Making sense of this crazy world
I am a student of history, a teacher of history and a writer of history. You could say history is a passion of mine. I have a website for students and I had been mulling around this idea of a podcast for some time. Would people be interested? Would I make it interesting? That’s essentially what was holding me back. But with a new year starting, the craziness still all around us, I thought what the hell – give it a go, John! The primary purpose of the podcast is to use history to help us make a little more sense of this crazy world we are living in. I aim to do this by using history. It’s not the only tool to be used, but it is my chosen tool. Everything happens in a context and that context is recent history. But that recent history is almost always the result of older history. We have to go back into our past to understand today. I could easily rattle off a hundred other aims but trust me, they will be introduced as we go along. But there are two other aims I must own up to straight away. The first is that I really want to lay it on the line that history is always about people. I think it was the great historian, Eric Hobsbawm who said unemployment is an economic statistic but a human experience. And you can’t appear to be further away from people than with dry statistics – but you’re not. And the second is that there is always more than one story to tell; more than one “truth”. History is an interpretation of the past, nothing more. There are always other interpretations. When we look at this crazy world of ours today and try to make sense of what is happening, it is so important to bear that in mind - someone else thinks differently. And if we don’t understand that other interpretation, if we don’t even know it exists, then we can’t reach an understanding of what is happening. And our truth is less secure! I hope that makes sense.
Listen on:
Episodes
Sunday Aug 24, 2025
Sunday Aug 24, 2025
Last week I gave you the positive spin on the way capitalism developed in America in the 1920s. Well, this week we’ll be looking at the worrying side, the dark side even. It shows that there are always, or nearly always, two ways to look at things, and it also shows the shortcomings, even the danger, of capitalism
Sunday Aug 17, 2025
Sunday Aug 17, 2025
Herbert Hoover, in accepting the Republican nomination to run for president in 1928, said ‘One of the oldest and perhaps the noblest of human activities has been the abolition of poverty … we in America today are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of our land.’ And that’s what were setting off to look at next: capitalism in America.
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad
Sunday Aug 10, 2025
Sunday Aug 10, 2025
This week, I'm going to take a deeper look at capitalism and present a sweeping history of it from the first industrial revolution in nineteenth-century Britain to today. And I'll leave you with a question: should capitalism be controlled by government?
Sunday Aug 03, 2025
Sunday Aug 03, 2025
The focus for this, and the next episode will be the economic and political system that formed the basis for the first industrial revolution in Britain and looks ahead to the development of Western economies: capitalism and the profit motive.
Sunday Jul 27, 2025
Sunday Jul 27, 2025
The industrial revolution created a new class: the working class, with its own experiences, its own culture and its own needs. It is a class that has come a long, long way since that first industrial revolution in Britain and this episode sets out to sketch that journey.
Sunday Jul 20, 2025
Sunday Jul 20, 2025
As well as bringing about the rise of the city, the industrial revolution brought about a social revolution that utterly transformed society. It developed a middle class and created a working class, giving shape to the society we live in today. In this episode I will focus on the development of the middle class.
Sunday Jul 13, 2025
Sunday Jul 13, 2025
In 1801 25% of British people lived in towns, 75% in the countryside; by the middle of the century, it was roughly 50-50; by the end the century those first figures were reversed with 75% of the population living in towns and cities and only 25% in the countryside. But what was life like in those towns and cities.
Sunday Jul 06, 2025
Sunday Jul 06, 2025
Having tried to explain why Britain was the first industrial nation and how an industrialised world began to take shape, in this episode I want to go further into what changed and not just describe what it was like for those who lived through it but show how the miserable lives of the foot soldiers of industrialisation, focusing particularly on agricultural workers, factory workers, coal miners, with a spotlight on children, was a result of the profit motive.
Sunday Jun 29, 2025
Sunday Jun 29, 2025
This episode looks a little deeper at the period in which the industrialising world catches up and overtakes Britain.
*Do note that since researching and recording this episode, India has overtaken Japan to become the world's 4th biggest economy. How fast this world of ours is changing!
Sunday Jun 22, 2025
Sunday Jun 22, 2025
I’m continuing my look at the industrialising world by focusing on the globalisation of the industrial revolution, well at least its spread to Europe and America!