I would like to watch some YT videos that give good general and detailed history for different countries. Mostly ancient and medieval, specifically of East Asian, Central Asian, and Middle Eastern and African places. Not Eurocentric. Do you have any recommendations for any of these?
I would like that as well. I had a phase when i would watch a lot of these sorts of channels but i became disillusioned after i noticed that they all present history from more or less the same eurocentric perspective, and particularly when the topics strayed into the 19th and 20th centuries their anti-communist and pro-western and especially pro-anglo-saxon biases became very evident.
So unfortunately no, i don’t have any perfect recommendations for you that are free of all eurocentric bias because most of the English language content that you find is made by people who received a western education in history and who use as their references western or western-aligned sources. This automatically leads to a specific kind of skew in the way they frame history even with the most well meaning and earnest content creators (those who are not acting as liberal propagandists but are genuinely trying to simply educate and inform).
However there are still degrees of bias, and you can usually tell which are more egregious by their production value. Those with better production value usually have corporate money behind them and tend to thus be more heavily propagandistic. So my recommendation is to be especially wary of when you see videos with fancy graphics. This doesn’t mean that all of the history content you find is unwatchable, just that it should be consumed with a healthy amount of skepticism toward their perspective on history.
For instance i have found this channel to be one of the better ones out there and about as neutral as i’ve seen if you can get past the rather monotonous way in which they present history in their videos. And i guess this guy is ok too. For the most part ancient history is usually covered quite well (except when it comes to Sparta and Rome which are often idolized by reactionaries and used, particularly in the case of the former, to push racist narratives of “brave white Europeans” resisting the “barbaric asiatic hordes”). But the closer you get to the modern era the more your political ideology and cultural bias plays a role in how you view history.
I would like to watch some YT videos that give good general and detailed history for different countries. Mostly ancient and medieval, specifically of East Asian, Central Asian, and Middle Eastern and African places. Not Eurocentric. Do you have any recommendations for any of these?
I would like that as well. I had a phase when i would watch a lot of these sorts of channels but i became disillusioned after i noticed that they all present history from more or less the same eurocentric perspective, and particularly when the topics strayed into the 19th and 20th centuries their anti-communist and pro-western and especially pro-anglo-saxon biases became very evident.
So unfortunately no, i don’t have any perfect recommendations for you that are free of all eurocentric bias because most of the English language content that you find is made by people who received a western education in history and who use as their references western or western-aligned sources. This automatically leads to a specific kind of skew in the way they frame history even with the most well meaning and earnest content creators (those who are not acting as liberal propagandists but are genuinely trying to simply educate and inform).
However there are still degrees of bias, and you can usually tell which are more egregious by their production value. Those with better production value usually have corporate money behind them and tend to thus be more heavily propagandistic. So my recommendation is to be especially wary of when you see videos with fancy graphics. This doesn’t mean that all of the history content you find is unwatchable, just that it should be consumed with a healthy amount of skepticism toward their perspective on history.
For instance i have found this channel to be one of the better ones out there and about as neutral as i’ve seen if you can get past the rather monotonous way in which they present history in their videos. And i guess this guy is ok too. For the most part ancient history is usually covered quite well (except when it comes to Sparta and Rome which are often idolized by reactionaries and used, particularly in the case of the former, to push racist narratives of “brave white Europeans” resisting the “barbaric asiatic hordes”). But the closer you get to the modern era the more your political ideology and cultural bias plays a role in how you view history.
That’s about what I expected 😭