Épisodes

  • 1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe

    1942: When World War II Engulfed the Globe
    Sep 23 2025
    By the end of the Second World War, more than seventy million people across the globe had been killed, most of them civilians. Cities from Warsaw to Tokyo lay in ruins, and fully half of the world’s two billion people had been mobilized, enslaved, or displaced.

    In 1942, historian Peter Fritzsche offers a gripping, ground-level portrait of the decisive year when World War II escalated to global catastrophe. With the United States joining the fight following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, all the world’s great powers were at war. The debris of ships sunk by Nazi submarines littered US beaches, Germans marauded in North Africa, and the Japanese swept through the Pacific. Military battles from Singapore to Stalingrad riveted the world. But so, too, did dramas on the war’s home fronts: battles against colonial overlords, assaults on internal “enemies,” massive labor migrations, endless columns of refugees.

    With an eye for detail and an eye on the big story, Fritzsche takes us from shipyards on San Francisco Bay to townships in Johannesburg to street corners in Calcutta to reveal the moral and existential drama of a people’s war filled with promise and terror.

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    48 min
  • Episode 482: The Boiling Pot

    Episode 482: The Boiling Pot
    Sep 19 2025
    In the span of one decade, Great Britain went from winning a war against France to fighting a war with its own colonies. This is that story.

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    25 min
  • Episode 481: The Partition of Poland

    Episode 481: The Partition of Poland
    Sep 17 2025
    Over the course of roughly three decades, Lithuania-Poland ceased to exist.

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    12 min
  • Episode 480: The Seven Years War

    Episode 480: The Seven Years War
    Sep 12 2025
    AKA the French and Indian War for those of you who ever took US History...

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    33 min
  • Episode 479: Storm on the Horizon

    Episode 479: Storm on the Horizon
    Sep 5 2025
    A number of factors led into the Seven Years War. Here I break them down.

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    18 min
  • Episode 478: Pirates!

    Episode 478: Pirates!
    Sep 1 2025
    Plus the Russo-Turkish War of 1710 and the founding of New Orleans.

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    24 min
  • Episode 477: Prussia

    Episode 477: Prussia
    Aug 25 2025
    Frederick I founds the Kingdom of Prussia and the Great Frost of 1709 grips Europe.

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    19 min
  • Episode 476: Peter the Great

    Episode 476: Peter the Great
    Aug 22 2025
    Russia enters our story as a major power player under Peter the Great.

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    16 min