WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall
Nik Osterman
Publishing Details
About This Podcast
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall
This is a story about why war happens when nobody truly wants it—until suddenly, everyone does.
If you grew up with the usual explanation, you were told the First World War begins with a gunshot in Sarajevo. A young man steps forward, fires two rounds, and the world falls apart. It’s neat. It’s cinematic. It has a villain, a victim, a turning point, and a date you can underline. It also has the comforting illusion that history is a line of dominoes and that one pushed the rest.
But the truth is crueler and more human.
Sarajevo was not the beginning. Sarajevo was a match. The question is why the room was full of powder.
This season is about the powder.
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Recent Episodes
S3E2 The Economy of War
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Today’s episode is The Economy of War—the machinery beneath the speeches, the quiet engine that makes conflict not only…
S3E1 The Victors in Fear: Britain and France Hold the Line
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode Four of our buildup arc is The Victors in Fear: Britain and France Hold the Line.If you want to understand the…
S2E10 Russia: Retreat, Revolution, and the New Empire
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode Three of our buildup arc is Russia: Retreat, Revolution, and the New Empire.If Germany is the story of a crown…
S2E9 The Crown Falls-The Republic Bleeds.
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode Two of our buildup arc is Germany: The Crown Falls, the Republic Bleeds.The most dangerous moment in a collapsing…
S2E8 1918–1919: The Peace That Continued the War
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Episode One of our buildup arc is 1918–1919: The Peace That Continued the War.The first thing to understand about the…
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-Hitler and Churchill
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’ve just walked out of Versailles—the great paper ending that doesn’t end anything—and now we take the next step exactly…
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-Coming Home
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Today’s episode is called After the Guns: The War That Stayed in the Mind. Because the deeper claim is simple and brutal:…
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall.-After the War
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Today’s episode is about what the war did after the war. About how 1914 to 1918 didn’t just end with an armistice. It went…
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-The Mailbag
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’re keeping the format, keeping the big machine in view, but we’re going to keep pressing the ear to the envelope—because…
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-The Attack
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Lets keep the larger format, keep the bigger-picture engine running, but deepen the personal enough that the disgrace and…
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-The Letters
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Today we’re going to listen to the war the way most people actually encountered it at the time: through letters, speeches,…
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-The Slaughter
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. And today we’re going to do what polite history often avoids. We’re going to go down into the slaughter field and stay there…
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall-Why Soldiers Went
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. And before we step into the July Crisis and the opening months of 1914 and something that deserves to be said plainly,…
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall - The Rehearsals
Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’ve moved into the Balkans, into the seam where old empires crack and new nations sharpen themselves like blades. And now…
S2E7 The Age of Attrition 1918 — The Armistice and the Peace That Wasn’t Peace
1918 — The Armistice and the Peace That Wasn’t PeaceBy the time the guns stopped, the war had already done its deepest work. Not only on borders, but on minds. What ended in November 1918 was the…
S2E6 The Age of Attrition 1918 — The Last Gamble
1918 — The Last GambleIn early 1918 the war reached a strange moment of imbalance. Russia was out. The Eastern Front, which had consumed German divisions for years, had vanished. German leaders…
S2E5 The Age of Attrition 1917 — Mutiny, Submarines, and the Breaking Point
1917 — Mutiny, Submarines, and the Breaking PointBy 1917, the war had entered a phase no one had planned for and no one could control. The optimism of 1914 was long dead, and even the grim…
S2E4 The Age of Attrition 1917: The War Breaks the World
By 1917 the war no longer pretended to be about glory. Whatever illusions survived 1914 had been buried in mud, wire, and arithmetic. This was now a war of exhaustion, and everyone involved knew it,…
S2E3 The Age of Attrition. 1916 — Verdun, The Somme, and the Arithmetic of Endurance.
Hello and welcome to War — 1870 to 1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Season Two: World War One — The Age of Attrition. Episode Three: 1916 — Verdun, The Somme, and the Arithmetic of Endurance.By 1916,…
S2E2 The Age of Attrition. 1915 — Trenches, Stalemate, and the Invention of Modern Suffering.
Hello and welcome to War — 1870 to 1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. Season Two: World War One — The Age of Attrition. Episode Two: 1915 — Trenches, Stalemate, and the Invention of Modern Suffering.By…
Frequently Asked Questions
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall has published 29 episodes since January 2026, covering topics in Documentary, Society & Culture.
WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall is currently dormant with new episodes daily. Average episode length is 12m.
