Carlin spends a lot of time telling you where he gets information, who he's quoting from, how reliable they are, what the historical consensus is, etc. In a word, historiography.

That's not to say he never gets anything wrong, he and his researchers aren't steeped in the subject for their whole careers so they'll miss things. He is biased towards the exciting stories and sources, but usually qualifies them with "I'll tell you this fun story but historians disagree about X Y Z because of A".

I'll have to look into the criticisms but my impression just from listening is far better than any other pop history.

From what I read, historians generally like him. The main criticism is that he sometimes uses outdated sources or oversimplifies stuff.

I've heard somewhat mixed things from my historian friends.

But you'll be happy to hear that "sometimes uses outdated sources or oversimplifies stuff" is a common criticism of basically all academic history written outside of the last 20 years, so he is in decent company.

> Carlin has also been criticized for being loose with history in favour of story.

How so? He seems to be pretty upfront in talking about his sources, quoting from them, and saying repeatedly that he's a journalist and not a historian.

In one of his podcasts, he talks about the "pendulum of history" and how it swings, depending on the time, between more story (ie more emotion and look as to feelings of the time) or more fact (ie 10k people died in this battle). He mentioned that he preferred to be on the more story side; giving eyewitness accounts and showing the emotion of the history. I wouldn't put him near Gladwell though, but on the more story side of the pendulum.

I think there's a difference between Dan Carlin's "I'm interested in exploring what it felt like to be in some moment of history, and why the people there made the decisions they made" and Malcolm Gladwell's "I'm going to cherrypick facts until my 'history' fits the just-so fable I'm trying to tell".

Being on the "story" side is IMO a large part of his podcast's appeal. You can get the bare facts of a battle or event on Wikipedia, and that's interesting in its own way. After listening to an episode on Carlin's podcast, I usually go look it up on Wikipedia, to get a different picture.

But talking about the people who were in that event, leaning heavily on eyewitness accounts and primary sources, all of that makes the events come alive. I think both are valid and important viewpoints on history. I think history in school would be a lot more interesting if it took a similar approach.

Looking at an historical event at more of a ground-level is nowhere near the same thing as giving outright incorrect information.