Explaining History

In the mid 1930s the Polish government contemplated the mass deportation of its large Jewish population to the British Mandate of Palestine. This anti semitic policy gained support from an unlikely ally, the right wing zionist Jews that made up the revisionist movement in Poland. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We conne...

In 1955 one of the most important international conferences of the 20th Century took place in Bandung, Indonesia. The leaders of the recently decolonised nations of Africa and Asia met to forge new economic and diplomatic ties. The conference was the first of a series of meetings of African and Asian nations resistant to colonialism and determined to avoid taking sides in the Cold War. Explaining...

When Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964 he was determined to undo many of the liberalising reforms of his predecessor Nikita Khrushchev. However, his appointment of Alexei Kosygin gave joint control of the economy to a moderniser who attempted to introduce more market based reforms. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We...

In the immediate aftermath of the Chinese Civil War and the seizure of power by the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong began a violent struggle for control of China's countryside. In a bid to develop a rural powerbase for himself and his party, Mao encouraged communities to tear themselves apart in cycles of denunciation and revenge. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century throug...

In the immediate aftermath of the First World War, British anxieties over revolutionary tensions in India were high. The action of a lone British general at Amritsar in April 1919 shattered the fragile peace between the colonising British and the colonised Indians, radicalising the independence movement throughout the inter war period. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century throu...

When Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz between 1940 and 1943 was tried for his crimes in 1947 he was open and revealing about the process of genocide at the camp and the attitudes of the SS men under his command to their work. The testimony raises as many questions and challenges for Holocaust historians as it answers. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critic...

In 1878 tensions over the Balkans were close to exploding into a major European war. German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck held a conference in Berlin to resolve the tensions, but the result was simply the postponement of war, not its prevention. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you e...

In 1922, during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic a social research institute was established in Frankfurt. It was set up by Marxist intellectuals and the alumni of the school had a massive impact on 20th Century thought, examining the workings of mass society, consumerism, culture, totalitarianism and the unconscious. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through...

One of the biggest forced movements of populations in human history occurred in the final months of the Second World War and long into the post war era. Eastern European countries expelled their German populations and some estimated 12 million people were added to the millions of refugees in Europe at the end of the war. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical con...

Democrat presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt hoped the USSR could become a key part of the post war worlds they were involved in developing. Both men were willing to overlook many of the violent excesses of Lenin's Bolsheviks and later Stalin, assuming that a more liberal and moderate Russia might emerge. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conver...

At the start of the First World War the threat of civil war in Ireland between home rule nationalists and protestant unionists in the north began to recede. Two years later, however, a revolt in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916 against the British was crushed and fifteen of the rebels executed. This podcast explores the causes and consequences of the Easter Rising. Explaining History helps you underst...

In the second half of the 19th Century, the development of a new and diverse range of magazines, leaflets and books written by educated and wealthy Victorian women for a female audience had a radicalising effect on the women's movement. The desire for equality before the law led to a pressure for female suffrage and a minor publishing revolution developed in support of these goals. Explaining Hist...

In the first two years of the First World War, British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith was a distant and detached character, leaving major decisions to the War Office, Winston Churchill and Horatio Kitchener. By 1915 two crises, munitions shortages and Gallipoli had resulted in his subordinates political demise and the creation of a coalition government. Explaining History helps you understand the...

In 1919 America experienced a post war explosion of racial violence. Black communities in over 30 cities across the USA were attacked by mobs, angry at the new economic opportunities that had opened up to black people as a result of the First World War. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present....

During the First World War, nearly a hundred thousand poor Chinese labourers dug British trenches on the western front. Their government hoped that the war would provide opportunities to revise crippling treaties imposed on her by Britain and France and claim back territory lost to Germany and Japan. When Chinese hopes were dashed at the Paris Peace Conference, the long term political consequences...

Benito Mussolini dominated Italy for two decades and was able to rule partly because of the relationship he had with the Italian people. To many ordinary Italians he was an immensely popular figure and many viewed him as down to earth and in touch with the lives of Italy's working poor. This podcast explores his cult of personality. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through...

The Potsdam Conference was the last major meeting of the allied powers and took place after the surrender of Germany. The conference was a key event in the development of the Cold War and drew up the conflict's battle grounds in Europe and Asia Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you e...

In January 1942 Reinhard Heydrich, Himmler's deputy held a conference at Wannsee in Berlin to order the mass extermination of all of Europe's Jews. This podcast explores the relationship between the conference and the course of the war. For a detailed analysis of this and the Jewish Holocaust, read Julia Routledge's excellent new ebook The Genocidal Century: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Genocidal-Centu...

Harold Wilson was Britain's Prime Minister from 1964-1970, a period in which optimistic visions of a new country faltered and faded. By the end of the decade the modern, meritocratic and scientific country that he promised in 1964 had not materialised. This podcast explores Wilson and the challenges he and Britain faced. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical con...

At the end of the Second World War Europe was devastated, starving and in chaos. Millions of refugees and displaced persons were dependent on the United Nations to feed and shelter them. Some of the newly restored governments saw it as an ideal opportunity to expel unwanted ethnic minorities and in parts of the continent, fighting between communist and non communist forces continued. Explaining Hi...

by February 1945 The Soviet Union controlled most of Eastern Europe and outnumbered the Western Allies 3-1. Stalin was in a uniquely powerful bargaining position at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea to shape the post war world and demand concessions from Churchill and Roosevelt. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We conne...

In late 1943 the British, Americans and Soviets met at Tehran to discuss the final stages of the war and what the post war world would look like. Throughout the meeting Churchill's war strategies were steadily undermined by American disagreements and the growing power and confidence of the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conver...

Leni Riefenstahl was Adolf Hitler's favourite film maker and became an increasingly popular member of his inner circle, producing films like Triumph of the Will and Olympia throughout the 1930s. After the war she distanced herself from the Nazis crimes but evidence shows her complicity in them, despite acquittal at the Nuremberg Trials. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century thro...

In 1920 the sale, import and manufacture of alcohol in America was banned and for the next thirteen years the government waged an increasingly fruitless war against smugglers and gangsters to keep America dry. How did a society that cherished libertarian principals and the limited role of the state come to enact such far reaching laws? Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century throu...

In 1963 John Profumo, Harold Macmillan's Minister for War was forced to resign following an affair with a young call girl Christine Keeler. Even though the scandal was relatively trivial it came to dominate the headlines and defined the modern sex scandal. It revealed far more about the anxieties of Britain in a time of growing prosperity than it did about the private life of a junior minister. Ex...