Come to the station, jump from the train, march at the dobble down lovers' lane.

Stand in the glen where the roses entwine.

Lay down your armsined Lay down your arms

Lay down your arms

And surrender to mine

Hello and welcome history friends

Patrons all to 1956

Episode 2.1

The Suez Crisis is our end destination But to get there, we have to set things in their proper context

and make sure we fully understand what's going on.

The British, French, Israelis, Egyptians, and even the Suez Canal itself will all be

explained in the coming episodes.

This overview should give you a great

window into the strange world of the 1950s. Messy debates and bitter struggles characterized

this era as states which were once world powers gradually came to terms with their new status

and their new position, not as the superpower they had once been,

but as merely one cog in the European state machine. To sum, this acceptance process took longer

than it did for others. In this episode, we open with just such an example. The French struggle

in Algeria may seem unrelated to the Suez Crisis, but in actual fact,

Algeria tells a story, as much of the experience of Vietnam, of French power in steep decline.

Through successive French governments, different solutions were imagined, and while the Algerian

question would not be properly solved until the early

...