Modern history for curious minds, teachers and students
Built on 1,000+ episodes and 13 years of carefully researched, examiner-verified history.
Which brings you here?
I’m here for the history
Listeners and curious readers. Explore more than a thousand podcast episodes, weekly essays connecting today’s events to their roots, and deep dives into the people and ideas that shaped the modern world.
I’m a student
Studying A-level History? Find the exact course your school teaches, understand it one manageable stage at a time, and get history-specific technique that earns marks. No sign-up, no assumed knowledge.
I’m a teacher
A-level History resources mapped to every board — AQA, Edexcel, OCR and WJEC — written to mark-scheme logic by a former Pearson/Edexcel examiner. Every historian real, every argument verified.
For more than a decade, the Explaining History Podcast has helped listeners around the world make sense of modern history. What began in 2012 as a simple experiment—short, accessible episodes explaining major historical events—has grown into a long-running library of carefully researched, thoughtful explorations of the 20th and 21st centuries.
This page introduces new listeners to the podcast, explains what makes it different from other history shows, and offers curated paths into more than a thousand episodes.
If you’re searching for a history podcast that goes deeper than anecdotes or trivia, this is where to begin.
Teaching A-level history?
Revising for exams?
Here for the essays?
One piece every week connecting current events to their historical roots — free, every Tuesday.
Subscribe free →Paid tier also available — deeper dives, full archive, essay guides.
-
In this episode, Tony Fox discusses “Remember Me to My Comrades,” a collection of letters and diaries from International Brigade volunteers from Northern England. The narrative explores the political dimensions of these volunteers, their sacrifices during the Spanish Civil War, and their lasting legacy in the fight against fascism, highlighting their humanity and commitment.
-
In August 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru addressed the Indian Constituent Assembly on the eve of independence: ‘Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge.’ The phrase captured something genuinely extraordinary. But it concealed as much as it revealed. Independence came simultaneously with partition — and the violence that accompanied it remains one of the largest catastrophes of the twentieth century. The tryst with destiny was written in blood before it was written in ink.
-
In 1839, Louis Daguerre announced to the French Académie des Sciences a process by which light acting on a chemically prepared surface could produce a permanent image of whatever lay before the lens. It was not simply a technical innovation. It was an epistemological event. For the first time in human history, the external world could be made to represent itself, bypassing the intermediary of the human hand. The question of what this meant — for knowledge, for art, for memory, for truth — has been argued over for nearly two centuries, and has not yet been resolved.
-
On 17 December 2010, a twenty-six-year-old street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi stood outside the regional headquarters of the Tunisian government in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid, doused himself in paint thinner, and set himself alight. His act of self-immolation became the symbolic catalyst for the most significant wave of popular uprisings in the Arab world since decolonisation. Within weeks, the president of Tunisia had fled. Within months, the presidents of Egypt and Libya had fallen. Within five years, most of those hopes were extinguished.
-
How Witte’s state-driven industrialisation of the 1890s made Russia a modern power — and manufactured the working class that would rise against the autocracy in 1905 and 1917.
-
The counter-reforms, Russification and the paradox of a regime that industrialised the economy while forbidding the political change industrialisation everywhere produced.
-
Emancipation, the zemstva, the law courts and the military reforms — and why every Great Reform stopped short of limiting the autocracy that made it.
-
How Khrushchev tried to reform Stalinism without surrendering the Party’s monopoly — de-Stalinisation, the Virgin Lands, living standards and the limits of the Thaw.
-
In the latest solo episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we explore John Gray’s False Dawn and the remarkable parallels between two failed attempts to remake Russia on a Western model – Bolshevism and the “shock therapy” of the post‑Soviet 1990s. The Treaty of Versailles and the Missed Opportunity After the First World War, John Maynard Keynes wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, warning that the Carthaginian nature of the Treaty of Versailles – the punishment of Germany – would set in motion terrible consequences. Keynes argued that new systems of economic international cooperation were needed, and that the…
-
In 1978, the People’s Republic of China was one of the poorest countries in the world. Its economy had been devastated by the convulsions of the Maoist era — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution — and its population of nearly a billion people had a per capita income comparable to sub-Saharan Africa. Forty years later, China was the world’s second-largest economy, the largest manufacturer, the largest trading nation, and a military and technological power whose capacities no other country could ignore. The transformation was without precedent in the history of economic development.
-
The twentieth century produced more kinds of music than any previous era, and the proliferation was not random. Each major genre that emerged — gospel, blues, jazz, country, R&B, soul, reggae, hip-hop, electronic music — arose from a specific social location, carried specific values and grievances, and tracked the history of the communities that created it with a fidelity that no other art form matched. Popular music was not the accompaniment to the social history of the century. In many respects, it was the most accurate record of it.
-
On the morning of 11 September 2001, nineteen men boarded four commercial aircraft on the east coast of the United States and turned them into weapons. By the time the day was over, nearly 3,000 people were dead, two of the most recognisable buildings in the world had collapsed, and the most powerful government on earth had begun the process of deciding what it would do in response. The decisions it made over the following months and years reshaped the world in ways that are still being reckoned with.
-
In this episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we are joined by Italian author Filippo Iannarone to discuss his acclaimed crime novel, The Toscanini Conspiracy – a story that weaves together a real‑life cold case, the anti‑fascist resistance of conductor Arturo Toscanini, and the author’s own family history of heroic opposition to Mussolini and Hitler. The novel began with a chance encounter. While travelling in Val d’Orcia, Filippo discovered a small inn called Locanda Toscanini and asked the host why it bore the name of the legendary conductor. The answer opened a door to a forgotten story: the murder of Dr. Rinaldi,…
-
In 1962, Rachel Carson published a book about pesticides. It was written in a style more usually associated with poetry than with science, and it argued that the application of synthetic chemicals to the natural world was producing consequences that no one had planned and that no one had yet begun to measure. The book did not save the environment. But it created the political and cultural conditions in which saving the environment became thinkable.
-
The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is sometimes described as ancient, and it is not. It is a modern conflict, born of the specific conditions of the late nineteenth century — the rise of nationalism, the decline of empire, the crisis of European Jewry — and of the specific decisions taken by specific people in the first half of the twentieth century. Understanding it requires going back to those origins, without assuming that the outcome was in any way inevitable.
-
The internet was built by the American military to survive a nuclear war. It became the infrastructure of global commerce, the primary means by which most of the world’s population communicates, and the most powerful surveillance apparatus in human history. None of these outcomes were planned. All of them followed, with a logic that seems almost inevitable in retrospect, from decisions made without any clear sense of what they would produce.
-
Cinema was the twentieth century’s own art form — the only major artistic medium to be invented after industrialisation and before the digital age. No other form matched its combination of mass reach, emotional immediacy, and technical complexity, and no other was so thoroughly shaped by the specific conditions of the century that produced it.
Follow us to receive new posts via email:
Key History Topics
Global History: Key Topics
- The Permanent Crisis: America in the Age of Trump
- The 2008 World Financial Crisis
- The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism
- The Partition of India
- The Great Depression and the Collapse of Global Trade
- The Cultural Revolution in China
- The Mexican Revolution
- The Creation of the United Nations
- The Iranian Revolution
- 20th Century Syria: From Mandate to Civil War
- The Marshall Plan and the Reconstruction of Europe
- The First Indochina War
- The Global Anti Apartheid Movement
- The Holocaust: Bureacracy and Genocide
- Korea: War, Division, Development
- Operation Condor
- The Bandung Conference
- The Rwandan Genocide
- Stalin and the transformation of the USSR 1924-41
- Pakistan from Independence to Belt and Road
- The Civil Rights Movement
- The 1911 Revolution and the fall of the Qing dynasty
- Watergate and Nixon’s Legacy
- The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 and Its Aftermath
- Ghana’s Independence and the ‘Year of Africa’
- The West German Republic: From Ruins to Reunification
- The Space Race and the Cold War
- Bangladesh war of Liberation
- The Sykes Picot Agreement and the conquest of the Middle East
- The Collapse of Yugoslavia
- Deng Xiaoping and the transformation of China
- The Fall of France, 1940
- The Spanish Civil War: A Global Struggle
- Post War Australia 1945-75
- The Sri Lankan Civil War
- Global Migration and Refugees in the 20th Century
- 20th Century Australia
Cultural History: Key Topics
- The Birth of Consumerism and Mass Culture
- Modernism and the shock of the new
- The Jazz Age
- The Birth of Cinema and the Hollywood Studio System
- The Culture of Weimar Germany
- Interwar Britain: Media, Modernism, and the Invention of a National Culture
- Culture and Imperialism in European colonies between the wars
Listen by Topic
Browse curated collections of Explaining History podcast episodes by topic — each page brings together the essential episodes on a key historical subject.
Fascism & the Far Right
The Spanish Civil War, Vichy France, Nazi genocide, and the post-war far right.
Stalin & Soviet Terror
The Great Purge, the Gulag, Stalingrad, and the Soviet state’s war on its own people.
The Iranian Revolution
The White Revolution, the Neocons, the 2025 Israeli strikes, and the full arc of US–Iran confrontation.
Neoliberalism & Thatcherism
From the post-war welfare state to the Thatcher revolution and its legacy.