The first podcast I listened to was the Dig podcast and chose the episode titled “The Americans Can Fix Nothing Without a Drink’: Alcohol in Early America” The purpose of this podcast is to have a narrative-driven digital history project with a feminist perspective that reaches a large audience. The episode’s purpose is to explore drinking in early American, why American’s drank so much alcohol compared to other countries, and how this affected the country. The second podcast I listened to was Consolation Prize and I listened to the bonus episode called “What is a consul anyway?” The purpose of this podcast is to tell the stories of consuls who were appointed across the globe to serve the interests of Americans. The purpose of the episode is to define what a consul is and why it should be studied.

The Dig podcast is more relaxed in style and does have a bleeped-out swear word which wouldn’t be included in an entirely professional podcast. The history is formatted chronologically. The Consolation Prize podcast is more professional because it is from George Mason’s Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. The podcast is separated by topic and question. Some topics are what a consul is, what their jobs are, the different people related to them such as ambassadors or consul General, and examples of consuls doing their work by citing specific people. The Dig podcast is more relaxed while the Consolation Prize is more professional. These podcasts try to keep the listeners interested by answering the questions listeners may have while watching and maintaining an upbeat tone of voice rather than the voice of a bored professor. I believe only the length would prevent people from listening to the entire podcast and may just opt to read to the transcript. The audience for these podcasts is historians, history majors, or just people interested in history. Audio is a great way to tell historical stories because, for example, a friend tells you how they got a scar. We hear stories all of the time and hear historical stories through audio provides an easy resource to use on the go. Using audio is challenging because you can’t show diagrams or images that you reference so you have to link them somewhere and hope your audience looks at them. Another challenging thing is that at least for me, it’s hard for me to remember any of the information I learned other than a one sentence summary if I don’t take notes.