Explaining History

At the heart of Britain's war time alliance was a deep wariness at what the outcome of the war would portend. Churchill was desperate for the USA to enter the war and Roosevelt saw the struggle against fascism as vital to America's security, but the US president like Wilson before him imagined a world without European empires. In this episode we examine James Barr's excellent book Lords of the Desert and explore the origins of ...

In this episode, we tear away the euphemisms and expose a grim reality: sanctions kill.

Drawing on a 2025 study from The Lancet Global Health, we show how economic sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other powers are responsible for up to 777,000 deaths each year, with children and the elderly most at risk.

We trace the history of sanctions from the League of Nations to Iraq, Venezuela, Iran, and beyond. We compare sanctions t...

How did neoliberalism go from fringe idea to ruling ideology in the United States? In this deep-dive episode of Explaining History, we trace the hidden rise of America’s most influential right-wing think tanks—Heritage Foundation, Cato Institute, Manhattan Institute and more—from their birth in the 1970s oil-crisis chaos to their role in dismantling the New Deal order.

You’ll discover:

• The 1971 Powell Memo that sparked a billionair...

Britain’s Austerity Trap

Why is one of the world’s richest countries still behaving like it’s broke?

In this episode of Explaining History, we dive into Yanis Varoufakis’s searing critique of Britain’s ongoing austerity dilemma under the new Labour government. Despite hopes for change, Chancellor Rachel Reeves faces the same iron cage of fiscal rules, banker subsidies, and Treasury orthodoxy that has strangled public spending...

The extent to which western soft power and legal and moral authority has been shredded by Gaza is lost upon British, American and European populations for the most part, but across the global south a new movement appears to be coalescing around South Africa and Columbia. In Europe, Ireland and Spain have joined with them and sixteen other global south countries to form the Hague Group, dedicated to upholding international law as it...

Warfare had to be re-propagandised in the 20th Century, particularly in the western world, as a moral crusade. Mass democracy determined that leaders needed to present war as a manichean struggle between freedom and tyranny. The end of the Tsarist regime and the intervention of a liberal American president in the First World War was an ideal opportunity to re-invent conflict as moral crusade in the defence of freedom. The arguments...

This episode draws from the excellent book Red Memory by Tania Brannigan, an oral history of the Cultural Revolution. Here we examine the role of thought, how Mao sought to stimulate public thought during the Hundred Flowers Campaign of the late 1950s to seek out enemies and how struggle sessions were a form of thought torture, making ones own self unbearable.

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Chilean folk icon Violeta Parra (1917-1967) was far more than the singer of “Gracias a la Vida.” In this episode, Erica Verba—Director of Latin American Studies at Cal State LA—reveals how Parra transformed from teenage street-busker and RCA-Victor recording artist into the archivist, painter and political catalyst who ignited Latin America’s Nueva Canción movement.

We trace her itineran...

Join us on The Explaining History Podcast as we welcome Dame Vikki Heywood, former Executive Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, to discuss her dazzling debut novel Miss Veal and Miss Ham. Set against the sleepy veneer of a 1951 Buckinghamshire village post office, this intimate tale reveals the hidden passions and unspoken resilience of two women whose lives span from the suffragette movement to ...

Join us on The Explaining History Podcast as we sit down with historian and author Mark Bridgeman to unravel the extraordinary life—and daring deceptions—of Violet Charlesworth, Britain’s first notorious female fraudster. In his landmark new book, Nothing for Something, Bridgeman spent three years mining court records, witness statements, private archives, and first-hand site visits to reconstruct a scandal that captivated Edwardia...

At the end of the 20th Century, the Cold War which had defined the struggle between various different iterations of capitalism in the western world and the USSR in the east was replaced by a slow oligarchic coup. An equivalent class has come to power in both countries and has similar imperatives, to occupy the state and cannibalise society. This podcast explores the material and ideological conditions that led to this takeover.

Nazism sought to bypass legal norms where it couldn't just sweep them aside. The German Weimar constitution took time to dismantle and new institutions, practices and laws needed to be created in order to subvert it. A similar process is underway in America at the moment and Trump's recent allocation of over $200 billion to ICE is a huge step towards cementing a police state that is answerable directly to him. Today we explore the ...

In this episode of Explaining History, we dive into the fascinating world of David Bowie’s 1960s—a decade of shifting cultural currents, personal reinvention, and the search for identity that would shape one of the most iconic artists of the 20th century.

Drawing on Neil Stephenson’s insightful book David Bowie, we explore how the social upheavals of the 60s—from Swinging London and Mod culture to the countercultural movements and s...

This episode explores part of the story of St John Philby, father to Kim and eventually advisor to King Ibn Saud. Philby was one of the few administrators that the British government and its colonial government in India could find who understood Arabia and Mesopotamia. In 1915 as British fortunes against the Ottoman Empire took a turn for the worst, Philby was sent to Basra to reorganise the city's finances after the retreat of the...

In the first decades of the 20th Century, a growth in literacy and the availability of paperback and hardback books created a culture of mass participation on literary reading that was unprecedented. Nicola Wilson's new book Recommended, a history of the Book Society, tells the story of Hugh Walpole, JB Priestley and Cecil Day Lewis amongst others and how they created the first mass book club which sent monthly recommendations to l...

The project to permanently shrink the British state and to inflict mass hardship on the most vulnerable which was commenced after 2010 has cost untold numbers of lives. The last calculations put the dead at around 338,000 people but it is likely now to be far higher and Britain has exchanged one austerity government for another. Now the Labour Party continues the brutal economic assault on the poor, the unwell and the disabled ...

When France was defeated in 1940, across its empire it underwent a period of civil war as Vichy and Free French forces faced one another. Until at least 1943 there were widespread sympathies across France for the Vichy regime and antipathy towards the British and the Americans. This podcast episode explores the complexities of identity, loyalty and a nation divided.

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In this episode, we dive into the turbulent decade of the 1970s, exploring how the oil shocks and economic crises of the era shattered the postwar order in America. Drawing from historian Gary Gerstle’s influential work The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Era, we examine how stagflation, energy insecurity, and geopolitical tensions fueled public disillusionment with Keynesian economics and paved the way for a neoliberal revolution...

Liverpool's modern history is one of struggle, adversity and community and today we hear from David Swift, author of Scouse Republic: An alternative history of Liverpool. In the 1980s the city was in deep economic decline from its Victorian heyday as one of the world's busiest ports. Liverpool's radical identity was forged by the ideological battles of the decade and from the predations of Margaret Thatcher's Tory government and it...