Explaining History

In the 1970s and 1980s two political figures came to define the polarisation of British politics and society and the end of political consensus between the Conservative and Labour Parties. This podcast explores the ideological worlds of Thatcher and Benn and their impact on the trajectory of both parties.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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In all totalitarian societies, individuals instinctively find ways of navigating and interacting with a repressive state. In the USSR, rumours, jokes and anonymous letters to the authorities, were often ways of expressing deep seated anger with the Stalinist state, whilst trying to avoid the most severe punishments.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we hear from history teacher and writer Larry Auton Leaf about Mao, Stalin, Khrushchev and Sino Soviet Split

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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Following the assassination of John F Kennedy, his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, was unexpectedly propelled into the White House, but faced a staff of Kennedy loyalists, including the president's brother Bobby, who he could not trust. Johnson was also faced with the myth of JFK, a public perception of a great and now martyred president. Johnson saw this as an opportunity, rather than a threat, and used the memory of Kennedy for his own ends.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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The long battle of attrition by the Japanese Army against the resilient US Marine Corps on Guadalcanal began with serious miscalculations by Japan. Both sides saw the island as a linchpin in the Pacific War and Japan's over confidence and their imperial over stretch led to their eventual defeat, but not before inflicting immense losses on America, on land and at sea.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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Working class life in Britain during the 1930s was shaped and reshaped by economic forces. In the first part of the decade, a devastating economic slump in the staple industries of coal, cotton, ships and steel saw the migration of working people to more prosperous parts of the country. In the later 1930s, rising living standards and wages gave some working class households living standards and opportunities they had never experienced before.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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In 1941 Sachsenhausen concentration camp became the first of the existing pre war concentration camps to become a site of mass killings as 9,000 Soviet POWs were murdered there by gas or shooting. Heinrich Himmler, anxious to find more efficient methods of mass murder, was kept informed by his henchman Theodore Eicke and took a keen interest in the killings, knowing that the methods used at Sachsenhausen would be later employed in the mass murder of the Jews.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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After the appointment of Adolf Hitler as chancellor in 1933, Stalin began to privately regret his decision to prevent a popular front of communist and social democratic forces emerge in Germany. Across Europe communist parties found themselves in uneasy alliances with social democrats and in Britain the threat of the British Union of Fascists galvanised this process. The popular front government in Spain that came under assault in 1936 drew communist and non communist volunteers from Britain and other European countries to defend it, with both Hitler and Stalin becoming involved in the fate of the Spanish people.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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Following the victory over Japan at Midway, the US Navy was unprepared for a devastating defeat inflicted on its landing force at Guadalcanal. The Japanese sought to control islands close to the sea lanes vital to Australia's survival; shutting them off would bring the country to its knees and prevent it becoming a staging post for the liberation of Asia and the Pacific. The commitment of America to Guadalcanal would lead to one of the bloodiest campaigns of the Pacific war.

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, civilian governments struggled to establish law and order and in many cars failed to prevent a wave of vigilante violence against those suspected of collaboration. The complicity in Nazi crimes and the everyday experience of occupation created huge divisions in societies of western and eastern Europe and a deep suspicion on the police, who had often been used by the Nazis and collaborationist governments

Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and share.

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Website: explaininghistory.org

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