History Uncensored

Is Putin fighting a war from a position of power…. or desperation?
Ukraine’s drones have been attacking his home town of St Petersburg - pushing the war well and truly into the heart of Russia.

At the same time…Russia continues relentless bombing of Ukrainian cities and claims to be advancing.

So the question everyone is asking but nobody seems to be able to answer clearly is this: who is ACTUALLY winning?

And ultimately: after more than four years of this war.. is this conflict ending - or just changing?

Bianca Nobilo interviews war correspondent Sam Kiley, who was reporting on the ground in Kharkiv before the February 2022 invasion, to answer these questions.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why has one island shaped the ambitions of empires, triggered superpower confrontations, and repeatedly found itself at the centre of world history?

This is the story of Cuba - the largest island in the Caribbean, just 90 miles from Florida, and one of the most strategically important pieces of real estate on Earth.

Long before Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Cuba was coveted by great powers for a simple reason: geography. Spain built an empire around it. Britain tried to seize it. The United States spent generations trying to dominate it. The Soviet Union turned it into the frontline of the Cold War. Today, as Russian warships return to Havana and China expands its footprint on the island, Cuba's strategic importance is once again impossible to ignore.

But geopolitics is only half the story.

From the first Indigenous societies and the arrival of Columbus, through conquest, slavery and sugar plantations, independence wars, American intervention, dictatorship, revolution and communism, Cuba's history is a story of competing visions of freedom, sovereignty and power. It is a story of extraordinary resilience, profound suffering, revolutionary ambition and enduring controversy.

Bianca Nobilo explores just over five centuries of conflict, looking at one thing that never changed: Cuba was never just an island. It was a strategic platform - one the world has been fighting over ever since.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A small island sitting dangerously close to a rival superpower. A military flashpoint shaped by ideology, geography, and fear. Is that Cuba - or Taiwan?
In this deep-dive, Bianca Nobilo explores the striking parallels between Cuba and Taiwan, two islands shaped by the ambitions of far larger powers. From the Cuban Missile Crisis to rising tensions in the Taiwan Strait, Bianca looks at why great powers become obsessed with strategically placed islands just offshore and what that reveals about the return of spheres of influence in global politics.

Cuba became central to America’s Cold War anxieties, just like how Taiwan now sits at the heart of U.S-China rivalry - both islands represent something far bigger than territory alone.

At its core, this is a story about power, fear, and the return of great-power competition.
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Eugenics is often treated as a dead ideology buried with Nazi Germany but historians and scientists argue the idea never truly disappeared - it simply evolved.

Bianca Nobilo speaks to geneticists Adam Rutherford and Professor Debby Sneed, exploring how eugenics became tied to empire, racial hierarchy, forced sterilisation and genocide. Later examining the flawed science that sustained it and tracing how ancient Sparta and classical Greece were later mythologised by modern extremists.

Was eugenics defeated after World War II? Or did the bad science that fuelled some of history’s worst atrocities simply adapt to a new age?
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Why do powerful men keep idolising the ancient world?

From Xi Jinping invoking Thucydides at a US-China summit, to Putin’s “Third Rome,” to Elon Musk posting “America is New Rome,” modern leaders repeatedly reach back to Greece and Rome when talking about power, destiny and empire.

Bianca Nobilo explores what leaders’ historical obsessions, like Hitler and Napoleon reveal about them and why ancient figures like Caesar, Augustus, Alexander and Sparta still hold such political and psychological power today.

Chronopolitics also comes into play - the political use of the past to legitimise the present and claim authority over the future - because the ancient world can justify almost anything: democracy, empire, conquest, republican virtue, dictatorship, restraint or glory.

So the real question isn’t whether leaders read the classics. It’s what they’re trying to authorise through them.

What historical figures do YOU notice modern leaders admiring?
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices