with that. It’s also a lot to do with podcasts themselves. People really, really like it, and I think there are just a lot of people out there who are doing a really good job of telling those stories.
Ryssdal: We’ll get to the podcasts in a second. But I think also it’s interesting to note that, as you pointed out in this piece, sort of academic history is on the wane, right? Fewer people actually studying it in school.
Dunn: That’s right, yeah. So that’s the, the other side of this is that university admissions for history degrees are going down. That I think is partly to do with the long-term trend in the decline of the humanities because university keeps getting more and more expensive. And people rightly, you know, think about, “Oh, what’s going to be the job I’ll get at the end of this?” And not a lot of teenagers think, “Oh, great, I’m going to make my millions as a historian.” They could be wrong about that actually, by the way, because history is a great preparation for lots of different jobs.
Ryssdal: You’re preaching to the choir here, pal. I was a history major way back. On the podcast thing, as we were talking about before we turned the microphones on, I am a recent discoverer of and now newly obsessed with “The Rest Is History,” which is, as you point out in this piece, and will be self-evident to anybody who listens to it, two middle-aged English white guys talking about history, which you wouldn’t think would be gripping. But the point is, yeah, it’s about the history, but it’s also about the parasocial relationship here, right? It’s about the relationship that we as listeners have with these people who are saying these interesting things.
Dunn: Yeah, I mean, you perhaps may experience this yourself with your listeners, Kai, I’m sure. You know, it is quite a personal experience listening to somebody’s voice, especially, you know, in your headphones, perhaps for hours a day. And the the company behind “The Rest Is History,” Goalhanger, they know that, and they deliberately seek that. They concentrate on the relationship between the two hosts. And that really helps, you know, when you feel it’s people who you have a kind of feeling of a social relationship that really increases your personal feeling of investment in the story.
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