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Frame from The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1 Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

The Agricultural Revolution: Crash Course World History #1

CrashCourse
Explainers
YouTube
4 HN users recommended this explainer5 months2015–2021 score 6
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN recommends the series as a funny, coherent high-school-level overview of world history that teaches a lot in a few hours.

The first episode of Crash Course World History, in which John Green covers the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and how it shaped civilization. It is delivered fast and with jokes.

“This series taught me in a few hours what I didn't learn in school over years” (HN, 2019)

2 strong recommendations · 3 recommendations · 1 citations · Explainers · intro

6 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@dunk010 Sep 2018 Strongly recommends
on HN thread Ask HN: Favorite teachers on YouTube?
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I'm quite surprised that nobody has suggested Crash Course. The first one they did - Crash Course World History by John Green - is really great, and I personally found both endearing and funny ( [this video] ). It's not advanced material, mostly high-school level, but you've got to crawl before you can walk, and it can help to fill in some missing spots if you have them, or give a high-level overview or recap in an entertaining way. Example: I'd done basic biology, but taken instead chemistry and physics (where I was, you only did all three if you wanted to go into medicine). I used Crash Course Biology ( [link] ) to back-fill my knowledge before studying a masters in Bioinformatics.
Endearing, funny high-school level world history overview
@runyor Feb 2019 Strongly recommends
on HN thread The Decline of Historical Thinking
Interesting is also that you can learn history much better outside of school. In contrast to education institutions youtubers for instance usually succeed at presenting the stuff in an interesting fashion. And if you listen to these kind of presentations in several languages or from diverse political influenced sources then you can also get a rather objective overview. This series taught me in a few hours what I didn't learn in school over years: [this video]
Taught more history in hours than school did in years
@afarrell Oct 2015 Recommends
on HN thread How Bernie Sanders Tech Volunteers Code the Bern
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I'm afraid that this risks sounding terribly terribly condescending and I don't want it to, but I truly intend the following to be helpful... > that thinks too-logically about politics There is a reason Justice Oliver Wendell Homes said "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience." Humans are complex and if you try to define a set of axioms (or special forms) and build up and understanding from that, it is all too easy to follow your line of thought past massively lethal flaws. In your case, there are very good reasons why we don't give the president all of the powers that are currently allocated to congress. It is very very tempting to lay out specific ones for you. Other commenters will surely do that. However, I think that would not help you learn a better way to approach thinking about human power structures and the ways that they can fail. You should start by reading (or listening to audiobooks of) more history. Read broadly, enough that you start to experience the phenomenon described here: [link] If you want some easy-to-digest things to start with, this list of resources videos is pretty good, but has the flaw that it is all from one source: - [this video] - [link] - [link] For understanding the law, these are a good start: - [link] - [link] As an exercise, reading both of these and weighing them is a good one. - [link] - [link] - [link] But I really can't actually drop a list of sources on you and give you what you need to have the instinct of thinking
@afarrell Oct 2016 Recommends
on HN thread Any online apps to learn history/ geography/ economics (serious stuff)?
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For learning historical narratives, Youtube is honestly pretty great. Crash Course[1] is good for a broad overview. It presents a fairly coherent narrative and the advantage of this is that you can then relate any other historical narrative to this skeleton. Extra History[2] is a good example of a channel that presents narratives of specific incidents. If you are looking for a channel focusing on one particular period from lots of different angles, The Great War is not bad[3]. But none of this is actually going to teach you the skill of inquiry and skeptically reading different competing historical narratives. You kinda do need a class for that. A friend of mine is building a startup to make running one easier: [link] [1] [this video] , [link] , and [link] [2] [link] [3] [link]
Broad overview with coherent narrative skeleton

Citations, criticism and jokes

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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