In this episode of the podcast we continue with our study of the AQA syllabus - Russia 1917-53: Revolution and Dictatorship. We explore the nature of Stalinist culture during the period 1928-41

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The British right wing print media has enjoyed extraordinary power to shape politics and public affairs in the UK in the past half century. They have influenced the outcome of elections, their owners invited to meet with British Prime Ministers regularly and they have been largely free of regulation. This podcast explores the liberal ideas that have failed to constrain their power, in the context of Prince Harry's record settlement with Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers.

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What factors led to an unprecedented improvement in living standards for white American families during the post war decades? This podcast examines this period that is firmly rooted in the US and world wide imaginary as a moment that is quintessentially American and explores the global transitions that created it.

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It's Trump's second inauguration and here are some thoughts about him, about political organisation in the years ahead and why we absolutely cannot depend on centrist sensibles any longer.

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This episode is the second in our isms and ologies series on Anarchism and gives a concise overview on the history of anarchist thought and politics from the 1848 revolutions onwards. Anarchism shaped countries as diverse as Mexico, Russia, Spain and China and both capitalist and Stalinist regimes sought to destroy it.

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At the end of the First World War the Ottoman Empire was carved up between the British and the French, with Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq being taken as mandates by Britain and Syria and Lebanon being occupied by France. The British originally secured Syria for France, but the French then overthrew the new king of the country, Faisal, the son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca.

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There are two main ways that historians have conceived of the causes of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, both as a struggle between liberalism and authoritarianism and between a people's socialism and a new rising state capitalism. This episode explores the arguments of Yueran Zhang, who suggests that there is a different explanation that can be understood from the motivations of the students and workers who stood up to the regime.

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By the mid to late 1960s the Republican Party had found a series of wedge issues that combined to break three decades of Democrat power by 1968. Richard Nixon implemented the Southern Strategy, a direct appeal to working class white voters in the South who were resentful about the social advances made by black Americans throughout the decade. This podcast explores this struggle in the context of the New Deal era.

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It's my mission in 2025 to unpack ideologies and navigate their complex fluid nature, contradictions, theorists and explanations of the world. In January we're starting with anarchism and this is the first part of a series of podcasts exploring what exactly anarchism is and what anarchists believe.

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During the Cold War a range of liberal and left intellectuals looked at the new technologies born of the Second World War and its aftermath with mounting concern and alarm. Figures like Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Adorno of the Frankfurt School and the Philosopher Martin Heidegger reacted to the destructive power of the atomic bomb and the cultural power of the mass media with fear and pessimism and believed that the world was sleepwalking into catastrophe. In this episode of the Explaining History podcast we speak with Dr Caroline Ashworth of Oxford University about her new book Catastrophic Technology in Cold War Political Thought.

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