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This is the first of many podcasts exploring the writing of historian Sean McMeekin in his revisionist exploration of the role of the USSR in World War Two. In this episode we examine how conventional ideas about Stalin’s intentions, preparedness and his outlook regarding the prospects of the allied powers against Germany by 1941 need to be revised. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert interviews. We connect the past to the present. I
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Part two of today’s exploration of Chiang Kai Shek’s decision making in the summer of 1937 as Japan’s armies placed ever greater pressure on northern China.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 Exclusive ContentBecome a Patron: patreon.com/explaininghistory▸ Join the Community & Continue the ConversationFacebook Gr
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This is the fourth part of my exploration of the Ukraine crisis, and its wider ramifications. Across Europe and America both the Russian Federation and more recently Ukraine have found sympathisers whose support to either side reflects the state of cultural conflicts that have divided western democracies in the past decade. Whether this is by Russian design or not, these divisions and the support from the far right and populist right of the west have benefitted Vladimir Putin immesurably. Explai
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This is the first of a multi part exploration of protest music in America during the late 1960s, beginning with Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s Ohio, written to mourn the killing of four students by the National Guard at Kent State University in Ohio, in May 1970. By the late 1960s, the pressure of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement had led to a progressive radicalisation of the new left and also a reactionary backlash from America’s lower middle classes, who flocked to Nixon in 1968
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During the First World War, much of the fighting occurred in colonial Africa, which in 1918, the victorious powers believed could not rule itself. President Woodrow Wilson of the USA and Britain were able to collude on a neo colonial mandate system that mainly benefited them at the expense of France. All three had agreed that it was unthinkable that former German and Ottoman colonies be returned. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical conversations and expert i
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When Britain, France and Russia secretly planned to carve up the Ottoman Empire in 1915, France made a claim on Ottoman Syria and acquired it as a mandate during the Paris Peace Conference. Brutality, colonial mendacity and a refusal to acknowledge the demands of Druze leaders and Syrian nationalists led to an explosion of anti colonial violence in 1925, along with an equally brutal response from the French occupiers. Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through critical con
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During the 1950s, as Britain attempted to hold on to its African colonies, it had to deal with the ambitions of white colonial settlers for domination of the black population on a more explicitly racist model of government, exemplified by apartheid South Africa and the growing force of black nationalism. The British attempted to foster ‘moderate’ African leaders who might be compliant in a new state, the Central African Federation, which incorporated North and South Rhodesia and Nyasaland. Outma
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When the poorly defended British colony of Burma was attacked by Japan in December 1941 it quickly collapsed. For many Burmese, it was a moment of opportunity and for the British a desperate bid for escape and survival. Racial colonial attitudes soon showed themselves as the million Indians who had served the British in Burma were abandoned by their colonial masters and at least 50,000 died as they walked across the Burmese jungle to the Indian border. Explaining History helps you understand the
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By the end of 1946 a guerrilla war was being waged by the new Democratic Republic of Vietnam against the colonial French in the south, but developments over the next three years would radically expand the scope of the conflict to make it the ‘first total war of the anti colonial era’. 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 Sho
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Between 1918 and 1939 France’s overseas colonial empire, like Britain’s, grew with the acquisition of Ottoman territories as mandates. France’s empire was ruled using different ideas and institutions to Britain but both systems struggled to hold together during economically and politically turbulent decades. 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