A global history podcast for curious people who want depth, clarity, and honest storytelling.
For more than a decade, the Explaining History Podcast has helped listeners around the world make sense of modern history. What began in 2012 as a simple experiment—short, accessible episodes explaining major historical events—has grown into a long-running library of carefully researched, thoughtful explorations of the 20th and 21st centuries.
This page introduces new listeners to the podcast, explains what makes it different from other history shows, and offers curated paths into more than a thousand episodes.
If you’re searching for a history podcast that goes deeper than anecdotes or trivia, this is where to begin.
What Is the Explaining History Podcast?
Explaining History is an independent, long-form history podcast dedicated to making complex global history clear, accurate, and engaging.
Each episode is written and presented by Nick Shepley, a historian, teacher, and author who has spent more than fifteen years helping students and general audiences understand the forces that shaped the modern world.
Unlike many history podcasts that prioritise entertainment or light commentary, Explaining History focuses on:
Serious scholarship, explained accessibly Primary sources and recent historiography Clear storytelling without sensationalism Global history beyond Europe and the U.S. Underrepresented perspectives and difficult histories Complexity without gatekeeping
It is, in effect, a portable history classroom, but without the jargon or exam pressure.
Who Is the Podcast For?
The Explaining History Podcast serves a wide and loyal audience:
• Students (GCSE, A-Level, IB, AP, undergraduate)
Clear explanations of major events, ideologies, and turning points.
• Teachers
A reliable source of classroom-ready historical summaries and recommended reading.
• History Enthusiasts
Deep dives beyond the usual narratives—anti-colonial movements, modern dictatorships, globalisationGlobalisation Full Description:While Globalization can refer to cultural exchange and human interconnectedness, in the context of neoliberalism, it is an economic project designed to facilitate the frictionless movement of capital. It creates a single global market where corporations can operate without regard for national boundaries. Key Mechanisms: Capital Mobility: Money can move instantly to wherever labor is cheapest or taxes are lowest. Offshoring: Moving manufacturing and jobs to countries with fewer labor protections. Race to the Bottom: Nations compete to attract investment by lowering wages, slashing corporate taxes, and weakening environmental laws. Critical Perspective:Neoliberal globalization creates a power imbalance: capital is global, but labor and laws remain local. This allows multinational corporations to pit workers in different countries against one another, eroding the bargaining power of unions and undermining the ability of democratic governments to regulate business in the public interest., economics, intelligence history, and more.
• Curious Listeners
People who want to understand the world’s past in order to make sense of the present.
Why People Listen
Listeners describe the podcast as:
“The clearest explanation of modern history anywhere.” “Accessible but never dumbed down.” “A historian who respects his audience enough to tell the truth.” “A treasure trove for teachers.”
The show’s purpose has never changed:
If people understand history, they understand the world—and themselves—better.
Start Here: Curated Listening Paths
Because there are more than a thousand episodes, new listeners often ask “Where do I begin?” Below are curated routes into the archive.
Big Turning Points of the 20th Century
Perfect if you want to understand the major forces that shaped our lives today.
The Russian Revolution
Hitler’s Rise to Power
The Great DepressionGreat Depression The global economic collapse that began with the US stock market crash of October 1929 and deepened through bank failures, trade collapse, and mass unemployment to produce the worst economic crisis of the twentieth century. By 1932, a quarter of American workers were unemployed; industrial production had fallen by half. The Great Depression began not with a single event but with a series of interconnected collapses. The October 1929 stock market crash wiped out speculative fortunes but would not, alone, have produced a decade-long depression; the depression was deepened by bank failures that wiped out the savings of ordinary Americans, by the Federal Reserve’s contractionary monetary policy that reduced the money supply, by the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 that triggered retaliatory trade barriers worldwide, and by the gold standard constraints that prevented governments from expanding their monetary supplies in response to the crisis. By 1932–33, a quarter of American workers were unemployed, industrial production had fallen by fifty percent, and the banking system had effectively ceased to function. The international dimension was crucial: Germany’s reparations obligations and war debt structure, financed by American loans, made the German economy uniquely vulnerable to the credit contraction. The Depression contributed directly to Hitler’s electoral rise — the Nazi Party gained over 37% of the vote in July 1932 in conditions of mass unemployment and national humiliation. The policy responses — Roosevelt’s New Deal, Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard, the various autarkic nationalisms of the 1930s — produced partial recovery in some countries while deepening the crisis in others. Full recovery required the Second World War’s military spending to restore full employment. The Great Depression was not a natural disaster but a political-economic failure: decisions made by governments, central banks, and financial institutions that could have been made differently. Keynes’s analysis — that the depression reflected a collapse of effective demand that markets could not self-correct without government intervention — was substantially correct, but politically unacceptable to the orthodoxies of the 1930s. The lasting significance of the Depression is not economic but political: it demonstrated that sustained mass unemployment was politically uncontainable, that democracies unable to provide economic security were vulnerable to authoritarian alternatives, and that the international economic system required political management that pure market mechanisms could not supply. The post-war Bretton Woods system — managed exchange rates, capital controls, the IMF and World Bank — was designed precisely to prevent a recurrence by building the international economic management mechanisms that had been absent in the 1930s. & Global Trade Collapse
The Fall of European Empires
The Cold War: Origins to Collapse
Empires, Colonisation & Anti-Colonial Struggles
Essential for listeners seeking global, non-Eurocentric history.
India: From Company Rule to Independence
Algeria’s War of Liberation
The Partition of IndiaPartition of India partition-of-india The 1947 division of British India into the independent states of India and Pakistan, accompanied by the largest mass migration in human history — approximately 14 million people crossing the new borders — and communal violence that killed between 200,000 and 2 million people. The Partition was the culmination of the British policy of separate Muslim and Hindu electorates that had deepened communal political identities since the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, combined with the Muslim League’s demand for a separate Muslim state that the Congress Party could not accommodate within a united India framework. Lord Mountbatten, appointed Viceroy to oversee the transfer of power, accelerated the timetable from June 1948 to August 1947, creating a planning crisis in which the Radcliffe Line — the new border drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never visited India — was announced on 17 August, two days after independence, leaving populations with days to decide which side of the line they were on. The Punjab and Bengal were divided, splitting communities, families, irrigation systems, and railway networks that had developed as integrated units. The violence that accompanied the mass migrations — Muslims moving toward Pakistan, Hindus and Sikhs toward India — included massacres, sexual violence, abductions, and forced conversions. The dispute over Kashmir — a Muslim-majority princely state with a Hindu maharaja that acceded to India rather than Pakistan — produced the first India-Pakistan war and a conflict unresolved to this day. Partition is a defining example of a political decision whose human costs were underestimated by those who made it and cannot be adequately captured in statistical form. The 200,000 to 2 million deaths represent not just individual tragedies but the destruction of communities that had coexisted — often tensely, but coexisted — across centuries of shared geography and economy. The deeper question the partition raises is whether it was avoidable. Historians have debated whether a united independent India was structurally possible given the political developments of the 1940s, or whether the Congress-League conflict had by 1947 made some form of division politically inevitable regardless of British decisions. The evidence suggests that specific decisions — Mountbatten’s acceleration of the timetable, the failure to prepare for mass migration, the manner in which the border was announced — made the violence worse than it needed to be, even if the political division itself may have been unavoidable. and Pakistan
Middle Eastern Mandates and Revolutions
Modern Political History
Episodes that explore states, ideologies, and political movements.
NeoliberalismMonetarism Monetarism is the economic school of thought associated with Milton Friedman, which rose to dominance as a counter to Keynesian economics. It posits that inflation is always a monetary phenomenon and that the government’s role should be limited to managing the currency rather than stimulating demand. Key Mechanisms: Inflation Targeting: Using interest rates to keep inflation low, even if high interest rates cause recession or unemployment. Fiscal Restraint: Opposing government deficit spending to boost the economy during downturns. Critical Perspective:Critics argue that monetarism breaks the post-war social contract. By prioritizing “sound money” and low inflation above all else, monetarist policies often induce deliberately high unemployment to discipline the labor force and suppress wages. It represents a technical solution to political problems, removing economic policy from democratic accountability. and the 1980s
Welfare States and Social Democracy
The Rise of Authoritarian Populism
Political Extremism in Europe and the U.S.
Economic History for Non-Economists
Explaining big economic processes without technical jargon.
Inflation, Oil Shocks, and 1970s Crisis
Bretton Woods The IMF and World Bank
Wars, Conflict, and Revolution
Military history with social, political, and human context.
Intelligence and espionage history
Vietnam, Korea & Cold WarCold War The geopolitical and ideological confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union that dominated global politics from 1947 to 1991. It was fought not through direct military conflict between the superpowers but through proxy wars, arms races, espionage, and ideological competition across the developing world. The Cold War began before the Second World War had fully ended: American and Soviet disagreements over the post-war order in Europe were visible at Yalta in February 1945 and had hardened into open confrontation by 1947, when the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to resisting Soviet expansion and the Marshall Plan began binding Western Europe to American economic leadership. The term itself was popularised by journalist Walter Lippmann in 1947, capturing the essential quality of a conflict that neither side could allow to become hot — because both possessed nuclear weapons capable of annihilating the other’s cities. The resulting stalemate was managed through deterrence, alliance systems (NATO in the West, the Warsaw Pact in the East), and the deliberate avoidance of direct superpower confrontation even while both sides fought intense proxy wars in Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan, and dozens of other theatres. The Cold War was simultaneously a strategic competition and an ideological one: each side claimed to represent the future of humanity, and each used development aid, propaganda, cultural diplomacy, and covert action to advance its model in the non-aligned world. It ended not with a military defeat but with the internal collapse of the Soviet system between 1989 and 1991. The Cold War’s most important characteristic was its globality: what began as a European dispute about occupation zones became a worldwide competition that shaped the politics of every continent. For the United States, it justified interventions that overthrew democratic governments (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973) on the grounds that any leftist government was a Soviet beachhead; for the Soviet Union, it justified the crushing of reform movements within its own bloc (Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1968) on the grounds that any deviation threatened the socialist camp. The Cold War’s legacy is therefore not only the fall of the Berlin Wall but the long list of democracies destroyed, developmental alternatives foreclosed, and civil wars fuelled in the name of containing the other side. The Third World paid the price for a confrontation between two powers that never actually fought each other. Proxy Wars
About the Host
Nick Shepley is a historian, author, teacher, and the creator of the Explaining History multimedia platform.
For more than fifteen years he has taught history to thousands of students around the world—through classrooms, books, online courses, and the podcast.
His work is grounded in three principles:
History belongs to everyone.
Complexity should not be a barrier.
Understanding the past is essential for navigating the present.
Nick is the author of three modern history textbooks, educational guides, and countless articles on modern history. His Explaining History podcast has been downloaded over two million of times and continues to grow daily.
How Episodes Are Researched and Created
The podcast is built on serious scholarship but delivered with accessibility in mind. Each episode involves:
Reading primary sources and major historians Condensing complex debates into clear narrative Writing full scripts Recording and editing independently
There is no production team, no sponsorship machine—just a historian sharing knowledge freely with listeners worldwide.
That independence is what allows Explaining History to cover topics that commercial platforms often ignore, including:
The political economy of the Cold War Anti-colonial resistance movements Economic crises and global inequality CIA covert operations Counter-narratives to popular myths
Explore Episode Categories
You can browse episodes by topic here:
World War II
The British Empire
American History
Middle East & Iran
Globalisation
Revolutions
Dictators & Authoritarianism
Social History
Economic History
Decolonisation
Intelligence & Espionage
How to Listen
You can find the Explaining History Podcast on:
Apple Podcasts Spotify Google Podcasts Pocket Casts RSS feed linked directly on this site
For the best listening experience and full episode notes, use the podcast category page on this website.
Support the Podcast
If you find value in Explaining History and want to help it grow, you can support the project through:
Substack (bonus episodes + articles) Books & Courses Sharing episodes with students and friends Leaving reviews on podcast apps
This support keeps the podcast independent, ad-free, and accessible to everyone.
