In the decade and a half before the Spanish Civil War, a bitterly divided society existed in constant conflict. Wealthy landowners and industrialists, supported by the army and civil guard viewed the peasantry as a subhuman 'other' and feared the threat of communism.Subscribe to the Explaining History YouTube Channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXutxjOzJ8vTGHkVWikl0NQ

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In 1946, following the formation of a Hindu dominated transitional government in India, inter ethnic violence broke out in Calcutta. Hindus and Muslims killed their neighbours in days of rioting, but the violence continued for two years, during and after the partition.

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Throughout the Second World War, Britain saw its colonies as sources of available manpower, food and finance. As Britain's fortunes changed throughout the conflict, so did its attitude to the present and future of the rest of the empire.

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A review of Dr Alex Kay's excellent biography of SS Colonel Alfred Filbert.

You can buy the book here: http://www.foyles.co.uk/witem/biography/the-making-of-an-ss-killer-the-life,alex-j-kay-9781316601426

Harlem was the epicentre of black cultural and intellectual life in the inter war decades. Competing radical nationalist and communist parties struggled with each other to attract members from with black community. Each attempted to address the problems of discrimination and prejudice that black Americans faced.

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After 1936 the Spanish Civil War became the focal issue for Europe's socialist and communist parties. The rise of Hitler to power had made anti fascist struggle the most important battle for communist movements, especially as Stalin had encouraged political divisions between communist and social democratic parties in the run up to 1933.

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Did Britain have a sexual revolution in the 1960s? All indications suggest that momentous change occurred in attitudes to pregnancy, marriage, divorce and homosexuality in that decade. However, in reality Britain had experienced a long century of changing attitudes to sex and private life.

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At the end of the Second World War, intense ethnic hatreds had been reawoken in Yugoslavia and Josef Tito's victorious communist partisans took advantage of internecine feuds and attempted to suppress them in order to establish Yugoslavia as a communist state.

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In the second half of the 1930s, after explosive economic growth during the five year plans the USSR was convulsed by murderous political violence. The phenomenon of Stalinist terror has occupied the writing of historians for decades and in this podcast we examine two perspectives.

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In 1845, at the height of Britain's industrial revolution, Friedrich Engels, the son of a German cotton industrialist came to live in Manchester. His study of the lives of the English working classes was the first major work to highlight the appalling effects of the industrial revolution on the poor.

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