The Daily History Chronicle

On June 26, 1945, fifty nations signed the United Nations Charter in San Francisco, one of the most hopeful documents in modern history. But the same afternoon, those nations controlled empires that held 750 million people who had no seat at the table and no voice in the document supposedly written for all of humanity. This episode explores the extraordinary gap between the Charter's soaring language and the world its authors were actually willing to build and the remarkable story of how the people it excluded eventually used it as a weapon against the empires that wrote it.