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Amateur Historians in the Age of the Internet: A Look at YouTube

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Amateur Historians in the Age of the

Internet: A Look at YouTube
Anton Stjepan Cebalo
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I. Introduction

Historical knowledge production has drastically changed in the last two decades. The
internet age has ushered in a new form of participatory culture where effectively anyone can lay
claim to history online. As a result, a new generation of ‘amateur historians’ ranging from
YouTubers to bloggers to podcasters has emerged. Although some may lament this development
as evidence of declining academic standards, it is undeniable that history-writing has effectively
been democratized and is now more accessible than ever before. Rather than make value
judgements on its consequences, we should first acknowledge that this new mode is here to stay.

The internet has done more than open up historical scholarship beyond academia. It has
also permanently altered how we think and our capacity for deep attention. 1 The information-rich
environments we find ourselves in today has come at the expense of homogeneous analysis, and
instead privileges multimodal processes. Given these developments, it is unsurprising that our
understanding of historicity has changed. Time seems to move slower or faster depending on the
personalized inputs of our online consumption. The current shift is therefore nothing short of a
transformation—a process likened to “technogenesis,” taken from N. Katherine Hayles’s How
We Think.2 It is in this dizzying world that we find ourselves oversaturated with information and
often struggle to narrativize its broad scope. Ample online conspiracies have come in to fill the
void in our current era of ‘fake news’ fears and alarmism over the future. As academic historians,
it increasingly feels as though the runaway world is out ‘making history’ while we tag along to
grapple with mere fragments in the hopes of constructing a coherent story.

This essay will argue that it is time to give amateur historians their due. They have
become the de facto means with which the public consumes history. To dismiss them would
further marginalize academic research and only add to the divide between scholars and the
public. Amid this paradigm shift, the rise of the amateur historian can be understood to be the
final blow to traditional modes of professional source-based history first popularized in the 19th
century by Leopold von Ranke.3 During a time when history-writing is in deep crisis, the

1 Kleinberg, Ethan. Haunting History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017): 129-130.
2 As cited by Ethan Kleinberg, Haunting History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017): 129.
3 Leopold von Ranke can be considered the ‘father’ of professional history-writing.
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conventional gatekeepers of history have effectively lost their authority. This essay will claim
that amateur historians can help cure the deepening marginality that has afflicted the historical
profession since the 1990s while relying on case studies on YouTube as evidence.

II. Historical Time in the Digital Age

For much of its history, the internet possessed a future-in-the-present quality about it.
There was general optimism about it someday bridging divides across the world. Even among
historians, there was confidence that the internet would bring out the best in scholarship.
Although sounding utopian today, Robert Darnton writes glowingly in A Program for Reviving
the Monograph (1999) about what the future holds:

The electronic space is out there, waiting to be filled by something more substantial than
the junk produced by the consumer industries... It has room for a new kind of publication,
one that will not replace the book but that will revive it and send it into orbits beyond the
galaxy of Gutenberg.4

However, by the 2010s, the prevailing feeling regarding the future of the digital age began to
shift towards widespread cynicism. With the internet now gaining a comparable past, it has
developed a historicity on which it could be judged and assessed. The prevailing sentiments
which define the current historical era are often uncertainty, public distrust, paranoia, and a
general skepticism towards politics and its authority. Not only did the internet allow for a global
consciousness for the first time, it has also intensified the tension points of our increasingly
multipolar and technocratic world. The transition towards more generalized precarity weighs
especially heavy on the historicity of our post-crisis period after the Great Recession of 2008. Its
effects are likewise being felt at every level of civil society with the social contract that once
bounded the democratic polity now splintering. According to the latest 2020 study conducted by
the Centre for the Future of Democracy, a majority (57.5%) of citizens of democracies globally
are now dissatisfied. 5 In the last quarter century since the beginnings of the Internet Age,

4 Hammar, Anna Nilsson. “Digital History.” Scandia Digital History, 81, no. 2 (2016): 104.
5
Foa, R.S., Klassen, A., Slade, M., Rand, A. and R. Williams. “The Global Satisfaction with Democracy
Report 2020” (Cambridge, UK: Centre for the Future of Democracy, 2020): 9.
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dissatisfaction with democratic politics has increased from a third to over half with 2019
representing the “highest level of democratic discontent on record.” 6 Such polls and many others
demonstrate the historical predicament of our time hastened by our digital age.

Amid all this global restructuring along multipolar lines, our sense of historical time has
inevitably changed. In fact, it is being constantly remolded by the very act of engaging with the
digital world with sweeping consequences. In 2016, both Twitter and Instagram switched from
chronological to algorithmic timelines.7 8 Facebook was the first to make the switch sometime in
2014 or earlier.9 The non-linear means with which we consume information now is curated on
personalized algorithms so no one misses ‘what’s important.’ In effect, everyone skips to their
own rhythm with some overlap. Given that social media remains by far the most popular online
activity, such changes have effectively altered perceptions of time with most studies repeatedly
finding that Facebook users consistently underestimate the time they spend online. 10 Scholars
like John Tomlinson (2007), Robert Hassan (2009), and others have commented on the new
‘culture of immediacy’ and the speed that the internet age has ushered in. 11 12 The construction of
‘internet time,’ however, must also be linked to the economic transformations which have taken
place during the internet age, namely globalization and its reliance on new forms of precarious
labor. The internet has effectively de-territorialized our socio-temporal dimensions but it is the
material realities of globalization which have rendered this historicity real beyond just the online
world. Economic globalization has allowed for the internet to spread to great effect because it is
its complement. As Sylviane Agacinski writes in ‘Time Passing’ – Modernity and Nostalgia

6 Ibid., 2.
7 @farkas. “An Improved Timeline for Consumers and Brands.” Twitter. Last modified February 10, 2016.
https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2016/an-improved-timeline-for-consumers-and-brands.html.
8 Hunt, Elle. “New Algorithm-driven Instagram Feed Rolled Out to the Dismay of Uses.” The Guardian. Last
modified June 7, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jun/07/new-algorithm-driven-instagram-
feed-rolled-out-to-the-dismay-of-users.
9 Hockenson, Lauren. “Facebook Will Finally Roll Out a News Feed Redesign.” Gigaom. Last modified

March 6, 2014. https://gigaom.com/2014/03/06/facebook-will-finally-roll-out-a-news-feed-redesign/.

10 Whiteman, Honor. “Facebook Use May Alter Preception of Time, Study Finds.” Medical News Today.
Last modified February 12 2017. https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/315793.
11 Tomlinson, John. The Culture of Speed (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications Ltd, 2007).
12Hassan, Robert. Empires of Speed: Time and the Acceleration of Politics and Society (Leiden,
Netherlands: Brill, 2009)
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(2003), “Globalization is the unification of the world’s rhythms, all adjusted to the Western
clock...” although this Western-centric bias is now arguably being disputed with the rise of China
today.13 The creation of 21st century global time has led to the compression of spatial and
temporal boundaries, a drastic leap comparable to the equally-drastic changes of the early 20th
century when modernity and mass society was born.14 The 21st century economy, technological
change (i.e. the internet), and the new forms of labor are driving this leap forward and bringing
with it a new sense of historical time.

For simplicity’s sake, it would be useful to clearly delineate the characteristics of

historical time today before discussing the amateur historians (and indeed, all historians) that
work within it. We have already determined that historical time today is characterized by its
immediacy. The speed of capitalism’s globalization has created a discernible ‘world clock’
which provides measured time for the free flow of commodities. However, one’s own existence
in this time occurs in concurrent ways across different cultures and regions globally. The speed
of the online world has molded the historical subject into a multitasking user who exists in
present-time differently than earlier generations. Ethan Kleinberg in Haunting History (2017)
calls this new multimodal process of cognition ‘hyper-attention’ in contrast to older ‘deep
attention’ and its preference for object-oriented study.15 The proliferation of screens has
effectively come at the expense of deep attention and its routine of analysis. Since time is
perceived and lived, this cognitive shift has deep ramifications for understanding contemporary
historicity. Today, information is consumed multi-directionally and complex events unfold in
ways that defy the narrative forms of old. Zoltán Boldizsár Simon has argued that this new, tech-
induced historicity has prevented us from “acting upon a story that we can believe.” 16 Rather
than be future-oriented, our current historical sensibility is based on the speed and immediacy of
the ‘now.’ Helga Nowotny (1996) was an early proponent of characterizing our current mode of

13Agacinski, Sulviane. Translated by Jody Gladding. Time Passing: Modernity and Nostalgia (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2003): 5.
14Conceptualizations of ‘mass society’ and the ‘mass-man’ were popularized during the first-half of the
20thcentury to describe the new body politic. They would become a staple of cultural and media studies in the
succeeding decades, a direct creation of the changing material conditions of early 20th century modernism.
15 Kleinberg, Ethan. Haunting History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017): 130.
16 Simon, Zoltán Boldizsár. “(The Impossibility of) Acting Upon a Story We Can Believe.” Rethinking History
22, no. 1 (2018): 106.
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internet time as a form of “extended present.” However, it should arguably be called extended
presents due to the many, asymmetrical cycles of lived experience facilitated by social media
and online activity.17 What we are living in is a time of highly curated, non-linear online
consumption in an increasingly de-territorialized world which is structurally present-oriented.
The effective consequence of this temporal shift is the loss of a gradual story of the future and
our anxious entrapment within this so-called extended present.

How do amateur historians then fit into this new form of lived historical time? The
amateur historian is not new, but their prevalence today is. It can be argued that their rise is
representative of the general crisis of authority brought about by the digital age. With the internet
acting as a living archive of sorts, anyone can peruse its records and narrativize them. Indeed,
even some forms of music itself function much like histories-in-themselves with attempts to
narrativize the past through musical pastiches. One immediate example that comes to mind is the
genre of ‘vaporwave’ which compiles the auditory feelings of a particular moment in historical
time, such as life before 9/11 or the capitalist sounds of the 1980s.18 With the overabundance of
information whizzing by us in its many directions, cultural fragments are linked through
association and historical stories are being reimagined and recreated daily. It is this landscape
that the amateur historian must contend with directly in ways that may appear more distant for
the academic history-writer.

III. Who Are the Amateur Historians of YouTube?

The internet naturally has a preference for the image. Because online engagement centers
around screen-based consumption, it is unsurprising that photos and film have become our
modes of choice. Although podcasts, independent blogs and even Wikipedia, among others, are
also popular, YouTube seems to especially dominate today’s historical production. To limit the
cases discussed, the focus of this essay’s investigations will be on YouTube specifically. To
begin with a starting point, we can look to YouTube’s own community guidelines. They have
become something akin to the ‘scholastic virtues’ of old, dictating which videos are appropriate

17 Nowotny, Helga. Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1996).
18Vapor Memory. “猫 シ Corp. : NEWS AT 11.” YouTube video, 1:11:08. Posted [December 9, 2016].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSh2HswKn5Y.
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for circulation. Although these rules have proven to be relatively unrestrictive and are often
scrutinized, they are effectively the only dictum outlining behaviors on YouTube for historians
and all other content producers. The ultra-accessibility of the platform has facilitated a new
generation of historians outside the academic world. Since there are so many amateur historians
on YouTube, I will be narrowing it all down to a few key categories: niche histories, visual data
histories, archives, and others who are pushing the boundaries of historical production.

Niche Historians

As one delves deep into the world of YouTube historians, one finds that these channels
generally tend to gravitate towards particular niches. Channels self-organize themselves around
certain topics which carve a particular, unique focus for the historian. For example, the Armchair
Historian has some 562,000 subscribers and focuses largely on animated histories of the 20 th
century. Another amateur historian, M. Laser History, mainly covers the origins of nation-states,
major organizations, and large cities for its 55,400 subscribers. The Histocrat is another niche
historian who finds himself diving into the early history of the British Isles with videos like “A
History of Britain – Bronze and Iron (2200 BC – 800 BC.)”19 Military-related topics continue to
dominate history channels with Kings and Generals being among the most popular with over 1
million subscribers. Although academic credentials are not always listed for these channels,
some are former professionals in the historical field. Ryan Reeves, for example, is a former
Associate Professor of Historical Theology and now runs a channel titled “Historical Theology
for Everyone.” Currently totaling some 126,000 subscribers, the intent is to create popular
religious history that is accessible for everyone.

Although this is just a tiny slice of genre-based history on YouTube, it mirrors the
segmentation of academic history but in a more commercial way. These knowledge-based
ventures also double as forms of income for these popular historians. They are thus incentivized
to focus on gaining views with enticing stories. Therefore, niches in history online arguably do
not emerge as authentically as subdisciplines within history proper. Instead, they often simply fill
a gap which exists in the broad online marketplace of content. This often results in a large

19The Histocrat. “A History of Britain – Bronze and Iron (2200 BC – 800 BC).” YouTube video, 54:46.
Posted [September 30, 2019]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVqjKpTvpM8.
 8

portion of genre-based histories being on trending topics to maximize clicks. Some are even
partially AI-produced in a semi-automated fashion to ensure cost-effectiveness. One such
example is the popular The Infographics Show which produces explainer videos on trending
questions frequently of historical importance. Videos like “Worst Plagues in the History of
Mankind” are designed to maximize clicks and are often filled with repetitive fluff to exceed the
10-minute mark.20 YouTube’s new preference for longer videos has caused such consumerist-
driven content to spike in all genres, including history and the social sciences. 21 Sometimes
competing with one another, ‘niche historians’ thus find themselves most influenced by
algorithms, social media, and trends compared to other amateur historians on YouTube. It should
be noted, however, that this is not a problem with history videos per say but more of an issue
with the commercial market among internet content more generally.

Visualized Data History

Visualized historical data is another section which has amassed a significant viewership
on YouTube and beyond. The case is a curious one given history’s relative marginalization
within Big Data as a profession. As Anna Nilsson Hammar writes in Digital History, this can be
traced back to the “diminishing role of quantitative social science history and the influence of the
‘linguistic turn.’”22 From the 1960s onwards, the historian’s focus shifted “away from
[quantitative] sociology and towards anthropology.” 23 Although the linguistic turn still weighs
heavy on the humanities as a whole, there is room for a balance: historian James Grossman
stresses that “historical narratives offer a way of organizing and presenting big data as
meaningful information.”24 Such a transition is taking place within professional history-writing
already, especially within economic and social history. Data-izing history comes with its own set
of problems, however—for one, it tends to create illusions of objectivity and eschews criticism

20 The Infographics Show. “Worst Plagues in the History of Mankind.” YouTube video, 11:39. Posted

[November 12, 2019]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIbsN_PY2b4.

21Alexander, Julia. “YouTube Videos Keep Getting Longer.” The Verge, Last modified July 20, 2019.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/26/8888003/youtube-video-length-contrapoints-lindsay-ellis-shelby-church-
ad-revenue.
22 Hammar, Anna Nilsson. “Digital History.” Scandia Digital History, 81, no. 2 (2016): 106.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
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of the powers that operate behind it. Still, data-based history continues to be popular online and
on YouTube. It is a simple means of conceptualizing historical changes visually and is often easy
to mass produce. One YouTube channel which provides such visualizations is Animated Stats
which boasts 93,900 subscribers. Videos range from “Top Agricultural Production 1960 to 2016”
to “Top 20 Steel Producing Countries 1967 to 2018.”25 26 The format of the content is
straightforward: visualizations of data as it relates to each leading country in a particular
category. The data is illustrated without commentary but still provides the audience with an
impression of our current Great Acceleration. It can sometimes elucidate geopolitical realities
more clearly, such as the swing from the U.S. to China in most areas of global production.
Although this cannot be called ‘proper history’ by any means, since it is absent of commentary
or narrative, the visualizations underscore the speed of development that underpins our
multipolar world. One cannot help but feel the historicity of today’s immediacy while watching
the statistics dart between nations competing for the topmost spot. As a result of their success,
many channels that produce history-focused data visualizations have emerged. Ollie Bye boasts
some 209,000 subscribers and focuses largely on historical changes over the long durée of
history. Their most popular video is “History of the World: Every Year” with 9.5 million views,
which is a visualization of changing borders since history’s supposed beginnings.27 Other topics
include “The Spread of Gunpowder (800-1850),” “The History of Ireland: Every Year,” and
more. 28 29 It would be hard to justify this genre of visualized ‘data history’ as exhaustive in any
sense. It lacks analysis and waters down history to statistical change over time. Some
professional historians may even lament such visualizations as the dead-end of historical
scholarship. Moreover, the critics of data-izing history would find their most obvious examples
among this subgenre of YouTube. However, the outstanding popularity of visualized historical

25 Animated Stats. “Top Agricultural Producing Countries 1960 to 2016.” YouTube video, 3:25. Posted

[January 26, 2020]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0Uesek7KNI.

26Animated Stats. “Top 20 Steel Producing Countries 1967 to 2018.” YouTube video, 3:20. Posted
[October 17, 2019]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqF5pYDEpRM.
27Ollie Bye. “History of the World: Every Year.” YouTube video, 16:35. Posted [December 17, 2015].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymI5Uv5cGU4.
28 Ollie Bye. “The Spread of Gunpowder (800-1850).” YouTube video, 3:38. Posted [January 6, 2020].
29Ollie Bye. “The History of Ireland: Every Year.” YouTube video, 4:25. Posted [December 6, 2019].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsk51Tsq-e8.
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data on YouTube demonstrates that the public has a desire to see today’s profound speed of
change concretely mapped out.

YouTube’s Archivists

The ultra-accessibility of the internet has allowed for independent users to categorize
historical documents and even upload their own first-hand visual sources. It has also removed the
traditional constraints to archival access such as time, cost, and qualification. 30 Although often
not narrativized directly, these historical fragments are inevitably used in the process of history-
making by all historians. Documentarians, archivists, and independent media on YouTube have a
direct impact on today’s historical imaginations of the past and how we relate to it. These videos
allow for self-reflection on one’s perceived distance from the not-so-distant past and may even
inspire feelings of nostalgia. In other words, the digital archives of today remind us of our
present-oriented historicity and how it breaks from the past. In our post-modern age, these
archives also become a limitless supply of new content that can endlessly be distorted,
interpreted, reproduced, and, in some cases, commodified for market use. With their curators
usually being history hobbyists, these channels create popular history by curating primary visual
sources. Historical documentation is now available for immediate online consumption by
whoever is interested enough to look it up—and often a single view is usually followed by a
whole host of recommended, history-related videos on YouTube. YouTube’s many historical
archives naturally find their way in these curated, algorithm-driven recommendations. The ultra-
accessibility of archives today on YouTube and elsewhere has effectively allowed for a new
generation of amateur historians to emerge.

Those that fit into the ‘archival’ category on YouTube vary. One example is David
Hoffman who has become famous for uploading the large archival collection he has amassed
over the years. With some 305,000 subscribers, he focuses on providing audiences with a
‘snapshot in time.’ One video is a collection of outtakes from interviews in the late 1970s titled
“1979 Wall Street Interviews -Are They Any Different From Now?”31 Another video captures

30 McLachlan, Fiona. Booth, Douglas. “Who’s Afraid of the Internet? Swimming in an Infinite Archive” in
Sports History in the Digital Era (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2015): 229.
31 David Hoffman. “1979 Wall Street Interviews – Are They Any Different From Now?” YouTube video,
5:13. Posted [May 28, 2015]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiMus1FJb9w.
 11

feelings of the Great Generation and how and their opinions on their Baby Boomer children,
titled “How 1950s Parents Felt About Their Children.”32 Such content has proven to be
incredibly popular on YouTube, with each of these videos boasting well over 1 million views.
Although such footage is not historicized by any means, the titles and content lend themselves to
imagination—"how was life then really like?” Hoffman’s content hints at answers to such
questions, or at least cements certain impressions in the viewer. Hoffman is merely one of many
‘independent’ archivists who have crafted a name for themselves on YouTube, however.
Kinolibrary, for example, has some 86,000 subscribers and periodizes its videos on certain eras.
For example, there is footage from New York 1970s – 1980s, Los Angeles street subculture
1930s–1990s, China from the 1950s–1970s, and much more. Kinolibrary prides itself on being
an ‘independent’ agency which collects “high quality, rare and inspiring footage.”33
Footageforpro.com is another such independent channel which uploads archival footage by
country and boasts some 38,000 subscribers. Altogether, these channels provide audiences with
fragments with which they can imagine history. In doing so, they often rely heavily on
periodization to elicit an emotional response in the viewer and create a ‘mood’ for a given film
reel.

Archival work on YouTube is not just a Wild West of rogue archivists and
documentarians uploading their collections online, however. It has increasingly become
dominated by professionalized entities, news organizations and governments. And they have
embedded themselves in their amateurish landscape quite easily. The mass arrival of professional
archival footage came in 2015, in what was something of a watershed moment for historical
production on YouTube. Over one million minutes of historical footage dating back to 1885 was
uploaded to YouTube from the Associated Press and British Movietone. In total, some 550,000
video stories were uploaded to create a “visual-on-demand encyclopedia.”34 Other government-
funded archives like British Pathé (1.3 million subscribers) and US National Archives (100,000

32 David Hoffman. “How 1950s Parents Felt about Their Children.” YouTube video, 8:33. Posted [June 4,
2018]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUorVXJ8MZE.
33 Kinolibrary. “About.” YouTube channel. https://www.youtube.com/user/thekinolibrary/about.
34 Gani, Aisha. “Here Is the Newreel: AP and Movetone Upload Huge Archive to YouTube.” The Guardian.
Last modified July 22, 2015. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/22/newsreel-associated-press-
movietone-upload-archive-youtube?CMP=share_btn_tw.
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subscribers) have also taken up the call to providing their content on YouTube. Nowadays, it is
expected for major news outlets to maintain their own archives-of-sorts. However, the
professionalization of YouTube’s archives has not lessened the influence of its many
independently-minded curators. They all co-exist in this fractured, digital space to create
reference points in time for the viewer’s immersion. Although professional historians often rely
on manuscript-based sources, popular history is often crafted through the act of browsing
nowadays. Increasingly, these archives provide everyday people with an imagination of the past
which previously was limited to more authoritative formats. It is therefore not surprising that
they inspire the content amateur historians produce on YouTube.

Pushing the Boundaries: Other Amateur Historians

The generalized categories mentioned thus far are by no means exhaustive and there is
often significant overlap. Channels focused on historical documentaries, for example, can loosely
be grouped as “archival” although often feature a more defined, narrative form. Podcasts and
audiobooks on history are also common on YouTube which can be considered an altogether
different category. Such examples are no means unique to the internet, however. In fact, there are
amateur historians which are actively using contemporary digital tools to provide audiences with
novel means of consuming and experiencing history. I would like to draw attention to two
specific ones: Google Earth imagery and virtual reality.

2008-09 was a pivotal time for Google’s satellite imagery and its Google Earth program.
Not only was street view formally introduced, but 3D modeling of the urban landscape became
the new standard. 3D coverage remains inconsistent, however—large swaths of the world are
still unrendered in 3D, illustrating a deep digital divide globally. That being said, satellite
imagery by Google Earth now covers 98% of the world.35 The growing collection of GIS data,
aerial photography, and satellite imagery has expectedly intersected with YouTube’s amateur
historical output in original ways. Because Google Earth allows one to digitally stroll through
locations without being present, it has created ample opportunities for exploration and historical
narrativization. Michael Beach is one such historian who has emphasized such methods in his

35 Knight, Shawn. “Google Earth Now Covers 98% of the Population.” Techspot. Last modified December
13, 2019. https://www.techspot.com/news/83188-google-earth-now-covers-98-percent-population.html.
 13

videos. In his most common series “Mike Looks at the Map,” he visits cities with the help of
Google Earth and then tours them while providing historical commentary. His currently most-
watched video is on Dubai which has garnered some 1.4 million views in just a year and his
channel now boasts 33,700 subscribers. 36 I point out his work because his style would only be
possible in today’s internet culture: without being present in any of these locations, Beach is able
to provide a visual experience through satellite-based images while historicizing the many
locations he visits. The end result is a history-making process that feels in line with our
contemporary feelings of inhabiting a “global village.” The videos also double as architectural
commentary while providing historical explanations for a given urban space’s development. The
joking nature of the video series also bears some resemblance to ‘psychogeography’ or the
playful exploration of urban environments. When the Situationist International first coined the
term in 1955, it was proposed as a new means of understanding the “specific effects of the
geographical environment... on the emotions and behaviors of the individual.” 37 Future horizons
are imprinted within the urban landscape which beget imaginations of what could-have-been.
However, these same landscapes have the propensity to entrap us within the monotony of their
capital flows, many passageways, and architectural structures. Although psychogeography was
first imagined as a physical activity—as a means of strolling through the city to feel its affect—
Beach’s work is effectively a digital exercise of the same kind. As Beach digitally ‘strolls’
through the urban landscapes, it comes with candid reactions alongside historical insight.
Oftentimes, the commentary does not disguise itself as impartial and is laced with criticisms. The
experience resembles the work of a flaneur who solely exists online. Beach’s work thus
showcases a type of historical production that is only possible in our contemporary period. Such
imaginative journeys by satellite combine urban studies, history, and even entertainment to
create interwoven narratives—one which is best suited for the popular histories on YouTube.

Virtual reality (VR) continues to be relatively marginal to our everyday online

consumption, but 360-videos can be considered VR-by-another-name. Although not interactive,
360-degree videos provide audiences with novel immersion and are often the first “VR-like”

36Michael Beach. “Dubai: An Absolute Mess!” YouTube video, 16:17. Posted [July 2, 2018].
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbxQHjcctZk.
37 Debord, Guy-Ernest. “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography.” Les Lèvres Nues, 6 (1955).
http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/2.
 14

experience most of us have. The feature was added to YouTube in 2015. 38 Since then, 360-
videos have become common on the platform and some channels have begun to explore VR-like
experiences for recreated historical events. The field is still in its infancy, but finds its earliest
manifestations on YouTube. ZDF Enterprises GmbH, for example, has created a 3D, 360°
rendering of gladiators in the Roman colosseum.39 Channels like 360Rize focus exclusively on
360-video content and have toyed with some historical concepts like a VR-rendering of the
American Revolution. 40 Still, the high costs associated with this kind of historical production
means that it is often outside the domain of amateur historians. Established outlets like National
Geographic, History (American TV channel), BBC News, CNN, and Time Magazine have all
stepped up to create 360 imaginations of historical events. However, VR history still remains a
relatively small segment of historical production on YouTube and an even smaller segment of
amateur content creation. Still, YouTube has become the de facto platform for sharing such
experiments and we can expect more sophisticated renderings in the coming decade along with
real interactivity.

IV. The Professional and Public Divide

A few case studies by amateur historians on YouTube have thus far been presented.
Despite their growing popularity, the professional field of history by contrast has struggled. The
last few years has seen ample discussion on the supposed decline of history and the humanities
more generally. In the United States, the number of students who major in history has declined
by about a third since 2011.41 In fact, history has seen the steepest decline compared to all other
fields of study.42 Academic publishing has likewise suffered with declining sales since the

38Solsman, Joan E. “YouTube to Add 360-degree Videos.” CNet. Last modified March 12, 2015.
https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-adds-360-degree-video-uploads/.
39 ZDF Enterprises GmbH. “Gladiators in the Roman Colosseum - 360°/3D.” YouTube video, 9:40. Posted
[February 28, 2017]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBuijx_iZtQ.
40 360Rize. “Battle Road: The American Revolution in 360/VR.” YouTube video, 5:16. Posted [October 28,
2016]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TqvPNh18ms.
41Alterman, Eric. “The Decline of Historical Thinking.” The New Yorker. Last modified February 4, 2019.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-decline-of-historical-thinking.
42 Schmidt, Benjamin M. “The History BA Since the Great Recession.” American Historical Association. Last
modified November 26, 2018. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-
history/december-2018/the-history-ba-since-the-great-recession-the-2018-aha-majors-report.
 15

1980s.43 An exceptional academic book can now be expected to sell just 200 copies in its first
year. It seems clear that professional history is suffering a deep crisis of irrelevance—but why
has history, of all subjects, been especially unable to uphold its place in contemporary
knowledge production?

History has always possessed this ubiquitous quality about it. In the public imagination,
history is effectively synonymous with ‘the past.’ In today’s accelerating world, there is more
history being produced than ever before just by sheer volume of information. There are also
more digital tools at our disposal, endless data to sift through, and an abundance of primary
sources. Given these circumstances, the historical field should be rich with unprecedented
research and robust debate. 44 Yet, historical scholarship has lagged in contextualizing our novel
present and the number of would-be professional historians has subsequently declined. If one
was to temporalize the historical field today, it is a profession stuck in the latter-half of the 20th
century while struggling to understand the 21st century present. Professional history is effectively
haunted by its own historiographical past. If we are to accept that history is all-encompassing in
its scope, however, then such indictments are not against history itself but against the more
general form of knowledge production today. Our contemporary mode of knowledge production
has profoundly altered the historical subject in every respect, but it seems to have left the
historian’s practices relatively untouched. Today’s ‘crisis of history’ is therefore representative
of our extended present’s unique discursive practices and our inability to process its immediacy
as historians. It is precisely in assessing our contemporary historicity that professional history
has effectively failed. And in doing so, it has ceded its authority to the general public without
acknowledgement. Historical production has consequently become more invisible, embedded
within the general culture as amateur hobbyists become its de facto producers.

Despite professional history’s relative decline, the public has paradoxically demonstrated
it still has a voracious appetite for historical knowledge. To give one example, the “World

43Barclay, Donald A. “Academic Print Books Are Dying. What’s the Future?” The Conversation. Last
modified November 10, 2015. https://theconversation.com/academic-print-books-are-dying-whats-the-future-
46248.
44In some cases, there is. Social and economic history have seen a flourishing of new scholarship, but the
aforementioned trends speak for themselves.
 16

History” series by Crash Course has some 58 million views.45 Popular history books continue to
top New York Times bestseller lists, as well. In a 2015 U.S. survey, 33% of respondents chose
‘history’ as their favorite book genre. 46 Moreover, biographies and history remain the top-two
most popular genres among nonfiction books. 47 The many case studies presented in section III of
this essay also speak to the deep public interest in history. However, the amateurish form history
takes today is a dramatic departure from its professionalization and may, in fact, be a return to its
roots. Before history proper was professionalized by German universities in the latter-half of the
19th century, historical production often occurred on the cultural level through literature, folklore,
oral traditions, and customs. It was effectively a collective recollection of the past, despite its
many faults, and was embedded in the cultural consciousness of a particular locality or region.
Eventually, the rise of nation-states gave birth to professional history because it became
necessary to now narrativize the trajectories of this newly-constructed form of statecraft. History
was thereafter instrumentalized with grandiose narratives such as the rise and fall of nations and
the emplotment of its people. Today we find that the material conditions have changed with the
onset of globalization, the internet and new modes of being. The construction of the ‘global
village’ has effectively decoupled history proper from its former professional domain and
relegated it, once again, to the realm of culture. Just like the folkloric histories of old, today’s
narratives can be likened to digital ‘oral traditions’ with its own amateur historians,
commentators, and audiences. They have essentially filled the gap left by the failure of
professional historians to apply their modes of emplotment to present-day conditions.

However, this does not mean that the professional historian should or will disappear.
There is room for ‘shared authority’ if historians are willing to admit their domain is now
dispersed across the public rather than within an institution. Oral historian Michael Frisch first
coined the term ‘shared authority’ in 1990 to describe a kind of cooperation between the public
and professional history.48 The idea can take many forms, but it depends on concrete deliverables

45
CrashCourse. “World History.” YouTube playlist. Last updated August 13, 2019.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBDA2E52FB1EF80C9.
46 Yucesoy, B., Wang, X., Huang, J. et al. “Success in Books: A Big Data Approach to Bestsellers.” EPJ Data
Science 7, no. 7 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1140/epjds/s13688-018-0135-y.
47 Ibid.
 17

such as open source access to documents and journals, dialogical discussions, and an
acknowledgement that “hybridity [in methodology] is the new normal.” 49 The computer must be
viewed by the historian “as a machine to think with” rather than simply as a substitute for the
material original.50 Still, skepticism towards this newly-democratized domain of knowledge
production remains among professional historians. The late conservative historian Gertrude
Himmelfarb remarked that the internet “does not distinguish between true and false, the
important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral.” 51 Daniel Cohen has remarked that it
is a poor format for texts, “especially for long-form narratives."52 Some historians continue to
also pride themselves on being ‘exclusively analog,’ although such examples are far in between
nowadays. Although no professional historian would discount today’s digital technologies
outright, there is this inherent tension between video-dominated amateur historians and the
professional.

I will leave this section with a historical comparison which may help shed some light on
the current divide. Lest we forget, professional history also found itself in a crisis in the
beginning of the 20th century. It was the beginnings of modernity and the rise of the ‘mass-man’
was lamented as being responsible for the decline of ‘high culture,’ famously by José Ortega y
Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1929). Much like the fear that mass society would distort the
professional class of the early 20th century, we now again see the formation of a new kind of
‘mass society,’ except this time it is globalized, digitized, and present-oriented. The birth of
modernism required a complete reassessment of the relations that make up culture, politics,
economy, and the basis of historicity itself. Although such upheavals in history and the
humanities more generally were arguably justified then, they are now partly responsible for our
entrapment. Unlike before, historians today faces an unprecedented amount of difficulties since
the public participates in the knowledge production process whereas previously they did not en

48 Foster, Meg. “Online and Plugged In?: Public History and Historians in the Digital Age.” Public History

Review, 21 (2014): 4.
49 Zaagsma, Gerben. “On Digital History.” BMGM: Low Countries Historical Review, 128, no. 4 (2013): 17.
50 Ibid., 18.
51McLachlan, Fiona. Booth, Douglas. “Who’s Afraid of the Internet? Swimming in an Infinite Archive” in
Sports History in the Digital Era (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2015): 228.
52 Ibid.
 18

masse. If historians are to adapt to contemporaneity, then they must first begin by bridging this
divide with the public.

V. Conclusion

The rise of the amateur historian is a reflection of the crisis within professional historical
scholarship. By documenting the many such historians on YouTube, I sought to demonstrate the
depth of research and public education being done by everyday people with an interest in the
past. Because the internet still conforms to the hard logic of markets, it is easy to discount such
examples as corrupted by partiality or commercialization. Examples of kitsch-like historical
production on YouTube are innumerable, as is the case for most online content. However, such
accusations can just as easily be laid against institutionally-bound historians. Some may disagree,
but the onus is on professional historians to prove their worth in light of declining relevance, not
on the amateurs. Amateur historians can sustain themselves through their own audiences without
the approval of professionals. That being said, the decline of the history field is an unmistakable
tragedy and, if allowed to continue, will inevitably cause public standards to further deteriorate.
It is therefore in the interest of all people that professional history regain its reputation amid this
time of extreme flux. Given that the public’s distrust in institutions and politics is at an all-time
high, perhaps historians can lead the effort to remedy this pernicious divide.
 19

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