Making sense of this crazy world

About 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.

Publisher

historymadeeasier

Category

history · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

31 Jan 2023

Latest episode

4 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

192 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   4 Oct 2026

   The Culture of Racism in America - The Culture of Jim Crow

   In this episode and the next, I want to make clear the degree of racism in America in the 1950s and into the 1960s. It will not only help us not only understand the civil rights movement, but it will help us better understand America today. Because as I’ve said on a number of occasions, racism is embedded in American society, Trump and the white supremacists haven’t come out of nowhere.

2. 

   27 Sept 2026

   Classical Liberalism's Response to the New Deal

   What we are going to look at in this episode is the response of classical liberals as they faced up to their first experience of social liberalism or what Americans call progressivism.

3. 

   20 Sept 2026

   Roosevelt's New Deal - Taming Capitalism

   Whereas the measures we have looked at that help to make up Roosevelt’s New Deal could be seen as emergency measures, necessary in a crisis, now we turn to more fundamental measures in that they introduce controls on capitalism that were intended to be permanent, and were intended to place controls on capitalism’s excesses, in effect to tame it.

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Spotify

5.0 / 5

4 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 46 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

62

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

76

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