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Hi everyone, it’s been a while since my last post as I’m working on a new textbook on Chinese history, but here’s just one of the many video’s I’ll post on the next few days by way of compensation. It’s a recording on a very volatile period in British labour history in the three decades before World War One. <object width=”425″ height=”344″><param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/v/202TczyWs7U&hl=en&fs=1″></param><param name=”allowFullScreen” value=”true”></param><
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Here is a roundup of what I was talking about yesterday at Pencoed Comprehensive. Morality Hoess Here is a link to a podcast I recorded on Rudolf Hoess some time ago, it explains the moral problems surrounding his testimony and the book Commandant of Auschwitz) (Below is Hoess’s house as seen from Auschwitz One). Eichmann and Arendt Here is another recording on the Wannsee Conference Here is an article by the historian Tony Judt on Hannah Arendt and the ‘problem of evil’ Bystanders A great place to start reading about the role of bystanders during the Holocaust is in the…
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In August 1939 the Nazi Soviet Pact shocked the world. Two dictators and sworn enemies, who were under no illusions about future conflict with each other signed a non aggression pact and trade deal. It contained a secret clause about the division and occupation of Poland, a state which neither viewed as legitimate and Stalin viewed as an existential threat. Here’s a short video on the agreement and its consequences.
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Hi student listeners and readers, here’s a few thoughts on the exams you’ll be sitting over the next few weeks. It’s a short recording to help you think in a way that’s going to benefit you and hopefully leave you feeling less stressed and more focused.
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By 1946 General Douglas MacArthur was installed as America’s imperial viceroy in Tokyo, with more power over the Japanese than any US president before or since has had over the American people. His tenure in Japan led to a revolution in the practices of government and the development of a modern constitutional monarchy. He was careful not to threaten the position of Emperor Hirohito, despite clear evidence of his guilt in war crimes across Asia.
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The horrors of the fall of Berlin in April and May 1945 have been depicted in films and documentaries such as Oliver Hirschbeigel’s Downfall (2004). That Hitler spent his final days in a bunker and died by his own hand are facts that are widely understood and the mental image of a besieged and dying regime holding out ’til the end occupy a place in our darkest imaginings. The fate of Budapest in the same year is far less well known, but in many ways the two cities were in timately connected in the horror of the war and the onslaught…
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In the middle of the 1930s the official policy towards the Jews in Poland began to change. The liberal approach to the large Jewish population pioneered by Josef Pilsudski, the father of the nation, died with him in May 1935. What came in its place was a plan to export Poland’s Jews to Palestine, then a British mandate in the Middle East. The development of Poland as a nation state from 1918 onwards led to growing demands for a racially homogenous society from Polish nationalists. Whilst the treatment of the Jews and plans for their future treatment were in no…
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Hi all, apologies for the lack of posting, it’s a busy time of year for a history teacher, but without further ado, here are two recent videos. The first is on the subject of Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for the Presidential Election of 1964. Goldwater lost to Lyndon Johnson, who won by the biggest margin in US electoral history. However, the ideas Goldwater expounded, fiscal conservatism and a return to American ‘family values’ shaped the following decades in profound and lasting ways. The second video is on the American counter culture, a complex and shifting group of idealists, fellow…
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By the end of the Khrushchev era, conservatives within the regime saw nothing but failure. Not only had the post Stalinist thaw resulted in chaos as far as they could see, but the economic initiatives the General Secretary had put forward, such as the Virgin Lands Campaign, had been dismal failures. The coup to oust him, partly orchestrated by Leonid Brezhnev, was followed by an 18 year period where new economic ideas were looked upon with suspicion at best. Lenin, Stalin and Khrushchev had all based their rule on a particular model of political economy, the economic ideas they espoused…
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Britain’s two world wars were fought as much by economists as they were by generals. Finding a strategy to pay for the wars against Germany and her Axis allies was a key part of Britain’s national survival. Hitler’s economic strategy was based around conquest and plunder, with occupied peoples paying for his wars and Germany’s standards of living. In Britain’s case, the USA by 1941 was the country’s source of economic salvation and it was John Maynard Keynes who had most interaction with the American treasury officials and diplomats to negotiate not only the wartime loans but also the shape…
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