We Didn't Start the Fire: The History Podcast

This brand new pop culture history podcast is nothing like anything you've heard before, and it's everything you need to understand the modern world. This is the start of an epic journey where Tom Fordyce and Katie Puckrik take each of the 120 people, places and things mentioned in 'We Didn't Start The Fire', the smash hit by Billy Joel, and record an episode on every single one - and in the process they're expanding their brains without even feeling like they're learning.

True to Billy Joel's words we're kicking off with Harry Truman, an ordinary man from humble stock who rose to become the 33rd President of the United States, founder of NATO, yes-sayer to the devastating nuclear bomb on Hiroshima, vanguard of the heroic Berlin airlift, and avid piano player. Katie and Tom are lucky to have with them the columnist and famed political pundit Eleanor Clift (whom you may have seen appear as herself in films like 'Independence Day' and 'Dave'), to help them understand the man who oversaw the rebuilding of the post-war world. Has any US president ever had to make so many monumental decisions?

The clips used in this episode are in the public domain and have been kindly provided by the Screen Gems Collection at the Harry S Truman Library.

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Davy was a real man born in the late 1700s, but in the 1950s he became a glossy star when Walt Disney brought his life and legend onto America's TV screens. Renowned Disney scholar Dr Amy Davis joins Katie and Tom to introduce them to the King of the Wild Frontier, and the question we're all asking is: can you grin a bear to death..?

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Why Billy chose to encapsulate this behemoth of a topic in a single lyric, we'll never know. But this week, we're talking Palestine and all it experienced in the 20th century. Wars, protests, land grabs, displacement: the atrocities of this era are still being felt, and carried out, today. It's not something we were ever taught much about, but luckily we're joined by the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, Rashid Khalidi, to discuss this hugely important topic.

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How did a tiny village in the Korean mountains come to symbolise the north and south split? The answer lies in the year 1953, when a piece of paper was signed to end what became known as The Forgotten War. But Colin Thackery, Korean War veteran and oldest ever winner of Britain's Got Talent, remembers it well. Memories of gunfire, bodies, starving children, American soldiers playing the piano, frostbite. It's a remarkable story.

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'What! Einstein?', you say? 'Yuk, physics', you moan? Trust us. This one's a banger. Brain box eccentric and best-selling author David Bodanis is in the studio with Tom and Katie, and he's blowing their brains apart with his best E=MC2 facts and most enthralling Albert crazy-hair Einstein stories. You'll come away with dinner-conversation-worthy nuggets on quantum entanglement, the speed of light, and the atomic bomb. We weren't expecting it either.

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