The History of the Twentieth Century

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.

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

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

The BBC struggles to determine its role in wartime Britain.

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

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.

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

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

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

The Anglo-American amphibious landings in French North Africa were not only a complex military operation. There was also complex negotiation going on behind the scenes. The Allies did not want to defeat French forces in North Africa; they wanted the French to join them.