The Two Types of History

By Maggie Phillips

Monday, August 03, 2026

 

On the morning of July 4, the entry line for Henry VIII’s old stomping grounds stretched across the imposing forecourt nearly to the street. The Hampton Court Palace grounds wouldn’t open for nearly an hour, but the genial crowd, many carrying folding chairs and other sundries for a day out, chatted excitedly.

 

It was the first day of the Rest Is History Festival, two days of panel discussions and demonstrations hosted by the world’s most popular history podcast of the same name. Once admitted, the thousands of attendees grabbed coffee and pastries before heading to the lawn of the palace, settling themselves in front of the main stage to greet the festival’s stars, podcast hosts Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland (not the Spider-Man actor). It’s the kind of place where organic cheers spring up from different places in the crowd when their favorite historical figures garner a mention from the stage. Throughout the day, Sandbrook and Holland played host to other guest historians in conversations about ancient Persia, the six queens of Henry VIII, and of course, the Roman Empire.

 

At the time of their opening remarks, Holland could not yet reveal that he had recorded an interview with the other Tom Holland, Spider-Man star and Telemachus in Christopher Nolan’s screen adaptation of the Odyssey. Holland would only admit that he had seen the film, and he thought it was pretty good. Two days later, both Toms Holland would be on the red carpet at The Odyssey’s Leicester Square premiere, the historian’s support for the film drawing the ire of none other than acknowledged ancient Greece and Rome appreciator Elon Musk.

 

“Tom Holland is such a cuck,” Musk posted on X the day after the London premiere, when Holland (the historian) reposted a favorable review of the film. Musk was among the chorus of online haters who had opposed the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and trans actor Elliot Page as a Greek soldier. Holland replied with characteristic politesse:

 

 

The internet standoff between a mild-mannered academic and the world’s first trillionaire is not as unlikely as it might sound. Holland made his bones writing about classical Greece and Rome. Musk is an out-and-proud classical history buff. One of his legion of children is named Lycurgus, a figure of ancient Sparta. He frequently sprinkles his X posts with Latin phrases, quotes from Tacitus, and once, a picture of himself in gladiatorial armor with the Roman imperial acronym SPQR. At one point he mused it might be time for a modern-day Sulla.

 

Both in the run-up to the film’s release and now as it commands Homeric box office numbers, why and how we delve into the past has become a live topic among academics and cultural commentators of late—and on display in the Musk-Holland dispute are two different approaches to this subject. The Rest Is History Festival was Holland’s approach on the podcast made manifest: a humble curiosity about the past that invites people in. It is a dynamic (and attractive) approach that contrasts mightily with both the chauvinism and sentimental nostalgia that can curdle an enthusiasm for history into something toxic and divisive.

 

Musk’s approach to history, on the other hand, is a distinctly utilitarian mode. Included among his many missions—electric vehicles, getting to Mars, freight tunnels—is the preservation of Western (European) civilization. (Or his understanding of it anyway, as something muscular, powerful, and innovative.) He is concerned about the parallels between the decline of the Roman Empire and the threats that multiculturalism and declining birth rates pose to our current society. The classical Greeks and especially the Romans were great civilizations to be emulated, Musk believes, but we must learn from their errors or suffer the same fate as the Western Roman Empire in A.D. 476.

 

Others exploit the Greek and Roman past in support of a much more explicit ethnic supremacy. The neo-Nazi outlet Stormfront, for example, once used the Parthenon on its web banner alongside the phrase “every month is white history month.” And for some on the left, the response to white supremacists co-opting Greco-Roman history and imagery has been a backlash to “classical education,” a move to decolonize it, and to “save the classics from whiteness.”

 

But on the Rest Is History podcast, Holland and Sandbrook are not deploying history to take down a rival ideological camp. A typical episode is more of an exploration of the past than a polemical exercise. Their version of history knows its own limits as a discipline, both as a prognosticating tool and as a roadmap.

 

Two conversations that sunny Saturday illustrated that seeking to better understand the past can be, above all, a profoundly human endeavor. The first was a conversation with historian Dan Jackson about “the Pit of Death,” the 19^th-century Hartley Colliery mining accident in the Northeast of England that killed more than 200 men and boys. Pictures of the miners were projected onto the giant screen, and although we sat there with picnic hampers and smartphones more than a century and a half later, the poignant details of the tragedy felt surprisingly fresh and recent. On the lighter side, a cosmetic demonstration about how 17^th-century women altered their appearance to communicate and inveigle proximity to power evoked parallels to the present vogue for plastic surgery, fillers, Botox, and even “Mar-a-Lago face.” And are the spots that aristocratic courtiers used to affix to their faces really so different from the brightly colored pimple patches teens wear out of the house today? (“People are still people,” my teenager marveled.)

 

But a conversation between Tom Holland and the English classicist Mary Beard demonstrated the real crux of The Rest Is History: that to study the past is to appreciate that we are a part of something larger than ourselves, and often, something that is outside our ken.

 

The subject of Beard and Holland’s conversation was the surprisingly alien Roman past, where slavery and violence, even in domestic contexts, were casually ubiquitous. When Holland asked her what we today would find most surprising about ancient Rome, “The dirt,” Beard answered. “The sense of appalling deprivation.” Beard pointed to one particularly piquant vignette from the Roman historian Suetonius, in which a stray dog pads into an elite dinner party with a human hand in its mouth and deposits it onto the table. At the time this was viewed as a favorable augur for the emperor Vespasian’s political future—but where did he get the hand? Suetonius doesn’t concern himself with this question, or with the stray dog for that matter, suggesting that neither would have been considered particularly remarkable by contemporaries. “The ancient world, wherever you went, was a pretty nasty place,” Beard said.

 

On the one hand, our ancestors are totally different than we imagine—according to Beard, a staid formality, not raucous high spirits, would have characterized the audience at gladiatorial games, for example. On the other hand, while we tend to consider ourselves more evolved than the primitive people in the ancient past who watched men kill and maim each other for sport, we do still quite enjoy hearing about and imagining them.

 

These instructive both/and insights are perhaps a useful corrective in our era of popular nostalgia and romanticism about the past. Online, for example, it is often (and wrongly) asserted that modern people work more days annually than medieval peasants. Elsewhere, “Western heritage” social media accounts present the past as a time when men were men, all the women were feminine, and all the children were above average. Matt Walsh is all over X complaining about Nolan’s The Odyssey for things like showing an Odysseus who deals with trauma and guilt from war, and the casting of non-white actors to tell the story of what he calls “a foundational text of western civilization.” “What is the point of a story set in ancient times that doesn’t even try to actually capture ancient times?” he asks.

 

The irony, of course, is that in dispensing with some technical historical accuracy (inasmuch as a story with witches and cyclops can be historically accurate), Nolan is getting to emotional truths of the story that make it recognizable to people millennia later. And it is unclear why a social conservative like Walsh would like to see more sex, misogyny, and wanton killing in his Odyssey instead of, his own Daily Wire boss correctly identified, a clear Christian allegory. The violent and ugly historical accuracy Walsh desires would have overshadowed the themes the film chose to accentuate—humility, self-denial, atonement, what we owe our fellow human beings—that render it intelligible to modern audiences who live in a Christ-haunted world. Walsh also gloated over Nolan’s admission that his script scrubbed the Odyssey of its original misogyny as proof-positive that the film could not be a Christian adaptation. Walsh, then, seems less interested in his civilization as an incubator of the true and the good than as something that exists purely to sustain itself for its own sake. Within this framework, history is not an anthropocentric story but a mere record of power and domination.

 

Both at the festival and on their podcast, whether Sandbrook and Holland are talking about the Battle of Little Bighorn, Joan of Arc, or ancient Rome, the focus is on humanity rather than civilization writ large. And no one could accuse them of undervaluing the latter in their work. But they are not interested in arguing that a civilization is good because it is powerful, or that it is powerful because it is good. Holland’s book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World sees Western civilization and its intellectual tradition as worth preserving precisely because a Christian society upholds the human person’s inherent dignity and worth.

 

For the people who view history as an unerring road map to civilizational glory, the past is a cautionary tale: We have to learn from the great empires’ failures to avoid decline.

 

But Sandbrook and Holland are pursuing something more interesting than retrofitting the past to suit their ideological priors. During a Q&A at the conclusion of the festival’s first day, Sandbrook said his favorite series the podcast has done to date was about the fall of the Aztecs. Not because it dwells on decline per se, but because of its challenge to the listener to consider the stories of both the conquistadors and the indigenous Mexica people. Holland, for his part, said the drama of the Titanic story was among his favorites, because it invited the listener to consider how social class and competing international interests contributed to the ocean liner’s tragic sinking and its aftermath.

 

The Rest Is History contemplates the past as a different country, but without indulging in the temporal hubris of people who simply happen to be alive, flattering themselves that they are superior to their predecessors. The result is something refreshingly apolitical and convivial. And the appeal of this approach was evident in the festival, which according to its producers attracted 5,000 people over the course of its two days.

 

It was history as communion, both of a current and asynchronous nature. My daughter and I waited in line with a woman who came from the United States for the event; she listened with interest to my daughter’s impressions of her first trip to London, then gave us a tip that we could see the only surviving original of Beowulf at the British Library (we took her up on it; worth the trip!). Later in the so-called “Haunted Gallery” of King Henry VIII’s apartments, where the screams of a doomed Catherine Howard are said to be still audible, someone else approached us just to say hi, saying they had recognized us from the audience of a West End show we had attended the night before.

 

That first day, Sandbrook summed it up best: “The past is ultimately unknowable,” he said. And it is because Holland and Sandbrook keep this last part always in mind that they approach the past less as a “how-to” manual and more as a humbling reminder that one day, much of the way we live will be unknowable to future generations. As the popularity of both the podcast and the festival shows, The Rest Is History has found a winning formula in a study of history that is more interested in understanding the past than proving the present wrong.