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In 2014 I attended a forum held by No 10 Downing Street at Wembley Arena. Holocaust survivors and their families were being invited to participate in the Prime Minister’s commission for a permanent memorial for the Holocaust in Britain. Since the 1990s, successive British Prime Ministers have each attempted to out-do their predecessors in their desire to acknowledge and embrace the legacy of the Holocaust. Organisations like the Holocaust Education Trust, who I work for from time to time have benefitted in terms of funding and their ability to influence government policy, and the profile of the Holocaust has…
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When Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz between 1940 and 1943 was tried for his crimes in 1947 he was open and revealing about the process of genocide at the camp and the attitudes of the SS men under his command to their work. The testimony raises as many questions and challenges for Holocaust historians as it answers. 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, p
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Here, in a nutshell, is why is set up this blog, podcast and YouTube Channel. I think.
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By the time most teachers have started delivering GCSE or A level lessons on Nazi Germany, their pupils will already have consumed hours of movies, documentaries and YouTube clips about Hitler. This, you might think, is an advantage. Rarely can a classroom teacher expect their learners to come prepared with subject knowledge so when they do it should be embraced. Well, yes and no. Perhaps more no than yes. A two dimensional, highly simplified and mythologised version of Germany in the 1930s is absorbed from the various history cable channels by learners who come to the lesson with the following…
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This is a video I recorded earlier today, focusing on the memory of the Holocaust in Europe and America. I’ve already done quite a lot on debates surrounding the origins of the Holocaust so this is more focused on the contested memory of the final solution:
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In 1918, at the end of the First World War, Thomas Edward Lawrence was unknown to the vast majority of the British population. Throughout the 1920s, however, his wartime activities were popularised and he became a military celebrity that ranked alongside Horatio Nelson. Lawrence had been British intelligence in Egypt’s liaison with the Arab rebels of the Hejaz and had waged a guerrilla war against the Ottoman Empire. He was one of the few Arabic speakers in the British Army and had worked before the war as an archeologist in Syria. He was a complex and contradictory figure, at once…
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In 1916 a British officer, Thomas Edward Lawrence and an Arab prince, Feisal of Mecca led a guerrilla army of Bedouin against the Ottoman Empire in Arabia. In the 1920s Lawrence became an international celebrity due to his wartime exploits and he has remained a mythologised figure for much of the 20th Century. 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 a
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In 1922 the Institute for Social Research was established in Frankfurt, bringing together many of the more disparate strands of leftist thinking in Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. Here’s a video on a small part of the institution’s vast impact on 20th Century thought.
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When I studied American history about 27 years ago, during the late 1980s, we gave a cursory look at the development of post war suburbia. In a packed syllabus there was little time to do the topic justice. Considering the many millions of Americans the development of suburbia affected, both positively and negatively, it should be regarded as one of the most significant developments in the study of 20th Century American social history. One glaring omission from the textbooks was the racial dimension to the development of suburbia and the fact that it was planned and developed as an exclusively white…
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In the post war decades the dream of new affordable housing came true for millions of white Americans. Black, Latino, Jewish and other ethnic minority families were excluded from the new utopia of the suburbs and instead many lived in increasingly deprived inner city ghettoes. 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.▸ Support the Show & Get