Explaining History

This is the second podcast on labour relations and the Truman Presidency. In 1947, Congress took up the baton of anti union legislation, just as the president was having second thoughts. The Taft Hartley Act was the most significant anti union legislation of the post war era and rolled back many of organised labour's achievements during the New Deal. Explaining History helps you understand the 20t...

This is the third part of a series on Operation Barbarossa, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. This podcast focuses on the views and beliefs of attackers, defenders and the citizens caught in the middle. 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 s...

When US volunteers from the International Brigade returned to America after two years of bloodshed and slaughter in Spain, they received a frosty welcome from a suspicious FBI and police. Much of the American public knew very little about the war and understood nothing of what was at stake. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interview...

In the aftermath of the First World War, utopian visions of a future world without war informed a generation of diplomats, politicians and peace makers. The horrors of the First World War meant that this vision had become an urgent necessity. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enj...

Mao, Stalin, Truman and MacArthur's calculations, along with the ambitions of Kim Il Sung and Syngman Rhee turned Korea from a Cold War sideshow into the first hot war of the long Cold War age. 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. ▸ Suppor...

Incoherence was one of the defining features of Nazi economic thinking, as competing economic tendencies within the party and externally were suborned to Hitler's racial ideas. 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 Show &...

At the height of the allied intervention in Russia, David Lloyd George wavered in his enthusiasm for the mission but his political ally and friend Churchill had no such doubts and did everything in his power to encourage an allied crusade against the Bolshevik regime. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past...

Following his death in 1883 Marx was elevated the position of a secular prophet of history by the guardians of his legacy the German Social Democratic Party. The 20th Century Marx is a very different individual to the real 19th Century intellectual and revolutionary. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past t...

In the last years of the 1970s a fringe economic ideology captured the centre ground in Britain, America and China, transforming the world economy and shifting the balance of power from labour to capital for a generation. 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 s...

Hitler, his ministers and many of his generals fully intended to fight a war of racial annihilation in Russia unlike anything previously seen. This podcast explores the economic and racial thinking behind the Nazi Generalplan Ost. 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,...

The question of whether or not to negotiate with Russia and what form the allied intervention in the Russian Civil War should take divided Britain, France and America at the Paris Peace Conference. The Bolshevik response to the western powers was equally mercurial and ambig.uous Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connec...

I am working on a plan and I need everyone's input to create a historical literacy course in these frighteningly confused times. Please listen and then give me your thoughts. 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 Show & Ge...

On June 22nd 1941 Nazi Germany and its allies launched the largest invasion in history against the Soviet Union. The attack on the USSR had consequences that would be felt for the rest of the 20th Century. 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 sha...

Despite impressive advances against the Axis powers in 1940 and 1941, the organisation and leadership of Rommel's Afrika Korps devastated Britain's position in North Africa by the summer of 1942. Inflexibility and weak leadership led to one of Britain's greatest wartime humiliations, the fall of Tobruk. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and exp...

The prolonged crisis of the Russian Empire throughout the 19th and early 20th Centuries that resulted from the advance of modernisation led to the creation of revolutionary tensions not just from the left but from the right. Extreme anti semites, Slavophiles and defenders of Orthodoxy merged into the fascist Union of Russian Peoples and their street fighters the Black Hundreds. Explaining History...

The British, aware of their imminent loss of world power in Asia, encouraged the partition of India. Military planners and politicians hoped that a Muslim state, favourable to British interests and opposed to the USSR would emerge in the shape of Pakistan Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the presen...

The annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany presented the country and its exiles with the first of several crises. The disastrous outcome of the war for Nazi Germany meant that not just Germany's but Austria's fate would be decided in London, Washington and Moscow Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the...

Despite British setbacks and failures in Greece and an overstretched force in North Africa, Churchill was determined to seize Syria from the French Vichy collaborationist regime. The fighting to take Damascus was far harder and more difficult that Churchill had anticipated. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the...

Paranoia and the obsessional belief that the party and state were infiltrated by enemies and saboteurs created a culture of confession and interrogation. This existed at all levels of society from the bottom to the top and found its ultimate expression in the terror of the late 1930s. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We...

With ever more alarming new unfolding in Europe and the fate of Britain hanging in the balance, Franklin Roosevelt decided to stand for re-election for a second time, breaking with tradition that a president serves a maximum two terms. Facing him was the former Democrat Wendell Wilkie, a political outsider who rejected isolationism just as Roosevelt did. Explaining History helps you understand the...

The Nazi regime's consolidation of power led to an assault on the structures of Germany's federal system. It resulted in the creation of regional governors, but these were local tyrants soon left without any real power 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 subs...

The formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain had direct organisational, financial and ideological input from Lenin himself. He saw it as essential to have a political foothold in Britain, following the British decision to intervene against the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews....

A series of strategic errors, missed opportunities and disasters handed Germany victory in Greece and Crete and led to two further allied evacuations. However, the fall of Crete was the most costly airborne operation ever mounted by Germany. 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 1946 General George Marshall met both Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai Shek, and concluded that the nationalist cause in China was lost. From this fateful decision a gradual change in American policy towards Chiang developed with profound consequences. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If y...

After the initial chaotic phase of the development of the camp system, by 1936 new purpose build camp complexes that dwarfed their predecessors emerged. Sachsenhausen in 1936 was part of this new model camp system, designed to work as a means of transforming and 'educating' inmates into becoming ideal members of the racial community. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through...