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Notes -
"Pop" history isn't "history" if it gets stuff seriously wrong. But history as a discipline isn't just an arcane hobby for a gaggle of ivory-tower academics - a huge part of the point of those academics' existence is to inform (or to write) works that educate the public about history. And Mike Duncan pretty much gives you the background you need to read academic Roman history without getting lost. Papers can be abstruse and difficult but academic books are generally written with enough background to be readable outside a specialist niche, even if you need to have some experience in the discipline. Just as an example, I recently read Emanuel Mayer's The Ancient Middle Classes. Mostly a very dry read going through the details of Roman tombs and houses and making arguments from there about the existence of a Roman "middle class", but the book contains enough background that someone generally familiar with Roman history can read it all - after all, an academic writing a book like that will expect it to be used by scholars in other aspects of ancient history, or economic historians studying class throughout history, or historians working on urbanization, etc. etc.
I think this is a place where a lot of academics sort of create their own problems. When they sort of hold out the idea that you have to be able to read dry academic texts and have a university degree to do real [subject] it creates two problems.
First, it opens the door to frauds who want to play fast and loose with facts in order to create pseudo-academic lite texts. Most of the Pop-Physics and Pop-Philosophy stuff contains serious enough distortions that you are likely to end up with a false sense of how these subjects actually work. A lot of woo has come out of pop physics books trying to explain quantum mechanics or astronomy, particularly around things like time travel or quantum mechanics or space travel. Michio Kakaku is simply terrible at telling people what physically is actually possible and realistic as a possible future.
Second, it creates a situation where most people think of those subjects as impossible to understand and study. People think history is boring because they think it’s dry historical texts and dates.
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