Explaining History

Nov 06 2024 667 ep. 26 mins 4.6k
Explaining History Podcast artwork

The Explaining History Podcast has been exploring the 20th Century in weekly chapters for the past 10 years, helping students and enthusiasts engage with the past. With the help of expert guests, your host Nick Shepley navigates competing debates around the key events and processes of the past century.
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  History  Education  Society & Culture
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AQA Revolution and Dictatorship: Russia 1917-53 part 6

Nov 06 2024 27 mins  
This is part six of the Explaining History study course based on the AQA A level history module Revolution and Dictatorship: Russia 1917-53.In this episode we explore Lenin's creation of a new regime after the October Revolution and the beginnings of revolutionary terror and the civil war that would devastate Russia.I will be running a livestream Q&A for students on Wednesday Novem

Trump and the crisis of the Democrat Party

Nov 06 2024 35 mins  
Why has Donald Trump won an enormous victory not just amongst the electoral college votes but the popular vote too? For decades both parties have pursued economic policies that were developed in the Nixon and Reagan eras, which have benefitted finance capital over American society. The Democrats have simply offered more of the same, whilst Trump has presented a racist, nativist sol

Trumpism and the crisis of neoliberalism

Nov 05 2024 39 mins  
In anticipation of today's vote, the Explaining History Podcast dissects the road to Trumpism, how four decades of neoliberal economics led to the current polarised, oligarchic political moment.I will be running a livestream Q&A for students on Wednesday November 20th. You can access it here, subscribe to the channel to get your reminder.Help the podcast to continue bringing you hi

The Legacy of the First World War

Nov 04 2024 31 mins  
In the late summer of 1914 a war began that was largely unexpected, unwanted and which lasted for four years, destroying the European civilisation that existed beforehand, along with large parts of the continent, the Middle East and Africa. It spawned two brutal regimes in the guise of Nazi Germany and the USSR, along with generations of physically and mentally traumatised men. Thi

1989: The year of global transformation

Nov 02 2024 28 mins  
In 1989 the Cold War came to an unanticipated and unexpectedly peaceful end, the wars that both sides imagined would happen between the USSR and the west did not occur and a new world order rapidly formed in American and European interests in the long 1990s, only collapsing between 2008 and 2016. This exploration of the late 1980s and 1990s is told through the excellent book Post W

Approaches to history Part One: Herodotus, the first historian

Nov 02 2024 29 mins  
What are we doing when we write or think about history? What is it that historians do and when did they start doing it? We're taking a new direction on the podcast here and exploring the origins of historical thinking, a type of writing that the Greeks thought to be the inferior cousin to philosophy. Each Saturday we'll explore the practices and theories of history, and approaches

China, Japan and the legacy of the Nanjing Massacre

Oct 24 2024 30 mins  
Between December 1937 and January 1938 on of the great crimes of Japan's war against China occurred at the Chinese capital of Nanjing. Determined to break Chiang Kai Shek's nationalist forces, the Japanese murdered tens of thousands of captured soldiers and proceeded to slaughter the civilian population. The Japanese army went of the rampage, killing children and raping the city's

AQA Revolution and Dictatorship: Russia 1917-53 part 5

Oct 23 2024 33 mins  
After February 1917 the Provisional Government had a weak grasp on power, a fact that was exploited by the Bolsheviks in order to seize power in October. This study podcast explores how the Bolsheviks were able to seize power from a position of relative weakness. I will be running a livestream Q&A for students on Wednesday November 20th. You can access it here, subscribe to the cha

The New Deal and post war anti communism

Oct 22 2024 30 mins  
In the aftermath of the Second World War the New Deal came under a sustained assault by a newly resurgent Republican Party that used the threat of anti communism to shift politics towards the right. However, by the 1950s the New Deal was safe under a Republican Eisenhower presidency and the role of the state in the management of the economy continued to develop. Explore this parado

The Gulag Revolts 1953

Oct 21 2024 30 mins  
In the early 1950s there was an unprecedented level of political organisation in the Gulag system amongst prisoners who were able to find out about the events of the outside world and deal brutally with camp informants. In this episode we explore Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History of the Soviet Camps to understand this transition that led to uprisings following the death of Stalin t