About Us
Hello everyone, and welcome to History Off the Page (“HOTP”) – an entertaining series of lectures about European history. I got the idea for HOTP during the summer of 2020 as I prepared a series of online lectures for my students during the Coronavirus pandemic. Basically I realized that podcasting represented an intriguing way to break away from the traditional way we convey knowledge about the past to the general public, i.e. through lengthy, expensive and (let’s be honest) too often boring textbooks. We live in a world where people are on the go, where people don’t have the time to read the way they once did. But at the same time, the ability to stream music and podcasts has enabled us to engage with one another in ways previous generations could never have imagined. So while HOTP doesn’t 100% replicate what I do in the classroom, it is a way for me as a college professor to connect with a global audience, to share my insights at no cost with a public that badly wants to know more about how modern society got where it is.
HOTP is based on my experiences as a professor at a small university (Furman) in Greenville, South Carolina, where I enjoy small classes and close interactions with my students. Over the years, I’ve found they enjoy learning most about the past when you make it fun for them. Unlike traditional history classes, I try to go beyond the typical fixation on names and date, politics and economics, to answer big questions about why things happened and how the world we know came to be. So while we’ll get into big things like where the European Union came from and why the French Revolution was so bad, we’ll also talk about why the Waltz was a revolutionary form of dance, why 19th century Parians thought the morgue was a fun place to visit on a Saturday night, and how fish sticks best explain the failures of the Communist command economy in East Germany.
The lectures are free and can be found on most streaming services. If you really like it, I hope you’ll consider checking out the bonus episodes available to our Patreon members (https://www.patreon.com/historyoffthepage?fan_landing=true). Here we’ll try to post 1-2 episodes a month dealing with a wide variety of topics, complementing what we cover in the main series. At some point I also hope to offer book, movie and travel recommendations (as you might have noticed I’m something of a cinephile, and having spent more than three years of my life living in different parts of Europe, I have lots to say about travel too!).
At any rate, I’d love to hear your feedback about the show, or answer any questions you might have about the topics covered in it. You can follow me on twitter (@HistoryOTP) or Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/HistoryOffThePage), or just email me at [email protected].
Thanks for listening!