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America’s de-industrialisation, offshoring, its battle to maintain dollar supremacy whilst also restoring itself to being a net exporter have led to historic crises from which there appear to be no exit. President Trump’s recent and clearly failing tariffs against China and the rest of the world are merely an indication of America’s relative economic decline. This podcast explores the factors that have powered rising Chinese living standards, economic and diplomatic power and the factors that ha
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In this episode of the Explaining History podcast we speak with the writer Dennis Broe whose new book The Dark Ages, explores the second Hollywood anti communist purge of 1951. We talk about Hollywood and Los Angeles as a site of ongoing class struggle, the role of the media and the LAPD in the development of modern Los Angeles and the role of dissenting writers and film makers in challenging the power of the studios.You can join Dennis for a zoom class on Darkest LA: Film Noir, Greed and Corpor
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Fifty years ago, the longest imperial war of the 20th Century ended with the fall of Saigon and the victory of the North Vietnamese in the reunification of Vietnam. Miki Nguyen’s account of his family’s desperate flight from Saigon is covered in his father’s story, Last Flight Out, and his father’s bravery escaping the retribution of the communist forces. You can read his book here, based on his father, Ba Van Nguyen’s memoirs.Explaining History helps you understand the 20th Century through cri
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Scholarship of the Black Power Movement in general and the Nation of Islam in particular has been harder to accumulate than that on the main Civil Rights Movement led by Dr Martin Luther King and the SCLC. This podcast explores reasons for this and the differing interpretations on the nation that were recorded by historians and sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s. Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining History podcast and its many years of content
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In June 1941 Nazi Germany and its allies invaded the USSR, they saw the conquest of the country, the eradication of its leadership and the starvation of tens of millions of its people as part of a wider goal at creating a zone of resource extraction for the Nazi state in order to enable it to withstand an allied blockade and to stand up to the industrial and agricultural might of the USA and the British Empire.Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining
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In the past 24 hours there has been further indication that an immense transition in international relations is under way, far more significant that the retreat into isolation at the end of the First World War. Trump and Vance have signalled their intent to shift the US away from its traditional post war role of being the centre of Pax Americana, the metropole of an unofficial empire, to the first amongst great power equals. The consequences for Europe in this realignment will be dire, but there
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Donald Trump has signalled a great strategic alignment away from the principles of Pax Americana, the post war unofficial imperium that America has operated since 1945 towards something that resembles the concert of great powers before the First World War. One of the powers thrown into diplomatic and strategic crisis as a result of this is Britain.Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining History podcast and its many years of content and would like to
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Between 1876 and 1920 the Ottoman Empire experienced its final crises, and despite delivering several shock defeats to allied powers during the First World War it was overcome by 1918 and subject to humiliating terms in 1920 – the consequences of which have reverberated across the 20th Century. This is the first of several podcasts on this huge historical transition that is still playing out across the Middle East and beyond. Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjo
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What is soft power? It was a term conceptualised by Joseph Nye at the end of the Cold War to encapsulate America’s moral and cultural appeal to the world. The current decline in the use of soft power by Trump administration was first accelerated by the neocons under George W. Bush, who accepted explicitly that the War on Terror would mean the abandonment of the pretence of moral leadership and this was encapsulated by torture at Abu Ghraib prison, rendition flights and Guantanamo Bay. This podca
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What is globalisation? In its current incarnation, it is the now collapsing system of quasi free markets established by the US and its allies after the Second World War that ensured a degree of stability in trade for wealthy countries and the plunder of poorer ones emerging from control by European empires. This podcast explores the functioning of this high point of globalisation and the crises within it. Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining Hist