The History of the Twentieth Century

As America geared up for war, and then entered the war, African Americans fought to claim a role in the battle against fascism.

Transcribed - Published: 7 December 2025

During the interwar period, African Americans pushed back against the US military's explicit racism.

Transcribed - Published: 30 November 2025

Boogie-woogie went mainstream in America during the war, as evidenced by the music of Glenn Miller and the Andrews Sisters.

Transcribed - Published: 16 November 2025

The Americans were on the offensive in the Southwest Pacific, and after Tarawa, in the Central Pacific. As they advanced, Japanese military leaders scrambled to find a way to stop the Americans.

Transcribed - Published: 9 November 2025

As soon as Allied leaders chose Normandy as the site of the Operation Overlord invasion, British intelligence set to work convincing the Germans that the invasion would be somewhere else.

Transcribed - Published: 2 November 2025

The Allied campaign in Italy stalled, and British and American leaders were searching for a way to break the stalemate on the peninsula. Winston Churchill suggested an amphibious invasion behing enemy lines.

Transcribed - Published: 26 October 2025

The war era (1939-45) saw the beginning of the end of the big band era. Part of this decline was due to two key strikes in the music industry.

Transcribed - Published: 12 October 2025

The Holocaust should not be viewed as strictly a Nazi project or even a German project. Millions of people across Europe share responsibility for those crimes.

Transcribed - Published: 5 October 2025

When Hitler learned that the Hungarian government was attempting to make a separate peace with the Allies, he ordered the German military to occupy Hungary, which was also the home of the largest surviving Jewish community in Axis-occupied Europe.

Transcribed - Published: 28 September 2025

The US tries out a new strategy against Japan, but the American public is shocked by the cost. 

Transcribed - Published: 21 September 2025

A look at some prominent blues singers, plus Judy Garland and her most famous role, as Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz.

Transcribed - Published: 7 September 2025

The Allies hoped their invasion of the Italian mainland would lead to a rapid occupation of Italy, but the Germans put up a defense that slowed their advance to a crawl.

Transcribed - Published: 31 August 2025

The German Army continued to retreat westward over the winter of 1943-44, abandoning most of Ukraine. Red Army pressure was relentless, not giving the Germans any opportunity to establish a strong defensive line.

Transcribed - Published: 24 August 2025

The Big Three--Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill--met and conferred together for the first time in November 1943. It was the most important meeting of world leaders since the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.

Transcribed - Published: 17 August 2025

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, created in 1924 by the merger of three film production companies, quickly rose to become the most successful studio of the era. The record box office for the 1939 film Gone with the Wind represents the studio at its height.

Transcribed - Published: 3 August 2025

The Japanese "Zero" fighter plane played an important role in Japan's amazing victories early in the Pacific war. But by 1943, the Zero (and its pilots) were falling behind their Allied counterparts.

Transcribed - Published: 27 July 2025

Continuing from the previous episode, we examine events in multiple theaters in August-September 1943

Transcribed - Published: 20 July 2025

An eventful period in July-August 1943, when there were major developments on the Eastern Front, in the Mediterranean, and in the Pacific.

Transcribed - Published: 13 July 2025

The history of Paramount Pictures, one of the oldest and most prominent film studios of Hollywood's Golden Age.

Transcribed - Published: 29 June 2025

The end of the Battle of Kursk did not mean the end of the Red Army advance. The Germans withdrew, but the Red Army just kept coming.

Transcribed - Published: 22 June 2025

Hundreds of thousands died in Leningrad during the winter of 1941-42, but with spring came new hope. Composer Dmitri Shostakovich's latest symphony became a patriotic anthem, and not only in the USSR.

Transcribed - Published: 15 June 2025

As war raged around the globe, the city of Leningrad suffered under a German siege that lasted 872 days.

Transcribed - Published: 8 June 2025

In this episode, we look at Twentieth Century-Fox, John Ford, Shirley Temple, John Wayne, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Transcribed - Published: 25 May 2025

Resistance against the Nazis could take many forms.

Transcribed - Published: 18 May 2025

Some of the biggest successes (and biggest failures) of European resistance movements and their guides in Britain.

Transcribed - Published: 11 May 2025

In the occupied countries of Europe and Asia, resistance movements developed to oppose Axis occupations. In most cases, the resistance movements were divided between Communist and non-Communist.

Transcribed - Published: 4 May 2025

The U-boat war was going quite well for the Germans at the beginning of 1943, but by mid-year, the German Navy was on the verge of abandoning the effort.

Transcribed - Published: 20 April 2025

The Hamburg bombing forced the German government to rethink its defense policies. In Québec, Churchill and Roosevelt cut a deal on atom bomb research.

Transcribed - Published: 6 April 2025

After two years of trying, RAF Bomber Command at last perfected the techniques to inflict mass casualties and devastation on an enemy city. Meanwhile, the US Eighth Air Force struggled to develop their own strategies.

Transcribed - Published: 30 March 2025

As the war turned against them, the Japanese attempted to create allies among the nations it occupied, declaring the independence of Burma and the Philippines, while the US embraced China as a peer of the main Allied powers, alongside the US, UK, and USSR.

Transcribed - Published: 16 March 2025

The Japanese come to the reluctant conclusion that they have to abandon Guadalcanal and northeastern New Guinea. US submarine warfare begins to take a toll, and Admiral Yamamoto is killed.

Transcribed - Published: 2 March 2025

The German offenive failed. Then it was the Soviets' turn.

Transcribed - Published: 16 February 2025

Adolf Hitler begins his long-delayed 1943 offensive against the USSR, which fizzles in a matter of days.

Transcribed - Published: 2 February 2025

Warner Brothers was one of the minor studios until they introduced the first talking picture, which made the studio into one of the majors. In the Thirties, Warner Brothers, led by the irascible Jack L. Warner, was known for its glitzy musicals and crime dramas. In the early Forties, the studio released two films that are now regarded as among the best American films ever made: The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca.

Transcribed - Published: 19 January 2025

The Japanese claimed to be liberating their fellow Asians from Western oppression, but Japanese rule proved to be brutal and murderous.

Transcribed - Published: 5 January 2025

In early 1943, the remaining residents of the Warsaw Ghetto rose up against the SS. Farther east, the German Army uncovers the mass grave where the Soviet NKVD buried thousands of murdered Polish Army officers.

Transcribed - Published: 29 December 2024

After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, the American atom bomb project kicked into high gear. Fearful that the Germans were already working on a bomb and had a head start, the US government built a huge program meant to approach the problem of building an atom bomb from several different angles all at once.

Transcribed - Published: 25 December 2024

The Allies invade Sicily, which leads to the fall of Benito Mussolini.

Transcribed - Published: 22 December 2024

The Allies invade Sicily, which leads to the fall of Benito Mussolini.

Published: 22 December 2024

Hitler himself said that he had "never been a man of the defensive," but in the aftermath of Stalingrad, he had no choice.

Transcribed - Published: 15 December 2024

RKO Radio Pictures had a reputation for producing second-rate films. Even so, this was the studio that signed Fred Astaire and Katharine Hepburn; it was the studio that released King Kong and Citizen Kane.

Transcribed - Published: 1 December 2024

The first in a series looking at the American film industry in the 1930s and 1940s, the heyday of the "studio system."

Transcribed - Published: 24 November 2024

The fall of Burma to the Japanese put India on the front lines of the war, posing hard questions for the Indian nationalist movement.

Transcribed - Published: 17 November 2024

The BBC struggles to determine its role in wartime Britain.

Published: 10 November 2024

The BBC struggles to determine its role in wartime Britain.

Transcribed - Published: 10 November 2024

Stalingrad falls and Joseph Goebbels tries to spark a program to ramp up the German war effort.

Transcribed - Published: 27 October 2024

Roosevelt and Churchill met again in early 1943 to discuss the next stage of the war against the Axis, and they chose a provocative venue: Casablanca, a city their armies had only recently taken.

Transcribed - Published: 20 October 2024

In October and November 1942, the Japanese began their final push to drive the Americans off Guadalcanal.

Transcribed - Published: 6 October 2024

The Germans began an operation to relieve the siege of Stalingrad, but the Red Army was already prepared with a counter attack.

Transcribed - Published: 29 September 2024

The battle for Stalingrad raged on for two months, then the situation was suddenly upended by a surprise Soviet offensive that surrounded the city.

Transcribed - Published: 15 September 2024