The Y in History

After leading the United Kingdom during WWII, Churchill loses his re-election bid. Harry Truman surprises polls to defeat Republican Thomas Dewey in 1948. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev is ousted in a very democratic way in the Soviet Union, in 1964.

Modern medicine owes a lot of its development to the Ancient civilizations of Greece, India and China. Modern medicine took off after the Industrial Revolution because of faster spread of disease and infection within large industrial communities. The medical professionals were able to understand bacterial diseases way before they understood viruses. But the electron microscope took medical researc...

Stalin micromanaged his daughter and she ended up defecting to the US. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. though won the Presidential Office his dictatorial father held, via a democratic election. Mao's children mostly died young. 

Tibetan Empire reached its zenith under Songtsen Gampo's descendant Tri Song Detsuen in 755 AD who expanded Tibet politically and economically and promoted Buddhism to bring the nation together. However, about a century after him, the empire collapsed and Tibet entered its traditional "dark age." The Mongols conquered Tibet in 1244 but let the local Buddhist leaders manage the administrative affai...

Boeing hid information regarding the MCAS software from its 737-Max flying manual to short circuit the certification. Boeing's cheating cost 346 lives across 2 plane crashes.  Volkswagen had a cheat device software in its diesel cars to circumvent the NOX level requirememts in the US and the EU. Wells Fargo opened millions of bank accounts without customer consent. Is there a pattern across these...

Putin was a working class outsider who rose through the ranks to the Country's top job. Once at the top, Putin consolidated his position by eiminating opposition and giving Russia a strategic economic advantage. Xi was a Princeling who ended up on the wrong side during Mao's time. But Xi believed in Mao and came back, aspiring to be Mao 2.0

The West Indies emerge as a force in Cricket as Frank Worrell leads the team to Australia in 1960. South Africa is banned from International Cricket in 1970 due to apartheid. Kerry Packer becomes a major disruptor in International Cricket as he signs up top players for World Series of Cricket.

Cricket was spread by England through its Colonies. But it needed stars like WG Grace to make it popular enough to become a spectator sport. The England-Australia rivalry led to the Ashes Trophy and containing Aussie star, Don Bradman, led to the infamous Bodyline series between the two sides.

JFK is assassinated as his convoy drives through Dallas, bringing the US and the rest of the world to a stunned standstill. Egypt's Anwar Sadat is assassinated while inspecting a parade. But Congo's Patrice Lumumba is made to disappear in the most barbaric manner.

Railway tycoon Leland Stanford lived in Santa Clara Valley and founded Stanford University in 1891. Another prominent Stanford University figure, Frederick Terman. invested heavily in businesses that would base themselves in the area and employ talented young people. One such business was the original start-up, an electrical company started in a garage by Stanford alumni William Hewlett and David...

In 1914, American Marines rob Haiti's National Bank of $500,000 in Gold Reserves at th ebehest of the National City Bank. Wall Street looks to topple FDR and replace him with a business friendly Dictator. United Fruit, now Chiquita engineers the ouster of the democratically elected Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.

Strategic mistakes in the Russia-Ukraine relationship or a leadership vision that led to lasting impact. This episode evaluates patterns that emerge from the learnings we've had across the previous 74 episodes. Impact from the whims of a deranged leader or the ego trip of two super powers. Some interesting patterns emerge as we traverse history.

The Panama Papers refer to the 11.5 million leaked encrypted confidential documents that were the property of Panama-based law firm  Mossack Fonseca . The documents were released on April 3, 2016, by the German newspaper  Süddeutsche Zeitung  (SZ), dubbing them the " Panama Papers ." The document exposed more than 140 politicians from more than 50 countries, connected to 214,000 offshore companies...

The Turing Test in 1950 established the baseline for evaluating the real intelligence of a machine. To this day, no machine or software has been able to pass the Turing test. But do the next generation of ChatBots like ChatGPT have th epotential to pass the test?

The long-range spice trade began in around 1000 BCE with the movement of cinnamon, and perhaps pepper, from India and Indonesia to Egypt. For the next 1000 years, the Arabs served as the sole middlemen of the spice trade . In 1498, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama made the first sea voyage from Europe to India, via the southernmost tip of Africa. The mission was driven by a desire to find a d...

Over half of the emigration before the 1870s was from the British Isles, with much of the remainder from northwestern Europe. As migration increased along with new transportation technologies in the 1880s, regions of intensive emigration spread south and east as far as Portugal, Russia, and Syria. Migration to Southeast Asia and lands around the Indian Ocean and South Pacific consisted of over 29...

Resolution 242 passed by the UN Security Council on 22 November 1967 embodied the principle that has guided most of the subsequent peace plans aound the Israel-Palestine conflict - the exchange of land for peace. From the Camp David Accords of 1978 to the Oslo Agreement of 1993, several peace accords were signed by the two sides, yet peace continues to elude the region.

The US entered WWI after the  Zimmermann Telegram was intercepted by the British where Germany asked Mexico to join the War against the US. US entering the War turned the tide in favor of the Allies as battle fatigue started overpowering Germany and Russia. Russia saw the Czar abdicating while Germany saw its sailors refusing to fight. The War ended with Germany signing an armistice agreement with...

On the eve of WWI, alliances galore across Europe with Germany aligned with Austria-Hungary and France aligned with Russia. All that is needed is a trigger and that happens on June 28, 1914 with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austria-Hungary throne. The alliances declare war on each but Germany ends up fighting on two fronts. The episode explores the conditions that...

The East German uprising of 1953 began as a series of strikes and protests at living standards; it soon turned political, with town halls being stormed amid vocal demands for German reunification. The Soviets had to intervene with military force to quell the rebellion. On August 20, 1968, the Soviet Union led Warsaw Pact troops in an invasion of Czechoslovakia to crack down on reformist trends in...

The conventional marker for hyperinflation is 50% per month, first proposed in 1956 by Phillip Cagan, a professor of economics at Columbia University. Hyperinflation is the rapid, massive, and unmanageable increase in prices. In recent times, the worst cases of hyperinflation in history are Hungary from 1945 to 1946, Zimbabwe from 2007 to 2008 and Yugoslavia from 1992 to 1994. In all the three cas...

With a rise in geopolitical tensions with China, the World is looking to diversify its supply chain. Mexico presents an attractive nearshoring destination for manufacturers because of its proximity to the United States. The NAFTA enables free trade between the three signatory countries (US, Canada and Mexico) by reducing tariffs and other trade barriers. Vietnam, in China's neighborhood is emergin...

On August 16, 1858, Britain sent the United States an inaugural message via a transatlantic telegraph cable. In it, Queen Victoria congratulated President James Buchanan on their countries' mutual success at building the very cable she was using to talk to him.  The International Space Station is a truly global effort: nations ranging from America to Russia provided parts for and assembled the ISS...

In September 1980, Iraqi forces launched a full-scale invasion of neighboring Iran, beginning the Iran-Iraq War. Fueled by territorial, religious and political disputes between the two nations, the conflict ended in an effective stalemate and a cease-fire nearly eight years later, after more than half a million soldiers and civilians had been killed.

The Credit Mobilier Scandal centered around Railroad construction and the Teapot Dome Scandal centrered around Oil Field contracts. In both cases, the guilty were mostly let off easy. Same was the case in the Iran-Contra Affair during Ronald Reagan's time. Though the scandal created an uproar, the guilty mostly escaped punishment. The ABSCAM though exposed deep corruption within the corridors of p...