A scholar and a hater: new podcast focuses on historical figures that suck

The Guardian

21-03-2025

When the historian Claire Aubin gets together with her colleagues for drinks after a conference or academic meetup, the conversation always ends up one way. 'We're all sitting around a table, talking about our most hated historical figure,' she said. For Aubin, it's Henry Ford, an ardent antisemite whom Hitler called 'an inspiration'. She believes being a hater can aid in scholarship: 'Disliking someone or having a problem with their historical legacy is worth talking about, and brings more people into learning about history.'
That's why Aubin, who spent last year lecturing in the history department at UC Davis and San Francisco State University and is about to begin a full-time postdoctoral fellowship at Yale, started This Guy Sucked, a history podcast about terrible men. In each episode, Aubin speaks to a historian about their biggest villain, from Ford and Voltaire to Plato and Jerry Lee Lewis.
Aubin is used to studying some pretty rancid individuals – her area of expertise includes the relationship of the United States to Nazis who immigrated there after the second world war.
The anti-woke crowd might say Aubin's work contributes to a retrogressive sort of cancel culture. Or more traditional historians, trained to see these figures as complex products of their time, could say that her name-calling flattens any thoughtful critique. But Aubin believes you can be a scholar and a hater. She allows that 'schadenfreude is sort of the initial draw' of the cheeky title. But taking a critical look at a figure who may have been venerated in a high school textbook 'shows them as a real person, a person who had flaws, and those flaws are essential to understanding why they're important'.
The guest host historians Aubin taps have spent their entire professional lives studying these men, writing books and teaching classes. 'They have nothing to gain from canceling them,' she said. 'What they do have to gain is a respect and dedication to talking about history in a way that is holistic, that understands legacy as something that encompasses both positive and negative, and the wholeness of a person.'
The only requirement for Aubin's subjects is that they have to be dead (so she can't be sued for libel). So far, all of the episodes have been about men, but the title isn't exclusionary – she'll get to evil women too, someday.
'There is no bias in terms of who I want to talk about,' she said. 'Women have complicated roles too. There have been bad people throughout history from all kinds of backgrounds.' But for now, when women come up on the podcast, they're often 'the targets of the men we're talking about', meaning victims of their abuse.
An episode on Voltaire with the London School of Economics professor Eleanor Janega confronts the French enlightenment writer's reputation as a champion of universal human rights. Though Voltaire opposed slavery, he never called for its abolition, and made money off the slave trade through investments in the French East India Company (he also had a sexual relationship with his niece).
Janega believes that Voltaire's sharp and witty criticism of the Catholic church and monarchy is rightly venerated, but warns against hero worship of any supposedly great man in history. 'The bar is subterranean when it comes to 18th-century people and the concept of human rights,' she says on the show. That's perhaps why Voltaire has an untouchable, mythic position as a writer and satirist.
Some of Aubin's bad guys come off as low-hanging fruit – an episode on Jerry Lee Lewis, for instance, doesn't reveal much that hasn't already been covered in numerous films, books and obituaries of the late rock'n'roll icon who infamously married his female cousin. Still, there are enough specific details to keep the podcast from sounding as if Aubin and the guest host Robert Komaniecki, a music theory professor at the University of British Columbia, are merely reading a Wikipedia page, including a tidbit about Lewis once punching Janis Joplin in the face because he didn't like hanging out with a drunk woman (drunk men were fine).
Some of the men are not as well known to a general audience, such as Cesare Lombroso, the influential Italian criminologist and eugenicist who believed that criminals could be identified by physical features and defects. Or Samuel Cummings, a small-arms dealer who sold guns to dictators, made millions from South Africa's apartheid and got Americans hooked on gun ownership, leading to its current crises of mass shootings and violence.
'There are people that have had a profoundly negative impact on your life, so it's important to add them back into the story,' Aubin said.
One thing these men have in common: nearly every one of them worked to protect their own legacy while they were still alive. Lombroso requested that his head be preserved in a jar for study; Charlemagne paid court historians to write friendly biographies.
'These people are specifically responsible for the way they were largely accepted uncritically by the public after their deaths,' Aubin said. 'That makes all of our jobs as historians so much harder.'
Though she doesn't focus on guys that suck in the present day, Aubin believes her work sends an important message to them.
'Women are being treated worse now, minorities are being treated worse,' she said. 'It's really important that this show works against that, and shows there are experts who are willing to say: 'There are people in history who were bad, and historians will remember them negatively.''