Podcast Episodes

America's boom years - 1950 to 1970 (part one)

What factors led to an unprecedented improvement in living standards for white American families during the post war decades? This podcast examines this period that is firmly rooted in the US and wor…

Published on 10 months, 3 weeks ago

Trump 2.0

It's Trump's second inauguration and here are some thoughts about him, about political organisation in the years ahead and why we absolutely cannot depend on centrist sensibles any longer.

Help the p…

Published on 10 months, 3 weeks ago

A brief history of Anarchism

This episode is the second in our isms and ologies series on Anarchism and gives a concise overview on the history of anarchist thought and politics from the 1848 revolutions onwards. Anarchism shape…

Published on 10 months, 4 weeks ago

The Mandate System, Palestine, Syria and Iraq

At the end of the First World War the Ottoman Empire was carved up between the British and the French, with Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq being taken as mandates by Britain and Syria and Lebanon be…

Published on 10 months, 4 weeks ago

Tiananmen Square 1989 - Part One

There are two main ways that historians have conceived of the causes of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, both as a struggle between liberalism and authoritarianism and between a people's social…

Published on 11 months ago

Civil Rights and the Fragmenting of the New Deal (part 2)

By the mid to late 1960s the Republican Party had found a series of wedge issues that combined to break three decades of Democrat power by 1968. Richard Nixon implemented the Southern Strategy, a dir…

Published on 11 months ago

Anarchism: A beginners guide Part One

It's my mission in 2025 to unpack ideologies and navigate their complex fluid nature, contradictions, theorists and explanations of the world. In January we're starting with anarchism and this is the…

Published on 11 months ago

Catastrophic Technologies and Cold War Fears

During the Cold War a range of liberal and left intellectuals looked at the new technologies born of the Second World War and its aftermath with mounting concern and alarm. Figures like Herbert Marcu…

Published on 11 months ago

Jean Marie Le Pen and the evolution of French Fascism

The most significant European fascist since Franco, Jean Marie Le Pen, died this week aged 96. This podcast explores the context of the rise of Le Front Nationale, and explores his role within it. P…

Published on 11 months, 1 week ago

Gorbachev in New York 1988

In 1988 Mikhail Gorbachev visited the USA on a state visit and experienced celebrity treatment in Times Square in New York as he came to visit the new president elect George H.W. Bush. This episode e…

Published on 11 months, 1 week ago