The Create Unknown
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A Romantic Date with Alternate History Hub
🕑 Added 2022-02-20 19:39:00 +0000 UTCWe'll be recording Tuesday at 6pm ET as normal, the subject TBA -- but the next 2 hours of your is actually about the past. We've spent the last month pining over an opportunity to talk to Alternate History Hub, and we've finally done it. It was as hot, steamy, and YouTubey as we hoped it would be.
Our long-awaited Valentine’s Date is here! Getting a clear picture of history is hard enough, but Alternate History Hub somehow manages to imagine how things *could* have been with a highly-knowledgeable, entertaining realism. His favorite website in the world? Well, we start by positing what life would be like had it never existed at all.
It all started with a really, really bad show on SpikeTV. A ridiculous show pilot was so terrible and employed such simplistic, boring history that Alternate History Hub was born. And even the pilot itself was hard to track down because it’s been nearly scrubbed from the internet. They did the “worst possible thing you can do with history,” and it included a fascist version of Facebook. AHH can use fiction to teach how history happened, but SpikeTV couldn’t pull it off.
Storytelling is everything in history, whether it’s a YouTube video or a classroom teacher. Kevin is going to play the odds by having 17 children and naming them all William, and Matt has a strategy for injecting a harsh dose of reality into the replies of the most obnoxious social media weenies. And castles? They’re actually really small on the inside.
It seems like it would be easy to make history content sustainably, but it’s been near impossible for AHH and almost everyone else in the history game. Since it necessarily touches on politics, social problems, and conflict, all things history raise red flags everywhere. Advertisers don’t like it, so YouTube doesn’t like it – despite their stated commitment to educational content. We really don’t know what the future holds for history, and it’s a shame that it’s such a difficult, ever-present question for YouTubers like History Hub.
But when we consider what history is really like – not imagining yourself as you are now in a historical place, but trying to understand the people of a particular moment in time – there’s really only one truly important question: If you grew up in Chris-Chan’s position, would your life have turned out exactly the same way? Then the Patrons jump in to cleanse the question palate with a host of queries from serious to frivolous – and it couldn’t have ended better.
Thanks to Alternate History Hub for taking so much time to be probed on the development of historical genius on a platform that tends to reward twerking and gluttony. There aren’t a lot of history channels out there that are entertaining *and* highly accurate – subscribe. SUBSCRIBE.
Thanks to everyone who showed up to a raucous live show, and especially to the Patrons who make this show happen each and every week. You really are the best.
