Explaining History

By the end of the 1930s the Nazi regime had successfully directed public opinion in favour of the concentration camp system. As the decade wore on gradual apathy and disinterest in the camp system was a defining feature of public attitudes towards mass social and political incarceration. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews....

In the aftermath of the Second World War the British gave assistance and support to the French in their attempts to recolonise Vietnam. French colonialists deliberately sabotaged negotiations with Ho Chi Minh and led to the outbreak of war in December 1946. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the pres...

One book more than any other propelled Mao to global significance, 13 years before he seized power in China. It was called Red Star Over China and was written by an ambitious and often naive American journalist, Edgar Snow. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please...

In December 1941, hours before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, a naval invasion of Malaya began. Poor planning and a collective denial on the part of British colonialists that the Japanese were a serious threat led to the rapid collapse of Britain's colonies in Malaya, Singapore and Burma. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert inte...

How did everyone from German citizens to concentration camp survivors, war ravaged citizens of Poland and partisans across eastern Europe encounter the Red Army in 1945? In some cases violent conquerors and in others as liberators. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show...

In 1941, despite believing that thee USSR could not last against a Nazi invasion for more than a month, Churchill and his cabinet rejoiced at the news that they were no longer fighting the war alone and planned to offer the USSR whatever assistance they could. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the p...

What did ordinary Austrians and Germans think, feel and believe during the July Crisis of 1914? This podcast explores how the murder of a widely disliked archduke who was assassinated in 1914 presents largely apathetic populations in both countries with the pretext for war. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the...

For those unable or unwilling to offer manual labour in service of the Nazi volksgemeinschaft, mass arrests and imprisonment in the growing camp system was an ever present threat. The Nazi camps by 1938 were full of 'asocial' prisoners who were arrested largely on the basis of poverty, vagrancy or the inability to fit into the new world of the Third Reich. Explaining History helps you understand t...

By 1927 the situation of the Soviet peasantry had just about stabilised from the famine years of the Russian Civil War. However, both Lenin and Stalin looked upon the peasantry and especially the wealthier peasants with barely concealed disgust and suspicion. In Bolshevik thinking, the peasants represented an existential threat to the revolution and would be subsequently broken by Stalin after 192...

Following the end of a bloody civil war in China, the communist party began to rapidly seize the levers of power and create class categorisations for the population. Control of the police and a network of communist spies and informers began a wave of repression which was but a foretaste of catastrophes and horrors to come. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical c...

A complete absence of intelligence about new German guns along the Dardanelles led Britain into a disastrous campaign against the Ottoman Empire in 1915, in the hope that naval power alone could defeat Germany's ally and lead to a break through away from the western front. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the...

By 1946 America's political class, it's intellectuals and opinion formers and the population as a whole was broadly anti Soviet but had not committed to any major confrontation with the USSR. It would take changes in world circumstances in 1947 to bring about this commitment in the guise of the Truman doctrine. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations...

After three years of fixed positions, trenches and deadlock, the First World War became a conflict of rapid movement again in 1918. This podcast explores how military innovation made this possible, focusing on artillery and intelligence. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy th...

Between 1928 and 1935, bread rationing in the USSR had been implemented due to the extraction of foodstuffs from the peasantry for export and Stalin's disastrous collectivisation policy. In 1935 Stalin signalled a shift towards consumerism, but many Soviet citizens saw little improvement in their living conditions. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversat...

In a two month period Truman's policy towards the Soviet Union became more entrenched in the face of Soviet advances in eastern Europe and Iran. Truman, with little foreign policy experience was swayed by wartime diplomats such as George Kennan and the former Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and ex...

By October 1918, the resolve of the central powers to carry on the war was crumbling. The Austro Hungarian Empire fragmented following a manifesto by the new emperor Karl promising a federal future and German resolve finally ended with the German revolution. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the pre...

During the Stalin era, the science of genetics came under a sustained attack and was denounced as a bourgeois ideology. This podcast explores the changing thinking of British communist scientist J.B.S. Haldane and the Stalinist fraud Trofim Lysenko Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If y...

How did a combination of Wilsonian liberal internationalism and British colonial ideas about civilisation intersect with Britain's objectives in expanding its territories after the First World War? The Mandate system for administering German and Ottoman colonies was a largely British project, influenced by American internationalism and resented by the French. Explaining History helps you understan...

In 1937 there was a dramatic increase in the numbers of petty criminals being arrested, re-arrested and taken into the Nazi camp system. There were deep seated economic reasons for this assault on Germany's small time thieves and burglars, and precious little solidarity in the camps from other political inmates. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversation...

The recording of the anti war protest song Give Peace a Chance in 1969 was part of a complex and often contradictory period of political journeying by John Lennon as he abandoned the Beatles and embraced different forms of political and psychoanalytical radicalism in the last decade of his life. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert inte...

In the mid 1930s a celebration of the achievements of workers, aviators, explorers and peasants accompanied Stalin's Five Year Plans. This championing of the 'everyday' hero was the product of Stalinist thinking and a utopian belief in the creation of a new egalitarian society. The myths, however, rarely corresponded to reality as most Soviet citizens experienced it. Explaining History helps you u...

This week I was fortunate enough to interview Jacob Field, the author of A history of Europe in bite sized chunks. We discussed the future of the EU, the nature of medieval Christendom and the legacy of Churchill's wartime diplomacy among other topics. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present....

During the Second World War the Indian Army grew in size by a factor of ten. This radical transformation would have profound consequences for post war India and the independence movement. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share. ▸ Support the...

In the mid 1960s a weak pound and the Vietnam War combined to place pressure on Anglo American relations and the belief in the mind of British prime minister Harold Wilson of the diplomatic 'special relationship' between America and Britain. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjo...

In 1945, following the death of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, a foreign policy novice, was determined to take a tough line with the Soviet Union but was no match for Stalin, despite the detonation of America's first atomic bombs, ending the war with Japan. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the p...