Mark Felton on Israeli K98k's
- Thread starter Pat
- Start date
Except for the guns supplies in 22lr, yes. While he gets most of his stuff right, Felton is ultimately a “pop-culture” historian, for better or worse.
Cyrano4747
Well-known member
The same is true of all the Youtube surplus gun celebrities.
Felton has like 3-5 videos on guns and probably 300-500 on other history stuff. He is a PhD author that teaches at some college or another. These qualifications and titles are why I expect more from him, and why I get a little grumpy when I see him taking (what looks to me) like shortcuts.
Cyrano4747
Well-known member
He still falls into the same trap as all of the people who are generating hundreds of videos for YouTube: No one can be an expert on everything, and once you're out of your specific field of expertise you are basically just rehashing and re-presenting the existing secondary literature, which means that people who ARE experts in that field are going to be able to find holes. This is as true of academics as it is of your run of the mill youtuber: a person with a PhD in modern German history who is teaching European History 101 frankly doesn't know all that much about Charlemagne or the Byzantine Empire relative to their colleagues who have spent their lives working in those fields, and conversely your hypothetical Byzantine historian teaching the course next semester likely doesn't know much more about Hitler than you would glean from a good undergraduate course.
And that's fine. I'm saying this as someone who has been in exactly that situation, working in academia, and teaching survey courses outside of my research area. At the end of the day you don't need to be a field expert to teach introductory classes. The real value you bring to the course is as an educator, being someone who is trained to be able to synthesize that stuff in a digestible way and who has the instructional chops to successfully convey both the core course objectives (e.g. who Charlemagne was, why he's important) and the softer skills that are in many ways more important for the typical student (e.g. how to write a paper). A major part of that is having both the pedagogical and professional background to be able to go through a secondary literature that you're not intimately familiar with, learn the lay of the land quickly, and settle on a few well-received texts to draw on.
If I seem snarky it's because pop-history in general has a history of being latched onto as authoritative by people who aren't historians, and this has gotten worse as the bar to entry has been lowered by self-published videos, i.e. Youtube. Towards the end of when I hung up my lecturer's hat I was fighting a constant rear-guard action against just wrong BS that people were picking up off of Youtube. But, hey, it was slickly produced, easily digestible, and is something you can do in ten minutes rather than days.
You're spotting the holes in this one because it is a subject that you are - to one degree or another - an expert in your own right about. If he's got 300+ videos chances are that people who are experts in those fields have the same response watching them.
edit: A really bad example of this is Carlin. He's not academically trained, so some of his more egregious BS is understandable, but he's been doing it long enough that he really should know better. I'm about as far as you can get from an expert on ancient Mongolia, and I found his series on the Khans pretty interesting. Then I listened to about three episodes of his series on WW1 and had to restrain myself from throwing my phone in a lake. Just massive, glaring problems and a dependence on scholarship that was debunked in the 60s. But, again, that's my particular stomping ground so I could tell without even looking at his published list of works cited who he was drawing on in what parts and I also knew who he hadn't consulted.
If all you're looking for is an entertaining story time, by all means, there are worse things out there. But I would be extremely wary of treating any Youtube/podcast/etc about history that you find as a source of good information, at least until you've done the legwork to find out exactly how and why that person is an expert in that specific field.
Who is this “Carlin” you are referring to?
Like anything on YouTube, one needs to filter the info on any these history/technical based videos. I enjoy watching many of them, including Mark Felton's, but do frequently catch errors in most of them, at least on stuff I have some knowledge on. I still see folks quoting "Backbone" on K98k threads despite the advanced info out today that all of us here know about!
Cyrano4747
Well-known member
Dan Carlin, the man behind the fairly popular "Hardcore History" podcast.