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The Histocrat

The Histocrat is a history and mythology channel that moves comfortably between eras and continents far apart from one another. It will devote a series to Palaeolithic cave art ( which animals appear, which are missing, and what can honestly be inferred from that absence ) and then turn to the birth of ancient China, the Roman invasion of Africa during the First Punic War, or the Roman presence in Ireland. The breadth is not scatter: in every case the method is the same, beginning from a concrete question and following the available evidence as far as it goes. A substantial part of the channel is Mythillogical, a podcast on the origin and transformation of mythic figures. It examines how the modern werewolf took shape out of older traditions, where Santa Claus comes from, what the documentary history of the Loch Ness Monster actually is, and how Cú Chulainn is told within the Irish tradition. The approach is neither folkloric nor credulous: the aim is to trace how a story changes as it passes between cultures, and what needs account for those changes. There is also a declared taste for the oblique. Episodes on fraudulent monarchs ( Perkin Warbeck, False Dmitry ) or on the invention of trousers show a channel that does not confuse seriousness with solemnity: small subjects get the same rigour as large ones, and sometimes yield more. Viewers will find videos that explain where our assumptions came from, draw a clear line between what is documented and what is conjecture, and say plainly when the answer is simply not known. The channel is in English.