You can find a lot worse starting points than Dan Carlin. Learning to understand history as a complicated, ever evolving mess of conflicting and converging interests instead of a linear series of events opens a lot of doors. Furthermore, he was the first source for me that spelled out the Great Man theory, and then went on to propose it is not a thorough or even worthwhile model to view history through. There's still plenty of chuddy kibbles and bits scattered throughout, and it covers all their favorite topics and time periods, but compared to History Channel or other programs, he gets at trends and forces while still humanizing the sources.