Free, in-depth history guides on the major topics of modern history. Each guide combines narrative essays with embedded podcast episodes — read and listen together, or use the audio while you commute.
Available Guides
Weimar & Nazi Germany
The collapse of democracy, Hitler’s rise, and the Third Reich.
The Cold War
From the Grand Alliance to Gorbachev — the ideological struggle that shaped the modern world.
Stalin’s Soviet Union
CollectivisationCollectivisation Full Description:
The policy of forced consolidation of individual peasant households into massive, state-controlled collective farms. It represented a declaration of war by the urban state against the rural peasantry, intended to extract grain to fund industrialization. Collectivisation was a radical restructuring of the countryside that abolished private land ownership. The state seized land, livestock, and tools, forcing independent farmers into kolkhozy. Resistance was met with brutal force, including the “liquidation” of wealthier peasants (Kulaks) as a class.
Critical Perspective:This policy fundamentally altered the relationship between the people and the land. It treated the peasantry not as citizens to be supported, but as an internal colony to be exploited. By establishing a state monopoly on food production, the regime gained the ultimate lever of social control: the power to grant or withhold the means of survival, leading to man-made famines used to crush regional nationalism and resistance.
Read more, the Great Terror, and the Soviet war effort.
The British Empire
From the interwar mandate systemMandate System
Full Description:A mechanism established by the League of Nations after World War I to administer former Ottoman and German territories. “Class A” Mandates—Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, and Transjordan—were considered nearly ready for independence but placed under temporary control of France or Britain until they could “stand alone.” In reality, Mandates were colonies by another name.
Critical Perspective:The Mandate System was hypocrisy institutionalized. The same powers that carved up the Middle East for their own advantage claimed they were acting as benevolent trustees. No timetable for independence was set; “readiness” was defined by the mandatory power. Iraq was granted nominal independence in 1932, but with a British client king and treaty that preserved British military bases and oil control. The Mandate was not the road to freedom but the road to neocolonialism.
Read more to decolonisation and Suez.
The First World War
From the road to war in 1914 to the failed peace of 1919.
The Russian Revolution
The fall of the Tsar, 1917’s twin revolutions, and the Civil War.
The Holocaust
Persecution, genocide, the death camps, and the long shadow of memory.
The Vietnam War
From French Indochina to the fall of Saigon and America’s longest war.
Nazi Germany
Hitler’s rise, the Third Reich, and the road to total war and genocide.
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