Rec: A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry

Rec: A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry
Photo by Arthur Yeti / Unsplash

One of the blogs I really like is A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry run by Dr. Bret C. Devereaux, a professor of History. As the name suggests, his posts are mostly in depth analyses of various cases of popular culture and its intersections with history.

The reason his blog posts are so good is because they are not just fun, but also educative. Since they are written by a professor, their content is well researched and sourced with analogies and comparisons to actual historic data. But they are also really really long, so it's sometimes difficult to find enough time for them.

Fortunately, someone not officially related to the webpage is making audio versions of many of the blog posts over on YouTube. They're well produced and include the images from the blog posts as well. Whenever I'd listened to them as podcast, I would look at the video any time an image came up. Their descriptions tend tend to be informative and funny.

If you want to give the blog a try, one of my favorites is called That Dothraki Charge, which analyzes one of the scenes from the last season of the Game of Thrones. The audio version is here. Another good one is Luigi Cadorna Was The Worst.

They're worth reading even if, like me, you don't have any particular interest in Game of Thrones or WWII Italy - Dr. Devereaux explains the needed context, and you'll lean lots of cool facts from history.