Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 19 Sep 2017
Linguistically speaking, Alexander means “Defender of Men” from the Greek “alexo“, defend, and “aner/ander“, man. I’ll never be able to not internally think of his name as just meaning “Alex-Man”.
Oh, yeah, also he conquered an empire or something? IDK. I stopped paying attention after his bland name.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Jan 2021
So you just conquered Iberia, and you’re wondering where to go from here? It’s a more common conundrum than you might think. Consider: a big wooden floaty house that goes splish-splash in the Atlantic Ocean. Anyway, this is a video about Portuguese and Spanish (erm, Castilian) exploration in the Atlantic during the 1400s. Please note my deliberate decision to Nope on out at the turn of the 1500s.
This topic was requested by our longtime patron Antonio Juarez! Thank you Antonio for supporting our work and helping to provide entertaining educational content.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Ornament of the World by Maria Rosa Menocal; lectures from Great Courses Plus “1571: Spain, Portugal Encircle the Globe” by Donald J. Harreld, “Renaissance and Exploration: New Horizons” by Jennifer McNabb, “Portugal’s Great Leap Forward” by “Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius”
TRACKLIST: “Scheming Weasel (faster version),” “Monkeys Spinning Monkeys”, “Local Forecast – Elevator” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/b…
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 15 Jan 2021
Welcome to 2021! It’s cold, it’s been a hell of a journey, and sometimes it feels like we’re being pelted by shattered glass. What story could’ve possibly fit the bill so perfectly?
Disney really missed an opportunity when they decided Frozen was going to have exactly nothing in common with the original story. Honestly that kind of analysis could be worth a video all on its own …
It’s myth-y enough I’m still gonna put it in the same playlist, but it would’ve felt disingenuous calling it a myth, soooooo
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
If I had the time and energy, I’d have researched for a new video, but I have neither of those things right now, so you get Italy. Don’t worry, I made it extra snarky to compensate.
SOURCES & Further Reading: I, uh, well, most of the anecdotal information in this video came by way of tours I myself went on and somehow managed to retain 9 years later, but as always, you can find more on Florence & Venice in Florence: The Biography of A City by Christopher Hibbert and A History Of Venice by John Julius Norwich.
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 22 Feb 2019
Let’s spin the clock way back to the beginning of urbanized civilization, and learn about the long history of Mesopotamia from the dawn of the city to the collapse of the last Sumerian empire.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 25 Dec 2020
Journey to the West Kai, episode 5: Fishy Business and Mountaineering Madness!
Danger! Intrigue! Sandy fights a carp! Pigsy gets two makeovers! Monkey reunites with several old frenemies, and Tripitaka gets less screentime than the horse!
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 18 Dec 2020
Big thanks to our friend Al-Muqaddimah for his help with this video. The look of this video’s maps is an homage to his wonderful mapmaking style. For more Islamic History, check out his channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCf0O…
From the coast of Tunisia across the Straits of Gibraltar, over the Atlas Mountains, and east to the Nile of Egypt, Ibn Khaldun had certainly seen history at work. That experience came in handy as he wrote The Muqaddimah, a genre-defining masterwork of Historiography — not just retelling the events of the past, but explaining their causes and effects through the lens of human behavior and sociology.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Ibn Khaldun: An Intellectual Biography by Irwin, The Muqaddimah
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 10 Jan 2017
Things I learned when making this video: 1) when your script goes beyond 4 single-spaced pages, you’re heading into the danger zone 2) Gregorian Chants are awesome and you should totally listen to them, 3) editing always takes longer than you’d hope 4) self care is huffing frankincense for breakfast lunch and dinner and single-handedly sacking a levantine city!
Have a question about something I mentioned, or maybe something I might have left out? Leave it down below and I’ll do my best to respond!
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 18 Feb 2016
Today, Blue discusses recurring themes in history! This one’s the Military Expedition, aka what happens when a powerful military juggernaut gets too big for its britches and starts saying stuff like “too big to fail” unironically.
Blue: If you’re curious about the weird chart/graph thing blue showed during the Napoleon segment, look up Charles Joseph Minard [mentioned here and here], the guy who made it. It’s a really cool chart that shows the size of the army as it traveled across Russia (tan) and back (black). You can see how perilous the journey was based on how narrow the line gets. Graphs are cool.
Comments Off on Historical Models Summarized: The Military Expedition
At long last, the concluding chapter of Roman history! Let’s tie the bow on Byzantine Constantinople as the empire comes to an end, slightly earlier than we might think, but far later than anybody ever could have expected.
SOURCES & Further Reading: Byzantium: The Decline and Fall & A Short History of Byzantium by John Julius Norwich, Osman’s Dream by Finkel, https://www.ancient.eu/Despotate_of_t…
This video is sponsored by the LEGO Group. Learn more about the LEGO Colosseum here: https://lego.build/OSP
We’d like to thank our friends at LEGO for giving us this magnificent excuse to gush over some of the most beautiful architecture in history. This type of architectural-deep-dive is a little bit out of the ordinary for us, but it was lots of fun, so please do let us know if you found it interesting, as we’d be thrilled to do more!
Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 27 Nov 2020
Thanks to longtime patron Volt for requesting this topic!
We know their names! We know their symbols! We know there’s a truly staggering number of websites dedicated to their stereotypical personality traits! But what do we know about their stories? Let’s discuss!
FUN FACT I GLOSSED OVER IN THE VIDEO: like I said, it’s REALLY hard to determine when these constellations entered Greece. Most people set the date at 300ish, when Eudoxus codified the Greek calendar based on the Babylonian one — but that clashes with the fact that Heracles’s labors predate that by at least three centuries, and they’ve had those zodiacal themes since that lost epic poem was initially written. We know, therefore, that the Babylonian zodiac entered greece between Homer’s time (when he conspicuously didn’t mention them — and neither did Hesiod in his Astronomia) and Peisander’s time (author of the lost Heracleia), basically the interval between 800 and 600 CE. The phoenician traders carrying that info is a reasonable assumption, especially considering how important the stars are to sailors navigating at night. But it is WILD to me how hard this is to research and how nobody seems to have really explored the timeline here!
Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 6 Nove 2020
Wale, Wale, Wale(s), what have we here? I’ll tell you! A look at the oft-forgotten history of Britain’s secret third country Wales, where the population is about 50% bards just by sheer cultural osmosis.
SOURCES & Further Reading: A Concise History of Wales by Jenkins, A History of Wales by Davies
