I've been a latecomer to the 'history of *' podcast genre. Recently been working through Revolutions. Antennapod lets you sort a podcast's episodes chronologically, reverse-chronologically, alphabetically, etc.

Yes but the auto-download feature doesn't work.

Oh I thought it was about sorting as well. Frankly, if you spend 30 seconds tapping download on the next 30 episodes every few weeks, that solves the issue?

I use Spotify at the moment (thinking of switching back to Antennapod due to Spotify being buggy as fuck) and actually hit download on every episode I want to listen to: putting them in my downloads is the easiest way to both mark them as 'to be listened to' as well as having them available whenever (though that's one of the bugs: I'll still need internet to get permission from Spotify HQ to start playing, but I won't have to load the audio stream and can turn off internet once it's playing).

Or you could just grab the files and dump them into a folder for something like smart audiobook player -- that's what I'd do for anything longer than ~6 hours in total, don't want to keep track of that stuff in my podcast player which is for, well, podcasts, not (cut-up) audio books.

You may be right on that, I have it disabled so I haven't noticed.

I binge old podcasts regularly. You can sort episodes old->new.