The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest campaign of the Second World War, and mobilized extraordinary numbers of men and material on both the Allied and Axis sides. The battle was of major strategic significance: control of the seas would have allowed the Germans to bring Britain to its knees by preventing it from receiving supplies from the USA and its...
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The Battle of the Bulge began in late 1944 with the last major German offensive of the Second World War. Following the Normandy landings earlier that year, the German army was in a weakened state, so this offensive was an attempt to cripple the Allied armies by dividing them and cutting off their supplies. Although the Allies were initially caught by...
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The Battle of the Marne was one of the earliest battles in the First World War, and ended in a decisive victory for the Allies on the Western Front. Prior to this battle, German troops had been advancing relentlessly across Western Europe, sweeping through France and Belgium in spite of the latter's neutrality. This all changed with the counter-attack by British and...
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The Battle of Verdun was one of the most significant engagements of the First World War, and is widely recognized as one of the most brutal and costly battles in history. Like many of the battles in the four-year war of attrition, it was fought largely through trench warfare, with devastating human and material losses. Indeed, many historians now agree that...
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There is arguably no group that has had as much of an influence on modern pop and rock music as the Beatles. The Liverpool-born band, made up of John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, burst onto the scene in the early 1960s and inspired such passionate devotion that the fervor surrounding them was dubbed “Beatlemania” by the...
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On 26 April 1986, the No. 4 reactor of the Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded, becoming the epicenter of a vast radioactive cloud which affected large swathes of Europe. The Chernobyl disaster remains the worst nuclear disaster in history: in the immediate aftermath of the explosion, hundreds of people suffered from acute radiation sickness, and in the decades that followed many...
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It is impossible to understand modern European history without first understanding the Cold War. Indeed, the tensions between the USA and the USSR, the two great powers to emerge from the Second World War, dominated the second half of the 20th century, resulted in a series of brutal proxy wars and brought the planet to the brink of nuclear war. The clash...
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The European Union is both one of the most influential and one of the most polarizing supranational bodies in the world. With its own monetary union, the Eurozone, and key rights including free movement throughout the 28 member states for EU citizens, its supporters see it as the most effective means of fostering international cooperation on the continent, while its...
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The fall of the Berlin Wall put an end to almost 30 years of physical and ideological separation between the two halves of the German capital. Constructed at the height of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall symbolized the hostility between the capitalist powers in the West and the Communist powers in the East. Its fall saw people flood across...
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The Iran-Iraq War, which took place between 1980 and 1988, was one of the deadliest conflicts since the Second World War. It involved two ambitious and headstrong leaders: Saddam Hussein, who wanted to make his Republic of Iraq a powerful force in the region, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Musavi Khomeini, who planned to export his Islamic Revolution beyond the borders of Iran....
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The Korean War was an internal war which led to a major confrontation between the Western Bloc and the Communist Bloc. The conflict lasted for three years and ended with no real winner, so the Korean Peninsula was divided into two states. In just 50 minutes, you will gain an understanding of why the war broke out and find out...
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The Ku Klux Klan is one of the most notorious white supremacist groups in the world. It was initially founded in 1867 in the wake of the American Civil War, and its ideology has always had close ties with the myth of a prosperous Confederate state as a result. However, it is best known for the shockingly vicious acts of...
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