Explaining History

In the early 1970s John Lennon embarked on a brief and rather inglorious career as a political activist while based in America. His activism was an indication of the wider radicalisation of the decade and can help us to examine the prevalence of the counter culture in 1970s America.

In 1966 after four years of existing at the margins of the Chinese Communist Party following the disasters of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong returned. He claimed that revisionist and right deviationist elements within the party were derailing the revolution and only the millions of Red Guards and the Chinese workers and peasants could put China back on track to socialism. The result was the catastrophic cultural revolution.

Erich Fromm, one of the most overlooked intellectual figures of the 20th Century wrote insightful critiques of consumerist capitalism and explanations of the appeal of Nazism. His work also explored the dilemmas of being human in an increasingly alienating world.

By the early 1960s the once cordial relations between the USSR and The People's Republic of China had been replaced by suspicion and animosity. Two rival interpretations of communism vied for supremacy across the communist world and East Germany came to back the Soviet Union against the Chinese.

by early 1918 the Bolshevik's revolution was in serious danger of being overthrown. Instead of elite troops the new government possessed poorly disciplined Red Guards. By 1921, the army was over three million strong and had defeated its enemies, but at immense political cost to its creator, Leon Trotsky.

When the Nazis' occupation of Greece ended and a gradual withdrawal turned into a desperate retreat from the Red Army, a civil war in Greece began. The British occupied Athens in a bid to restore King George II and prevent a communist takeover, but it proved to be one of Churchill's most controversial initiatives of the war and the beginning of a conflict that would last until 1949.

Towards the end of the Second World War, zionist terrorist Menachem Begin and the paramilitary organisation Irgun instigated their own war against the British authorities in Palestine. They sought to establish a Jewish state there and saw the British as an obstacle to this ambition

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s the British became increasingly aware that they were vulnerable to air attack, especially after the rise of Nazism in 1933. The policy of evacuating children from the inner cities to counter this threat began in 1939, but at considerable physical and emotional cost to the children involved.

During Stalin's First Five Year Plan (1928-1932), the Russian population experienced greater material hardship and shortages than at any time since the Russian Civil War. Mass industrialisation led to food and housing shortages, resulting in misery and protest among the urban population.

Lyndon Johnson had an antagonistic relationship with the Kennedy brothers but was indispensable to John F Kennedy as a political fixer. Following Kennedy's death he became President of the USA and won a landslide victory a year later. This podcast explores the career, ambitions, struggles and crises of Lyndon Johnson.

In March 1918 in Britain, Parliament voted to enfranchise property owning women for the first time. This podcast explores the wartime decisions that led to this moment of radical electoral reform.

In the second half of the 1970s Americans developed a profound disillusionment with politics and a skepticism towards the office of president. The impact of Watergate and the apparent weakness of Nixon's two successors combined with an overall economic gloom and American humiliation in Vietnam and the Middle East.

In the second half of the 1970s Americans developed a profound disillusionment with politics and a skepticism towards the office of president. The impact of Watergate and the apparent weakness of Nixon's two successors combined with an overall economic gloom and American humiliation in Vietnam and the Middle East.

In the second half of the 1970s Americans developed a profound disillusionment with politics and a skepticism towards the office of president. The impact of Watergate and the apparent weakness of Nixon's two successors combined with an overall economic gloom and American humiliation in Vietnam and the Middle East.

The massive increase in government spending, borrowing and currency devaluation that occurred during the First World War by all powers led to a global surge in inflation. This growth in prices had major implications for both the combatant powers and the empires they governed