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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 solutionThe Final Solution Full Description: The code name used by the Nazi administration for the specific phase of the Holocaust characterized by systematic, industrial extermination. It was adopted as the ultimate strategy only after earlier policies of forced emigration and territorial displacement had been deemed failures by the regime.The Final Solution represents the lethal culmination…
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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
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One of the problems with the teaching of GCSE history is the tendency for narrative to insert itself into specific modules. This is perhaps unavoidable as history has been passed on as story for tens of thousands of years and taught as an intellectual discipline for a little over 200. It is important to be mindful, however, that as a module ends, the idea that the issue in question has been ‘resolved’ is ‘over’ and/or ‘fixed’ can be unintentionally communicated to pupils. It goes without saying that this can result in a teleological and ahistorical view of change over time…
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By 1934, Britain appeared to have survived the worst effects of the great depression. Unemployment had begun to decline and new light industries in the south and the midlands had developed, supplying consumer goods for an affluent middle class. Britain’s economic problems were regionalised, however, and in the worst affected areas such as South Wales or Tyneside adult unemployment exceeded 70 percent. This podcast explores the response of the Jarrow ship workers, who look part in one of the many protest marches to London that were organised throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Their march, in 1936 received minimal support from…
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From 1943 onwards, long before the outcome of Britain’s war against Japan in Asia was certain, British colonial administrators pondered about what to do with French Indochina (occupied by Japan in 1941), once the Japanese were defeated. They knew comparatively little about the colony and believed it would be best to return it to the French at the end of the war. This decision was not taken in order to help the French or as an act of charity towards them, it was designed to counter a deadly threat to the British Empire. The British were concerned that if Indochina…
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At the end of the Second World War, the British Army marched into the French colony of Indochina, which had been occupied by Japan for the previous four years. The British used Japanese and Indian troops to prevent a Viet Minh nationalist government establishing itself and returned French colonists to power. 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