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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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.
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The counter-reforms, Russification and the paradox of a regime that industrialised the economy while forbidding the political change industrialisation everywhere produced.
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Emancipation, the zemstva, the law courts and the military reforms — and why every Great Reform stopped short of limiting the autocracy that made it.
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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.
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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…
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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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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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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.
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The United States spent more than a decade in Vietnam, dropped more bombs on it than were dropped by all sides in the Second World War, and lost. The defeat was not primarily military. It was political, strategic, and ultimately moral: a failure to understand what the war was, who it was against, and what winning would have required.
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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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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.