20th Century Facts & Events

It seems that Ukraine rarely made the news until about 2013-14 when Russia invaded Crimea and somehow the Bidens were involved in a scandal. I knew of it, because my mother's family all trace their lineage to the Ukraine as recently as the 1920s. I do not go into any of that here - we're going back to the beginning of the 20th century, when Ukraine was a nation split between the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs. During the first half of...

The Cold War - a long, drawn out conflict between competing ideologies and world views. We start to look at the years immediately following VE -Victory Europe. There are iconic images of sailors celebrating in New York, and soldiers kissing girls in the streets of London; but for much of Europe, it would take years to get to a point of celebration. Let's look at why...

This is the first episode in this season and I will be continui...

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

If you have not listened to part 1 of this series, I recommend doing that first. The purpose of the series is to understand the police state that Nazi Germany became and to see the difference between the SS, the SA, the SD, the Ordnungs Polizei and the Gestapo, if there is a distinction. But it is not possible to view the perpetrators without eventually cons...

Here it is!  The finale - the culmination of the other three episodes where we have worked toward an understanding of where political forces stood in the mid-20th century.  I start this episode after the 1936-7 elections in India under the Raj and end it 10 years later with Indian and Pakistan Independence.  That decade packs a wallop for stuff happening.   

Primary characters in this episode are Muhammed A...

In Episode 1, I discussed the different players contributing to the rising tensions in the Spanish Republic in the years leading up to 1936.  They were the same tensions that were growing across Europe during the years of the Great Depression and all of the instability that had come as a result of the poor economy, failing empires as well as growing communist and fascist movements.  Listen now to how the military coup tur...

The civil war that ravaged Spain in the years leading up to World War II has been a footnote to the greater conflicts in Europe in the early 20th century.  But it had much greater implications; in some ways it became an extension of the Russian civil war.   It was a testing ground for the Nazi war machine, and it allowed Hitler to see how far he could push the boundaries with France, Britain and Russia, years before ...

If you have patiently listened to the first 2 episodes of this series, I hope you feel educated about the long history of this region.  The previous hours have been a preparation to help explain what happened in the 1990s.  Yugoslavia is breaking apart in 1991 and there is growing tension between the different Yugoslav republics.  The politicians have started to prey on their citizens' worst fears about each other. &...

This is the second of a 3 part series on the Bosnian War of the 1990s.  Please join me as I delve into  the relationship between the nations that make up the former Yugoslavia and give historical context for how those nations have been manipulated by other powers over the decades.  This episode starts in the late 1800's with the results of the Great Eastern Crisis and ends 100 years later in the 1980s, just prior to ...

In the late 20th century, as the Iron Curtain fell, the nations that made up the country of Yugoslavia began re-evaluating their relationship to one another and opening some old wounds.  Bosnia, a nation within Yugoslavia, with a long, complex history became a continuation of the atrocities of World War II,  with the rest of the world watching impotently.  Part 1 of the series examines Bosnian history and how it rela...