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 Jul 23, 2023
Sunday Jul 23, 2023
Having looked at China before the Chinese Communist Party came to power, I want to take a few episodes to look at the man who dominated Chinese history from the end of the ‘century of humiliation’ to his death in 1976. The man whose body still sits in a mausoleum in the middle of Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing: Mao. This episode looks at some of the reasons why he gained power.
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad
Sunday Jul 16, 2023
Sunday Jul 16, 2023
History is important to countries because it shapes the collective memory of the next generation, the way they see their own country and its place in the world. Pride, patriotism, knowing your friends and your enemies, knowing who you think you can trust and who you can’t trust, are all influenced by how history is taught. This episode will consider how history is taught in schools.
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad
Sunday Jul 09, 2023
Sunday Jul 09, 2023
I really like a phrase I came across in preparing this episode. It comes from in an article produced by the European Foundation for South Asian Studies called Assessing the ‘Century of Humiliation’. It says how ‘Contextualising history means contextualising behaviour’. To put it the other way round, to understand a country’s behaviour today, we have to look at it in the context of its history. For its historical experiences play a major part in how it sees the world today. And this episode looks at just what China’s ‘century of humiliation’ means to China today and what influence it has on China’s relationships with other nations.
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad
Sunday Jul 02, 2023
Sunday Jul 02, 2023
This was in fact a long century, lasting 110 years. For it began with the First Opium War with Britain which began in 1839. And it didn’t end until the end of WW2 and the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. It was a century in which China and the Chinese people suffered at the hands of imperial powers, mostly from Europe and Japan, but a little bit from America too. Every Chinese leader over the last century has regarded it to be his historic task to overcome that ‘century of humiliation’ and restore China to its rightful position in the world order: at the top. So, its important!
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad
Sunday Jun 25, 2023
Sunday Jun 25, 2023
If China is to become a dominant player, if not the dominant player, in the 21st century and beyond, then it is important that the rest of the world reaches an understanding of just what it is we are dealing with. We see the world very much from the perspective we have been taught: the British perspective, the European perspective, the American perspective. Well, China’s culture, its values and its history is very different, and so too is their view of the world we share.
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad
Sunday Jun 18, 2023
Sunday Jun 18, 2023
With this episode I’m going to give you a few insights to China – its history and its culture. I think it’s important because I think the world is going to change radically in the not-too distant future. The Western perception of how things should be done – free markets, democratic norms, the rule of law, human rights – are going to be challenged by different civilisations, notably China’s.
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad
Sunday Jun 11, 2023
Sunday Jun 11, 2023
The leaders of the G7 met recently and China was high on the agenda for their discussions. Rishi Sunak, the British Prime Minister, said that China posed 'the greatest challenge of our age.' He's not wrong, but how well does he know China? This episode begins a little series on China by giving some illustrations of the significance of the awakening giant.
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad
Sunday Jun 04, 2023
Sunday Jun 04, 2023
This episode looks at the consequences of the Iran-Iraq War as they rippled out across time from Iran and Iraq and their people, to the region as a whole and to the wider world.
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad
Sunday May 28, 2023
Sunday May 28, 2023
We’ve been looking at the impact of Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini on their people, and I’m going to end this mini-series by taking a look at the Iran-Iraq War. Lasting eight years, from 1980 through to 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was one of the longest wars since WW2, and it was one of the most bloody.
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad
Sunday May 21, 2023
Sunday May 21, 2023
We are looking at the impact of Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini on history and on people’s lives, and in this episode, it is the effect on the Iraqi and Iranian people that I will focus on.
Intro and outro music curtesy of slip.stream:
https://slip.stream/tracks/58fb6726-c035-4d10-a8e8-eba70e5164ad
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