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Wokeness and anti wokeness are inventions of the political right on both sides of the Atlantic. They are confected ideas that are pushed by elite think tank, media and political groups and have been used in different ways since the era of the counter culture in the late 1960s. Their prime advocates claim that ‘woke’ is some manner of threat to either freedom or common sense, but the reality is far more mundane. The well resourced, organised and funded political right in the US and UK seeks wedge
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A century ago, America was the literary and intellectual powerhouse of the world. Black writers defined the black experience in the Harlem Renaissance, F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the glamour and hypocrisy of the jazz age in The Great Gatsby and thousands of detective, western and sci fi pulp novels were published, creating the foundations of modern genre fiction. Today we hear from Tom Lutz, founding editor of the LA Review of Books and author of 1925: A Literary Encyclopaedia and explore this
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The character of Jim in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain was written as a condemnation of the Jim Crow regimes that were springing up across the South as the Reconstruction Era slowly came to an end. Twain’s Jim was the first Black character in popular American literature that can be thought of as being written in depth and without becoming another racist caricature. The story, set before the civil war, has been the subject of ongoing scholarship and contestation ever since. In t
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In this episode of The Explaining History Podcast we were fortunate enough to speak with Dr Surekha Davies, historian of art, science and ideas, whose new book, Humans: A Monstrous History explores the darker aspects of human imagining and how we see ourselves through the filter of the monstrous.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 help the show continue, please consider supporting i
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This episode is the third in our isms and ologies series on Anarchism and gives an explanation of anarchist thought on society, the state, communism and how the state and individuals interact.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 help the show continue, please consider supporting it in the following ways:If you want to go ad-free, you can take out a membership hereOrYou can support th
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In this episode of the podcast we continue with our study of the AQA syllabus – Russia 1917-53: Revolution and Dictatorship. We explore the nature of Stalinist culture during the period 1928-41Help 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 help the show continue, please consider supporting it in the following ways:If you want to go ad-free, you can take out a membership hereOrYou can support t
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Why has Donald Trump won an enormous victory not just amongst the electoral college votes but the popular vote too? For decades both parties have pursued economic policies that were developed in the Nixon and Reagan eras, which have benefitted finance capital over American society. The Democrats have simply offered more of the same, whilst Trump has presented a racist, nativist solution. Here the rest of my analysis in this special post election recording. I will be running a livestream Q&A for
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What are we doing when we write or think about history? What is it that historians do and when did they start doing it? We’re taking a new direction on the podcast here and exploring the origins of historical thinking, a type of writing that the Greeks thought to be the inferior cousin to philosophy. Each Saturday we’ll explore the practices and theories of history, and approaches to understanding the past or exploring it from classical antiquity to postmodernism. Help the podcast to continue br
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What happened when news of the Russian Revolution reached the empire’s rural areas? How did the largely non literate peasantry interact with this change? How did the Russian Orthodox Church carry the message of the revolution? What did the empire’s non Russian and non Christian peoples make of it? This episode explores the chaotic and fragmented way in which Russian society encountered revolutionary change. Help the podcast to continue bringing you history each weekIf you enjoy the Explaining Hi
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The Conservative Party is one of British history’s great survivors, it morphs and mutates when it needs to into new incarnations that help to preserve it and its mission to protect the interests of Britain’s elites, institutions against the threat of change from below. This was always true until now. The party that many British people see as the natural party of government is changing into a fringe far right conspiracy theorists club, with politicians like Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick and Liz T