A small republic, a country in spirit, lies north of Dagestan and Azerbaijan. It has only about a million and a half people and I am not sure there is consensus about how they want to live, but they have had to deal with choices made by others. The second Chechen war happens to be how a relatively new Russian prime minister made a name for himself; a man whose name we all know; Vladimir Putin...

Following the tumultous revolution and subsequent hostage crisis, Iran's neighbour, Saddam's Iraq thought the timing was opportune to do a land grab.

The strategic miscalculation led to one of the bloodiest 20th century bilateral conflicts and had repercussions that reverberate today.

What happened?

When I was seven years old, one of my friends moved to Tehran with his family. I do not know what his parents did, but I know that they returned in less than a year because of the revolution. I did not know what that meant, but I was glad to have my friend back. Iran felt like an excotic and dangerous place.

Since my childhood Iran has been in the news; for the revolution, the hostage crisis, its support of Hamas & Hezbollah. Why? Why is this the current representation of a civilization that can be traced back to the earliest empires of the world?

Let's try to shed some light...

Here is the continuation of the 2 part series on Ukraine in the last 100+ years; trying to see the overall picture and understand why Ukraine has become such an important headline in the last few years.

If you haven't yet, please listen to part 1.

It seems that Ukraine rarely made the news until about 2013-14 when Russia invaded Crimea and somehow the Bidens were involved in a scandal. I knew of it, because my mother's family all trace their lineage to the Ukraine as recently as the 1920s. I do not go into any of that here - we're going back to the beginning of the 20th century, when Ukraine was a nation split between the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs. During the first half of the 20th century, Ukraine was in the middle of everything. What was Ukraine like demographically then and now, and what is the legacy of a century of nation building?

Thanks for listening!

Its effect was little in the rest of the world. Vietnam was the larger story at the time, and the horror of the Cambodian Killing Fields a sidenote in coverage.

This is part 2 of the two part series on the Korean War.

Thanks for listening.

If you have listened before, you know how this goes. This episode looks at the history of the Korean peninsula and what happened leading up to the Korean War in 1950.

We're following the trajectory of the Cold War; after the end of the very hot World War II, the beginning of the Cold War was playing out in countries and regions around the world, seemingly all at the same time. As usual, I found that I knew very little about happened in Greece during the late 1940s. Thanks for listening.

This is episode 2 talking about post-war Europe and the early days of the Cold War in Germany and specifically Berlin.

Listen to the first episode for greater context and come back for more!