A Short Walk through Our Long History

Dec 06 2024 110 ep. 22 mins 114

A Short Walk through Our Long History Podcast artwork

I think that if you want to understand the world we live in today, it helps to understand the important events of history. In this series, we are going to look at major events, people, documents, places, books, and ideas that have shaped history, and thus shaped our modern world.

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109 - The End of World War I

Dec 06 2024 29 mins

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 exp

108 - America Enters the War

Nov 16 2024 13 mins

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,

107 - The Soviet Revolution (Part 2 of the Russian Revolution)

Nov 07 2024 25 mins

здравствуйте, еще раз, товарищи. добро пожаловать в советский союзFor 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

106 - The Russian Revolution Part 1

Oct 31 2024 22 mins

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 i

105 - Big Battles of World War I

Oct 16 2024 15 mins

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

104 - Stalemate in the Trenches

Oct 14 2024 15 mins

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

103 - World War I Begins

Oct 07 2024 21 mins

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 hotel

102 - The Alliances and the Assassination (and Airplanes)

Sep 23 2024 21 mins

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 nucl

101 - Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressive Movement

Sep 17 2024 26 mins

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 ma

100 - The History of the World so Far

Aug 23 2024 23 mins

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