A Short Walk through Our Long History

We’ve been here on World War I for seven episodes, if you count the 2 on the Russian and Soviet revolutions.  See?  I’m getting more concise.  It took me 10 episodes to get through the American Civil War.  This time, I tried to not get quite so bogged down in explaining the battles, even though that is one of the parts that is most interesting to me personally.  But now I get to explain a few last...

Well, last episode, we left the chaos of the eastern front and the founding of the new country of the Soviet Union.  In this episode, we’re going back to France and Belgium and we’re going to look at the turning of the tide on the Western Front.  And do you know what turned the tide?  Yep, several million farm boys from the United States.  This isn’t only going to change the war, it’s going to cha...

здравствуйте, еще раз, товарищи.  добро пожаловать в советский союз For Lenin, transforming a society from near feudalism to communism was a tall order.  To do that, you have to change a capitalistic economy into a centrally controlled economy.   You have to destroy private ownership of land, homes, and capital.  You have to destroy institutions that supported the capitalist system, like schools,...

здравствуйте, товарищи. добро пожаловать в русскую революцию. One of the weirder and more catastrophic side effects of the First World War was what happened to Imperial Russia.  We’re about to see not just one but two Russian Revolutions, and then several years of civil war within Russia, that is going to leave the whole country in shambles for many years to come, and is going to set up some of an...

One of the unique aspects of World War I was simply the huge scale of the battles, with numbers of soldiers, sailors, and even airmen that the world had not seen in a long time.  Some of the Roman battles back in the day involved over 100,000 men on each side. Way back in episode 8, on the Persian Wars, I mentioned that the Persian army under King Xerxes might have had as many as a million men.  ...

World War I was a very different war than all the other wars fought before it.  There main reason for this was that military technology had advanced incredibly quickly in the previous 50 years, as had manufacturing technology and capability.  Because of the advances of the industrial revolution, factories could now turn out rifles and cannons by the thousands, and bullets and shells by the hundred...

Last episode, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian empire, all of Europe began to mobilize their armies, and move them to the borders of the countries around them.   If you are the leader of a country, and your neighbor begins to mobilize an army right at your borders, what do you do?  Well, of course you let them in and put them up in nice hotels in your big...

You know, we had an assassination last episode, too, didn’t we?  Well, this one is going to cause a lot more difficulty for the world, especially for Europe.  Things are about to get really crazy.  The first 45 years of the 1900’s were just an amazing, crazy time to be alive.  Someone born in 1900 would have been alive for two world wars, the Great Depression, the invention of nuclear weapons, the...

Well, welcome to the 20th Century!  I’m sure a fair number of those of you who are listening to this were born in the 20th Century, as I was, and the rest of you were born in the 21st century.  I know I’ve usually tried to refer to the centuries by their actual numbers, like the ‘1900’s,’ but now that we are entering the century that we’ve all lived in, I think it also makes sense to use the commo...

And here we are!  Episode 100!!!  It’s only taken us 100 episodes to cover the first 12,000 or so years of human history.   I have a tentative plan to get us all the way to, well, today.  It’s going to take about 40 or so more episodes.   Since this is our 100th episode, I thought I’d make this a sort of special episode, and instead of covering new ground, we could take a quick look back at everyt...

Wow, episode 99. I like the symmetry of having episode 99 be a summary of the world in 1899.    Last episode, we looked at the changes in technology, science, and worldview that occurred in the 1800’s, and like I said, there was an enormous amount of change from 1800 to 1899.  This episode, I want to summarize all the big stuff that happened in the 1800’s, and give us a kind of starting point for...

Well, look at that.  We’re finally coming to the end of the 1800’s!  Only two more episodes, then we’ll be in the 1900’s.  It only took us 30 episodes to cover that 100 year period.  I honestly have no idea how long it will take to cover the 1900’s, as I haven’t mapped that out yet.  Guess I ought to get started on that, huh.   Next episode, I’ll review some of the history of the 1800’s, and take...

Last episode we talked about the robber barons, and the changes in technology and manufacturing that they exploited to become phenomenally rich.  Part of that growth of riches was due to the expansion of the US as an exporter of stuff to the world.  And as part of that expansion, the United States began to see itself as a legitimate world power, and began to seek to enforce its will on other count...

Last episode, we looked at the very last chance the south had to win the war outright.  After Vicksburg and Gettysburg, the south’s only chance was the election of 1864, and the hope that maybe the north would elect a new, anti-war government that would just let the confederate states go.   But the federal government in Washington knew that risk too, and they needed to make sure that it looked lik...

The dystopian surveillance state we live in today has been called by some people ‘Late-stage capitalism,’ and is perhaps the inevitable result of the capitalist system.  When the very rich gain so much money that they can control all the media, all the politicians, and have zero accountability for their actions, everyone else in the world suffers the loss of liberty, privacy, and the loss of their...

Well, we talked last episode about the expansion of the British Empire during the 1800’s, but there were a lot of other countries that were trying to build their empires as well.  No one is going to be as good at it as the British, but a lot of other countries did try to get in on the imperialism action.   So I should maybe take a moment to explain what imperialism is, first.  Most countries have...

When we last looked at the British Empire, 15 !! Episodes ago, Queen Victoria was on the throne.  And she still is.  I mean, not today, today it’s King Charles and his weird red official portrait, but I mean Victoria is still queen at this point in our timeline.  We did kind of spend a lot of episodes focusing on the American Civil War, but we really didn’t cover much time.  I mean, it’s only 1877...

When Lincoln died, Andrew Johnson became the President.  Johnson was from the south, having been born in North Carolina.  When he was 17, his family moved to Tennessee, which is where he grew up.  He joined the Democratic Party, being a believer in states’ rights, and served as a US Congressman, then the Governor of Tennessee, then a US Senator.  He was the US Senator from Tennessee when Tennessee...

Well, the Civil War is over.  Mostly.  The big battles are over, and though there are going to be a few more battles, everyone knows that the south has lost.  The question on everyone’s mind is, ‘What’s going to happen now?’  Is this going to be a smooth transition, or a rough one.  Turns out, it’s going to be kind of rough.   And one of the reasons that it’s going to be rough is what we are cover...

At the same time that Sherman was burning his way through Georgia, but avoiding major battles, Grant was up in Virginia, trying to provoke major battles.  In March of 1864, Lincoln had put Grant in charge of all the Union armies.  General Meade was still the commander of the Army of the Potomac, so Grant took Meade and together they headed into Virginia to try to defeat Robert E Lee.  Grant’s goal...

The Union victory at the Battle of Antietam, well, the draw at Antietam that forced the South to stop their invasion of the north, was seen as a huge victory in the north, even though the actual battle that day was a draw.  Both armies basically left the field shattered, but since McClellan didn’t follow up and crush what was left of Lee’s army, the Confederates were able to get back to Virginia,...

The war has been going pretty well for the south at the mid point of 1862, but the south has less men, less guns, less cannons, less of almost everything.  Less manufacturing capacity, for sure.  But time is sort of on the South’s side.  The longer that the Confederacy exists as its own country, the more people are likely to just accept it that way.  And the longer the war drags on, especially if...

At this point, in late 1861, the war is not going well for the Union.  The early battles of the Civil War were mostly Union defeats, or at least draws where the Rebel army got away.  There were not any definitive victories, that’s for sure.  And because of that, the Confederacy still existed.  It was sort of like the American strategy during the Revolutionary war - as long as General Washington an...

Last episode, we talked about the revolutions in Europe in 1848.  The United States is about to have a revolution, I mean, another one, at least from a certain point of view.  From another point of view, it’s a rebellion.  But we aren’t quite there yet.   In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is accused by the Pharisees of driving out demons using the power of Satan.  And Jesus, in a masterful double en...

Well, here we are, at war.  Sort of.  Shots were fired at Fort Sumter, but no one was actually killed in the battle.  But now the battle lines are being drawn.  Lincoln has asked for more volunteers, and the border states of Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, and most importantly, Virginia, have chosen to leave the Union, rather than provide troops that would be used to attack the south.   So both sid...