Hidden history, told through curious minds.
Armchair Historians treats history as a lived, argued-over record rather than a fixed classroom timeline. Anne-Marie Cannon speaks with guests about buried queer communities, Renaissance medicine, Black women physicians, and the Buffalo Soldiers.
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Armchair Historians is an interview-based history show shaped by Anne-Marie Cannon’s interest in the people inside the record. The format is simple and durable. A guest brings a favorite history, then the conversation follows the path that made the subject matter feel alive. That path can be scholarly. It can also run through fiction, documentary work, tours, family stories, archives, or a stubborn unanswered question. Recent episodes show the range clearly. Marcus James brings listeners into molly houses and queer Georgian London, where performance, secrecy, love, court transcripts, and public space all matter. Gigi Berardi connects Bianca Capello, Renaissance Florence, early medicine, malaria, alchemy, and the constrained intellectual lives of women. Dr. Kama Ennis talks about Faces of Medicine and the legacy of Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, using historical storytelling to address representation and health equity. A rewind episode with Nick Brooks revisits the Buffalo Soldiers, emphasizing service, erasure, and the difference between simplified public memory and lived experience. The show is not built around trivia. It is built around why someone kept looking. Cannon’s interviews often linger on the research trail: what counts as evidence, how a story becomes visible, and what gets lost when history is narrowed to the version taught first. The pacing is friendly but not shallow. It welcomes listeners who like context, names, dates, and documents, while still making room for emotion and personal connection. Its best moments come when a guest moves from facts into consequence. A court case becomes a window into queer life. A disease history opens a conversation about medicine and belief. A military history becomes a story about race, credit, and survival. Armchair Historians suits people who want history to feel researched, conversational, and morally awake, with special attention to overlooked lives and unfinished questions.
Made for: For listeners who enjoy accessible history interviews with research trails, human stakes, and overlooked subjects. It especially suits fans of historical fiction, social history, documentary storytelling, and public-memory debates.
What sets it apart: The show frames history through the guest’s fascination rather than a fixed syllabus, so each episode carries both evidence and personal momentum. Its range is broad, but the throughline is clear: stories left out, softened, or misunderstood get careful attention.
What's your favorite history? Each interview on this podcast begins with this one question. Our guests are people who like history and get really excited about a particular time, place or person from our distant or not so distant past. The jumping off point is the place where our they became curious then entered the rabbit hole into discovery through scholarly research, pop culture, documentaries, other podcasts...We look at history through the filter of other peoples eyes.https://www.buzzsprout.com/?referrer_id=965986
Princess Serafina borrowed dresses; now your Georgian London curiosity has somewhere more interesting to go.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A vivid, humane account of molly culture, queer relationships, and Princess Serafina in Georgian London.
Mollyhouses and queer Georgian London come through as a world of secrecy, resilience, performance, and community. Marcus James, founder of Queer London Tours, keeps the focus on people negotiating public danger and private feeling: women living as men, men dressing as women, and…
A thoughtful conversation about Bianca Capello, Renaissance alchemy, and the historical possibilities behind Bianca's Cure.
Bianca Capello emerges here as a woman caught between record, rumor, and the imaginative space historical fiction needs in order to breathe. Armchair Historians pairs Anne-Marie Cannon with Gigi Berardi for a measured conversation about Bianca's Cure, Renaissance Florence,…
A focused conversation on Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler makes a clear case for carrying overlooked medical histories forward.
Dr. Rebecca Lee Crumpler gives the episode its historical anchor: the first Black woman to earn an M.D. in America, graduating in 1864. From there, the conversation draws a clean line to the present, where Black women account for only 2.8 percent of U.S. physicians.
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
Mike Duncan narrates Rome's full history solo, from Aeneas to Romulus Augustulus's exile in 476.
["Marcus James, founder of Queer London Tours, traces queer Georgian London through molly houses, Sunday gatherings, and rituals that turned secrecy into performance.
Anne-Marie Cannon interviews Gigi Berardi about Bianca Capello, Renaissance alchemy, and Berardi’s historical novel Bianca’s Cure.
Dr.
Armchair Historians revisits the history of the Buffalo Soldiers through Anne-Marie Cannon's conversation with Air Force veteran Nick Brooks.
Jason Sandy, an American-born architect who began mudlarking in April 2012, describes finding a Roman bone hairpin from around 60 AD that now sits on permanent display at the Museum of London.