Explaining History

In January 1945 the city of Budapest was surrounded by the Red Army and Hitler's occupying forces made a desperate and futile last stand. The siege of the city by the Red Army is often overshadowed by the subsequent downfall of Berlin, but the consequences for the inhabitants were no less savage.

In the second half of the 1930s the Polish Government abandoned its previously liberal policies towards Poland's large Jewish population and instead hoped to force mass migration to the British mandate of Palestine. Their partners in this endeavour were the extreme right wingers on the zionist movement, the revisionists, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky.

In the 1960s a diverse movement of protest and activism closely associated (but not limited to) the hippy movement developed in the USA. The politicised parts of the counterculture demanded the overthow of capitalism but did not look to the USSR as a possible replacement - Soviet communism had long since been discredited. Webinar Links (discount code: WF0009023) Modern Britain: http://www.hoddereducation.co.uk/Event/562 Germany 1945-91: http://www.hoddereducation.co.uk/Event/561 Nazi Germany http://www.hoddereducation.co.uk/Event/563 Soviet Russia http://www.hoddereducation.co.uk/Event/564 Also, if you can spare a dime towards the hosting, I'd be ever so grateful: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/help-fund-the-explaining-history-podcast/x/13613771#/

In 1964 the Republican nominee for that year's presidential race, Barry Goldwater, was defeated by the Democratic incumbent Lyndon Johnson. However, the libertarian ideas that Goldwater advocated endured and developed throughout the 60s and 70s into a new right political orthodoxy that would finally be realised in the 1980s by Ronald Reagan.

When Leonid Brezhnev came to power in 1964 he was determined to undo many of the liberalising reforms of his predecessor Nikita Khrushchev. However, his appointment of Alexei Kosygin gave joint control of the economy to a moderniser who attempted to introduce more market based reforms.

At the end of the Second World War, the USA reshaped the world economy in its own interests. The acute economic problems facing great Britain due to the cost of the war were a matter of indifference to many US policy makers and large sections of the American public. When John Maynard Keynes, Britain's pre-eminent economist proposed that Britain seek a loan from the USA, tough negotiations followed which would have a profound effect on post war Britain's economy and society.

When Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz between 1940 and 1943 was tried for his crimes in 1947 he was open and revealing about the process of genocide at the camp and the attitudes of the SS men under his command to their work. The testimony raises as many questions and challenges for Holocaust historians as it answers.

In 1916 a British officer, Thomas Edward Lawrence and an Arab Prince, Feisal of Mecca led a guerrilla army of Bedouin against the Ottoman Empire in Arabia. In the 1920s Lawrence became an international celebrity due to his wartime exploits and he has remained a mythologised figure for much of the 20th Century.

In 1922, during the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic a social research institute was established in Frankfurt. It was set up by Marxist intellectuals and the alumni of the school had a massive impact on 20th Century thought, examining the workings of mass society, consumerism, culture, totalitarianism and the unconscious.

In the post war decades the dream of new affordable housing came true for millions of white Americans. Black, Latino, Jewish and other ethnic minority families were excluded from the new utopia of the suburbs and instead many lived in increasingly deprived inner city ghettoes.

In 1936 two hundred unemployed ship workers marched from the North East of England to London to demand that something be done to alleviate the poverty that their community faced. Their march, from the town of Jarrow, was just one of a series of marches and protests from the poorest declining industrial areas of Britain in the 1920s and 30s, but in most instances marchers were ignored by the Labour Party and the Trade Union Congress.

At the end of the Second World War, the British Army marched into the French colony of Indochina, which had been occupied by Japan for the previous four years. The British used Japanese and Indian troops to prevent a Viet Minh nationalist government establishing itself and returned French colonists to power.

In the second half of the 19th Century a quiet publishing revolution was taking place. Victorian ladies with education and wealth were able to produce new newspapers, pamphlets and books demanding equal political and legal rights for women.

Between 1918 and 1939 France's overseas colonial empire, like Britain's, grew with the acquisition of Ottoman territories as mandates. France's empire was ruled using different ideas and institutions to Britain but both systems struggled to hold together during economically and politically turbulent decades.

In 1947, two days after India became an independent nation, the plans to partition the country into a Hindu India and Muslim East and West Pakistan were announced. British policies of divide and rule, combined with hastily drawn up boundaries and a lack of a real understanding about the possible outcome led to ethnic violence on an enormous scale.