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.
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One piece every week connecting current events to their historical roots — free, every Tuesday.
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In the latest solo episode of the Explaining History Podcast, I explore the striking parallels between the British Labour Party’s war on Jeremy Corbyn and the Democrat establishment’s growing fear of Zohran Mamdani – and what it tells us about the bankruptcy of the centre-left. The Liberalism That Wasn’t Let’s start with a confession. I used to be irritated by the American right’s habit of calling everything left of centre “liberal”. Fox News pundits would scream about “liberals” as if they were the vanguard of a socialist revolution. And I would think: no, you’re confusing liberalism with the left. They…
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On 1 January 1947, a notice was posted at every colliery in Britain. It read: “This colliery is now managed by the Nation on behalf of the people.” In a single morning, over 900 coal mines—along with 225,000 acres of farmland, 140,000 miners’ houses, and countless shops and offices—passed from private ownership to public control. The National Coal Board (NCB) was formally constituted, and the British coal industry, which had been a byword for private exploitation and industrial strife, became a public corporation. It was, as Prime Minister Clement Attlee declared, “one of the great days in the industrial history…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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,…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Rock and roll did not begin on the day Elvis Presley walked into Sun Studio in Memphis. It had been building for decades in the Black churches and juke joints of the American South. What changed in 1955 was not the music but the audience — and, behind the audience, the industry that decided white teenagers were ready to buy it.
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Writing a book like God Forgives, Brothers Don’t during the long twilight of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, journalist Jasper Craven discovered that the pipeline feeding young men into America’s fighting forces wasn’t just a response to war—it was a carefully engineered system. What he found was a sprawling network of military schools, ROTC programs, and a cultural pedagogy that had spent centuries convincing American boys that the path to manhood ran straight through the barracks. The result is a searing investigation into how the US military has become the nation’s primary engine of masculinity, and how that engine is…
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In 1991, George H.W. Bush promised a “new world order” — a world in which law and cooperation would replace force and rivalry. Within three years, 800,000 people had been murdered in Rwanda in a hundred days while the international community watched. The 1990s were not a liberal peace. They were a laboratory for the failures that would define the century to come.
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When Betty Friedan named “the problem that has no name” in 1963, she gave language to a dissatisfaction that millions of women had been living without the words to describe. What followed — the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s — was the most far-reaching cultural revolution of the postwar era. It was also an unfinished one.
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The fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 was, in a sense, a bureaucratic accident. But the accident was only possible because the system behind the wall had already ceased to function. This is the story of how the Cold War ended — and why the world it made was so different from what anyone expected.
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In August 1981, three days after eleven thousand members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organisation walked off the job in defiance of a federal law prohibiting strikes by government employees, President Ronald Reagan fired all of them, banned them from federal employment for life, and ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to begin immediately training replacements. The action was not unprecedented — there was legal authority for it — but no president had previously used that authority in this way against a union of middle-class professionals who had, moreover, endorsed Reagan in the 1980 election. The PATCO strike was broken…
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In the spring of 1968, something happened that had not happened before and has not happened since: a set of political explosions occurred simultaneously in countries that had almost nothing in common — in their economies, their political systems, their social structures, their histories — but that nonetheless felt, to those participating in them and to those watching from outside, as if they were expressions of a single underlying rupture. Students in Paris built barricades in the Latin Quarter and triggered a general strike that briefly seemed capable of ending the Fifth Republic. Students in Prague celebrated a Communist Party…
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On 30 June 1936, a small, erect man in a black cloak and a white robe walked to the podium of the League of Nations assembly hall in Geneva and waited for the jeering Italian journalists in the press gallery to be removed before he began to speak. Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia — King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah — had travelled to Geneva to make a personal appeal to the assembled representatives of world civilisation, eight months after Italian forces under Mussolini’s orders had invaded his country, six weeks after Italian troops had…
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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.