Explaining History

Nick Shepley

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Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes – The Golden Age, the Fall of Communism, and the Crisis o…

5/9/2026 • 29 min

**In this solo episode of the Explaining History Podcast, we return to Eric Hobsbawm's magisterial overview of the 20th century, *Age of Extremes*, to explore the paradoxes that shaped our world – and the crisis that defines our present.** Hobsbawm argued that the "short twentieth century" – from 1914 to 1991 – was defined by the confrontation between capitalism… Play episode

The Tsar's Generals and the Press – Russian Military Journalism in the Ref…
Austerity Never Ended – The Cultural Politics of Thrift in Modern Britain
The Lost Empire of Emmanuel Nobel – Oil, Revolution, and the Birth of the …
The Death of Britain's Two-Party System – A Century in the Making
The Transnational Far Right – Hate, Vigilantism, and the Mainstreaming of …
The Gulf Crisis – Two Theories of American Decline
The New World Order and Its Unravelling – From Bush Snr to Trump
China's Transformation 1978-84
Capitalism without Democracy
The End of NATO?
Petitions, protests and the Mandate System 1919-21
The Birth of the Multipolar Order and the "Evisceration" of the West
Trump's self created gulf trap
Are We Already in World War III?
Iran, the Straits of Hormuz, and the Graveyard of Navies
The Oscars and the Making of Hollywood
Civil crisis in the Ottoman Empire in 1913
Iran Roundup – America's Escalating Crisis in the Persian Gulf
Gambling, Pornography, and the Making of Modern America with Dennis Broe
London, New York and the Russian Revolution – The Emigré Hub of 1917
The Habsburg Army in 1914 – Incompetence, Illusion, and the Road to Disast…
Trump, Iran, and the Trajectory of American Empire
Serial Killers, the Blitz, and the Cracks in Britain's Wartime Myth
Defending Britain, Defending the Empire
The long wait for freedom for South Africa's slaves
The Dowding System and the Battle of Britain
Survival and greed in the conquest of the Aztec Empire
Anti-Colonial Struggle 1945-2026
Martha Gellhorn, Racism, and the Atrocities of Vietnam
The Collapse of the Sick Man: The First Balkan War and the End of Ottoman …
The Age of Catastrophe: Eric Hobsbawm and the Crisis of the Liberal Order
Mao's Lost Generation: Youth, Ideology, and the Cultural Revolution
The origins of the Watts Riot - 1965
Shellshock Nation: Fear, Fantasy, and the Myth of the "Devil's Decade"
The Politics of Resentment: From Brownshirts to ICE
The Scramble for Libya: Italy, the Ottomans, and the Prelude to the Balkan…
The Global Shock of the February Revolution 1917
The Greenland Crisis, British Weakness, and the Looming Collapse of the At…
Mississippi Burning and the Freedom Summer of 1964
The War on the Peasantry: Stalin, the Grain Crisis, and the Road to Famine…
De-Dollarization and the Trumpist Threat to the Fed
Sultan Abdulhamid's Counter Revolution - 1909
The Anonymous Ideology: Neoliberalism, Capital, and the Invisible Hand
Emergency Episode: The Murder of Renée Good and the Rise of the American D…
Official remembering and forgetting in Xi Xinping's China
The End of NATO? Greenland, Trump, and the Collapse of the Atlantic Allian…
Was the Russian Revolution Inevitable? Historiography, Myth, and the Colla…
24 Hours Later: The Reality of Trump's Venezuelan Adventure
Emergency Episode: The attack on Venezuela - implications and consequences

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