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On the morning of 13 December 1937, Japanese troops entered the Chinese city of Nanjing. The city had been the capital of the Nationalist government, which had fled westward ten days earlier, leaving behind a population of perhaps half a million civilians and a garrison of soldiers who had largely melted away into the city’s streets, stripped of their uniforms.
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The founding of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949 was the culmination of a civil war that had been running, in one form or another, since 1927. But to understand why that war ended as it did — with Mao’s Communist forces victorious and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government in flight to Taiwan — you have to go back to the alliance that preceded it: the United Front, and the catastrophic collapse that made the eventual reckoning inevitable.
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Is the era of Western global dominance coming to an end? This episode explores the profound decline of Western, and particularly American, “hard” and “soft” power on the world stage.We begin by contrasting two pivotal moments in history: Lord Palmerston’s 19th-century Britain, which could blockade a nation over the dubious claims of a single subject, and the modern United States, a superpower unable to prevent a small city-state like Singapore from punishing one of its citizens. This shift illus
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Explaining History Podcast: 2025 in Review – The Year the Tech War Was LostAs 2025 draws to a close, we reflect on a pivotal year that historians may one day see as the moment the world changed forever. This episode delves into the most significant geopolitical shift of our time: the American retreat from its tech and trade war with China, and the quiet acknowledgment that the battle has been lost.Join us as we analyze the key indicators of this tipping point, from tech oligarch Peter Thiel losi
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Unveiling Uzbekistan: A Nation at the Crossroads of History and FutureJoin host Nick as he welcomes back acclaimed journalist and author Joanna Lillis to the Explaining History podcast. Seven years after her last appearance to discuss her book on Kazakhstan, “Dark Shadows,” Joanna returns to shed light on the enigmatic nation of Uzbekistan, the subject of her new book, “Silk Mirage.”This episode delves into the complexities of a country that was, for 25 years, one of the world’s most brutal dict
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A seismic shift in US global strategy appears to be confirmed. In this explosive episode, we dissect the leaked draft of the Pentagon’s latest National Defense Strategy, which signals a historic reversal of decades of American foreign policy.We delve into the news that the US is formally de-prioritizing the “deterrence of China” in favor of a new focus on the homeland and the Western Hemisphere. What makes this shift so remarkable is its author: Elbridge Colby, the renowned strategist and author
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In 1940, when France fell to the Nazi invasion its colonies became Vichy satellites and in Asia, Vietnam rapidly fell under Japanese control. The French colonial elites saw their power gradually stripped away from them but it was the Vietnamese people that suffered terribly from Japanese rule with over a million dying in a famine created by the occupiers. The American OSS shipped arms to the Vietminh, the national liberation movement, but by 1945 they were far more concerned about the returning
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In this episode of Explaining History, we explore the fraught world of war reporting in Vietnam during the decade before full-scale U.S. involvement. Drawing on Philip Knightley’s classic study The First Casualty, we examine how embedded American correspondents were constrained by censorship, official manipulation, and the Pentagon’s control over information. We also highlight the surprising advantage held by some British reporters, who—operating outside the U.S. military’s embedded framework—we
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Is modern capitalism beginning to resemble a feudal system? This episode of Explaining History explores the provocative argument, drawn from the work of the late anthropologist David Graeber, that contemporary capitalism has evolved into a new form of feudalism.This episode delves into a lecture by David Graeber, where he contended that modern “rentier capitalism” shares many characteristics with historical feudalism. We’ll unpack the distinction he makes between a system based on the extraction
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The extent to which western soft power and legal and moral authority has been shredded by Gaza is lost upon British, American and European populations for the most part, but across the global south a new movement appears to be coalescing around South Africa and Columbia. In Europe, Ireland and Spain have joined with them and sixteen other global south countries to form the Hague Group, dedicated to upholding international law as it relates to Gaza. This, until quite recently, was inconceivable a