Indiana "Indy" Neidell is an American historian, actor, voice actor, musician and YouTube personality, best known for presenting the video series, The Great War on The Great War Channel which documented World War I in real time using modern research, various secondary sources and archival footage. A similar project, World War Two began in September 2018. Neidell is also a writer and actor with credits that include Metropia and numerous commercials in Europe, as well as video game voice-acting.
Neidell was approached by Mediakraft, the producers of The Great War, to host the series after they saw a series of videos he had produced between May and September 2013 about the history of baseball, entitled Watch Sunday Baseball. The Great War spin-off YouTube channel “It's History” also featured Neidell as a guest host for episodes on famous military campaigns. In June 2017, he launched the TimeGhost History YouTube channel with Spartacus Olsson, the creator of The Great War and producer for its first two years. The first feature was day-by-day coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis, 55 years to the day after the event. In April 2018, they launched the "Between-2-Wars" series to recap the Interwar period. The Great War project officially ended on November 11, 2018, exactly 100 years after the signing of the Armistice at Compiègne which formally ended all hostilities in the First World War. Neidell stated in his finale video that the channel will continue to release some episodes about events following the First World War. As for himself, Neidell has moved on to focus on other projects, such as the aforementioned World War II series. With The Great War project coming to a close in November 2018, Indy Neidell and Spartacus Olsson prepared for an equivalent YouTube project focusing on World War II, which they would produce themselves through their own TimeGhost channel with a projected start date for September 1, 2018. Accounting for the war's longer duration and larger scope for this independent project without the participation of Mediakraft Networks, it is a collaboration of various channels: TimeGhost will focus on a weekly series on the general historical events of the war in the European and Pacific Theatres of the war. To raise the seed money for this project, there has been a successful Kickstarter campaign which raised €54,380. With those funds available, a new studio was built from the ground up in its own building and arrangements were made with media providers such as Reuters News Service for archival footage. The series also has an Instagram account which runs parallel to it and follows the events of World War II on a day-by-day basis. As of June 22nd, 2020, the YouTube channel had received 38,444,295 views and has over 493,000 subscribers. In February 2019, Neidell teamed up with Swedish power metal bandSabaton for a project called Sabaton History, for which he is the host and writer. The series documents the historical events surrounding the band's songs. He also portrayed T. E. Lawrence in the music video for Sabaton's song "Seven Pillars of Wisdom".
Personal life
In 1996, Neidell moved to Sweden. He lives in Stockholm, Sweden. He played Keyboards for Moneybrother for a time. He was diagnosed with COVID-19 in May 2020. He recovered from a relatively "mild case" of after being bed ridden for 3 weeks, saying it was worse than the pneumonia he had the previous year.
