Explaining History

In 1936 a British Christian Zionist army officer, Orde Wingate, was posted to the British Mandate in Palestine to help quell the Arab revolt. Wingate's passionate support for the Jews in Palestine led to him organising a brutal counter insurgency against the Arabs with the Jewish defence organisation the Hagannah, laying down the tactics later employed by the Israeli Defence Force.

As the Tsarist empire collapsed and Russia's new rulers, the Bolsheviks, negotiated with Germany at Brest Litovsk, the most important territory to both powers was Ukraine. The fate of the nation and its wealth of food and mineral resources would decide the outcome of the war for both empires.

In the mid 1930s, the Soviet Union claimed that living standards in the USSR had surpassed those in the capitalist world. For a brief period during the Second Five Year Plan the regime's focus was on creating a consumer culture of department stores and choice for Soviet citizens.

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Between 1956 and 1957 Mao Zedong took the unprecedented step of encouraging criticism amongst the people of the Chinese Communist Party. The deluge of anger and rage towards the party was overwhelming and swiftly inspired a brutal reaction from the dictator and a crack down against dissent.

Seventy years ago this month the British Army discovered a scene of unimaginable horror at a prison camp in Saxony. The concentration camp at Bergen Belsen was used as evidence of the Nazis crimes to the world and particularly to a war weary British public.

May's book review (slightly early I know) Churchill and the Islamic World: http://www.ibtauris.com/Books/Humanities/History/Regional%20%20national%20history/European%20history/British%20%20Irish%20history/Winston%20Churchill%20and%20the%20Islamic%20World%20Orientalism%20Empire%20and%20Diplomacy%20in%20the%20Middle%20East.aspx?menuitem=%7B33E2E1B2-D37C-47D2-9984-8F332F3214BA%7D

In 1961, the city of Berlin, divided between East and West since 1945 saw a more permanent division erected. A wall that cut the city in two prevented East Germans from crossing from East to West enticed by the promise of a better life. * Support Explaining History here: please take a moment to look at my project https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/explaining-history and pledge whatever you can - there are some great rewards on offer!)

In 1945, at the end of the Second World War, the Labour Party swept to power on a mandate of social reform. Six years later, despite the creation of an almost universally popular National Health Service, the party was defeated in the 1951 election and spent 13 years in opposition. What explains their success and failure in one term in office?

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 mid 1930s the Polish government contemplated the mass deportation of its large Jewish population to the British Mandate of Palestine. This anti semitic policy gained support from an unlikely ally, the right wing zionist Jews that made up the revisionist movement in Poland.

In the mid 1930s the Polish government contemplated the mass deportation of its large Jewish population to the British Mandate of Palestine. This anti semitic policy gained support from an unlikely ally, the right wing zionist Jews that made up the revisionist movement in Poland.

Between 1949 and 1963 Konrad Adenauer's Christian Democratic Union party dominated West German politics, the Social Democratic Party opponents hopelessly out of touch with the electorate. The price of post war stability, however, was paid by vigorously suppressing the past and distancing West Germans from hard truths about the Third Reich's crimes.

In 1943 British journalist Alexander Werth reported from Leningrad, after the longest siege of the war had just been broken by the Red Army. He found the city he was born in devastated by the Nazis and a population that had born some of the bloodiest sacrifices of the war. His memoir of Leningrad is reviewed here. http://www.ibtauris.com/Books/Economics%20finance%20business%20%20management/Industry%20%20industrial%20studies/Media%20information%20%20communication%20industries/Press%20%20journalism/Leningrad%201943%20Inside%20a%20City%20Under%20Siege.aspx?menuitem=%7B19E11E12-06C7-4230-BA23-4A2B8F174CB8%7D

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.