The History Hour

The AIDS memorial quilt - a patchwork of loss

28 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

How an LGBTQ+ activist decided to commemorate friends who had died of AIDS with a quilt, plus sequencing the 1918 flu virus, five years of war in Yeme...

The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope

21 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In 1990, NASA launched the historic mission which put into orbit the Hubble Space Telescope. The orbiting observatory has revolutionized astronomy and...

The 1918 'Spanish' flu pandemic

14 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

A special edition looking at how the world has battled deadly viruses over the past 100 years, We have eyewitness accounts of the 1918 flu, and the re...

The history of the Volkswagen Beetle

07 Mar 2020

Contributed by Lukas

How the British army helped rebuild the German car industry after WW2, plus the fight to ban leaded petrol, psychiatry as punishment in the USSR, stri...

Freeing American prisoners from Iran

29 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

How a former prisoner in Iran fought to free her friends, a 200-year-old Antarctic mystery, eradicating small pox, the first mobile phone and rebel n...

Saving Antarctica

22 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In October 1991, an international protocol to protect the world’s last wilderness, Antarctica, from commercial exploitation was agreed at a summit i...

The publication of Harry Potter

15 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

A look back at some of the most influential books of modern times, including an interview with the publisher who first spotted Harry Potter's potentia...

London's first black policeman

08 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The prejudice faced by London's first black policeman, how a new sign language emerged in 1980s Nicaragua, the Native American casino boom, plus the r...

The early days of the European Union

01 Feb 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The hurried signing of the Treaty of Rome in 1957 which led to greater European unity, plus 1992 - when the British royal family started to reform its...

The mystery of the disappearing frogs

25 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

This week we're looking at extinction. The deadly fungus that's killing amphibians, the story of the Dodo, plus why discovering that whales 'sing' hel...

Storming the Stasi HQ

18 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

The fall of East Germany's secret police; racism, injustice and a child execution in the US, plus the killing of Osama Bin Laden; the woman who negoti...

The Computers for Schools revolution

11 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In 2009, Uruguay became the first country in the world to give a laptop computer to every child in state primary schools. We hear from the man whose i...

The book that warned of an end to civilisation

04 Jan 2020

Contributed by Lukas

In 1972 a book which outlined the possible future of the world became a best-seller. 'The Limits to Growth' was based on computer modelling which sugg...

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan

28 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On 24th December 1979 Soviet troops poured into Afghanistan in support of an anti-government coup. The Soviet occupation would last for nine years. Pl...

The Romanian revolution

21 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In this edition the fall of the Ceaușescus in Romania in December 1989, a global panic over bees in the early 2000s and WW2 black GIs finally recogni...

The Cuban writer who defied Castro

07 Dec 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On 7 December 1990 the dissident Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas killed himself in New York after years of suffering from AIDS. Before fleeing...

The man who gave his voice to Stephen Hawking

30 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The story of the American scientist Dennis Klatt who pioneered synthesised speech. He used recordings of himself to make the sounds that gave physicis...

I saw the soldiers who killed El Salvador's priests

23 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The woman who risked her life to reveal that the army, not left-wing rebels, were responsible for the murder of six Jesuit priests in 1980s El Salvado...

Rescuing migrants in the Mediterranean

16 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In 2004, a German aid agency ship, Cap Anamur, was sailing to the Suez Canal, when it came across 37 Africans on a sinking rubber boat. The captain, S...

Britain's secret propaganda war

09 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Subversive warfare and 'fake news' in World War Two, the scandal which exposed horrific Indian police violence in the 1980s, two sides of the Iran hos...

'Jane' - the underground abortion service

02 Nov 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The feminist network that performed illegal abortions in the 1960s in Chicago, the Algerian nationals who fought alongside the French in Algeria’s w...

The fall of the Berlin Wall

26 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

1989 was a seismic year in world history and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the clearest symbol of the Cold War. But it was a series of even...

An environmental history special

19 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

A pioneer of climate change science, UK's Windscale nuclear accident, Kenya's Green Belt heroine who won the Nobel Peace Prize, the man "who fed the w...

Black British history

12 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

To mark Black History Month in the UK we look back at some landmark moments in British Black History. We hear how the famous cricketer Learie Constant...

The birth of the People's Republic of China

05 Oct 2019

Contributed by Lukas

To mark 70 years of communist China we hear from a soldier at the founding ceremony on October 1st 1949. Also, the memories of an American friend and ...

Fighting the Islamic State group online

28 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

When the Islamic State group took over Mosul in Iraq in 2014 they flooded the internet with propaganda, claiming life under IS was fantastic. One hist...

The Cambridge spy network

21 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The distinguished British art historian Anthony Blunt was exposed as a former Soviet spy in 1979. He was one of a group of double agents recruited at ...

Conflict timber in Liberia's civil war

14 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

How the timber industry fuelled a brutal civil war in West Africa, the Honduran coup that left the president holed up in an embassy plus the Indian af...

The outbreak of World War Two

07 Sep 2019

Contributed by Lukas

On September 1st 1939 German forces invaded Poland. Douglas Slocombe, a British cameraman, was there at the time and filmed the build-up to the war. ...

The Kindertransport children

31 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Around 10,000 children were sent by their parents to safety in the UK out of Nazi-dominated Europe in the run-up to the outbreak of WW2 in 1939. Many ...

The return of the wolf

24 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Why the wolf was brought back to the US in the 1990s and the history of "rewilding", plus the liberation of Paris 75 years on, the missing children fr...

The division of Kashmir

17 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The origins of the crisis in Kashmir, the warnings ignored about 9/11 and the arrest of the notorious terror suspect Carlos the Jackal. Plus the inven...

The mass exodus of Algeria's 'Pieds Noirs'

10 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The French colonialists who returned to France after decades in Algeria, the Catholic welcome when the British army was first deployed to Northern Ire...

The anti-nuclear protesters who won

03 Aug 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The eight year protest campaign which stopped the construction of a nuclear reprocessing plant at Wackersdorf in Germany, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait...

When Tunisia led on women's rights

27 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Liberation for Tunisia's women in the 1950s; gay and lesbian fake marriages in China; the Chappaquiddick incident in the US; the birth of Mamma Mia! t...

Exploring space

20 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

To mark the 50th anniversary of the Moon landing in July 1969, five personal accounts of landmarks in space exploration. We hear from an Apollo flight...

Kenya's ivory inferno

13 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Twelve tonnes of ivory was set alight by President Daniel Arap Moi in Nairobi National Park in July 1989, to highlight the threat from poaching. The i...

Surviving Cambodia's 'Killing Fields'

06 Jul 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Life under the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, the Germans kidnapped by the Contras in Nicaragua in the 80s, plus how Aboriginal women took on the Australia...

The Stonewall riot

29 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The riot that inspired the modern gay rights movement; Saddam Hussein's 1980s genocidal campaign against Iraq's Kurds; notorious British serial killer...

The assassination of Medgar Evers

22 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

An African-American civil rights hero, a Chinese online star, the tragic icon of Iran's reform movement and archive recordings of the psychoanalyst CG...

The first anti-psychotic drug

14 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

How a 1950s drug helped revolutionise the treatment of mental illness. Also, how hundreds of thousands of Kosovans fled when NATO bombed former Yugosl...

D-Day

08 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Eyewitness accounts of the Allied invasion of Nazi occupied Europe on D-day, 6th June 1944. We also hear how the BBC reported events on that momentous...

Tiananmen Square

01 Jun 2019

Contributed by Lukas

A student protester's perspective on the Tiananmen Square massacre, the first social network on the internet, the surprisingly controversial early yea...

Fighting Uganda's anti-gay laws

25 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In 2009 Ugandan MPs tried to introduce new laws against homosexuality that would include life imprisonment and even the death penalty. We speak to Vic...

The final days of Sri Lanka's civil war

18 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In May 2009 the Sri Lankan army defeated the Tamil Tigers, ending a brutal 25-year civil war; also, the economists who predicted the 2008 global econo...

The war on drugs

13 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

US President Richard Nixon's efforts to deal with illegal drugs in 1971, the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam plus the rise of Jack Ma and hi...

The Malayan Emergency

04 May 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Battling a communist insurgency in 1950s Malaya, the sinking of the Belgrano during the UK Argentine conflict, plus how Ellen DeGeneres came out to mi...

The al Yamamah arms deals

27 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The huge but controversial Anglo-Saudi deal, the Sri Lankan journalist who predicted his own murder, plus remembering South Africa's historic election...

The Columbine school shooting

18 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The memories of the brother of one of the victims of the Columbine mass school shooting; plus the story behind 'A Raisin in the Sun' - the first play ...

The rise of Hindu nationalism

13 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

How an Indian religious rally in 1990 sparked the rise of Hindu nationalism, 100 years since the Amritsar Massacre plus the first wing-suit for base j...

Abolishing the army

06 Apr 2019

Contributed by Lukas

After a brief civil war in March-April 1948, the new president of Costa Rica, Jose Figueres, took the audacious step of dissolving the Armed Forces. T...

Drama in the British parliament

30 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Prime Minister Jim Callaghan's desperate attempts to survive a no-confidence motion in 1979, the record-breaking 20-day balloon flight around the worl...

Autism and the MMR vaccine

23 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

How a British doctor misled the world by linking the MMR vaccine to autism; the early rise of Hungary’s Viktor Orban also what it was like to contes...

China's breakthrough malaria cure

16 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

How an ancient Chinese remedy provided a 1970s breakthrough in the fight against malaria; the bombing of Dresden in the Second World War that inspired...

I was abused by a President

09 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

How allegations of child abuse engulfed Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, the campaign to return the Elgin marbles to Greece, Britain's first black ...

Venezuela's oil bonanza

02 Mar 2019

Contributed by Lukas

When Venezuela was rich; surviving a mid-air airline disaster; Japan's Red Army militants of the 1970s, the origin of the swine flu epidemic and Icela...

The curse of Agent Orange

23 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Millions left dead or deformed because of chemicals used in the Vietnam war, UK cigarette smoking warnings ignored, remains of the Nazi 'Angel of Deat...

Iceland jails its bankers

16 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Why Iceland jailed 40 bankers after the 2008 financial crisis, how the Maastricht Treaty gave birth to the EU, plus America's first female airline pil...

The last days of Hitler

09 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Hitler's secretary on the last days in the bunker; a CIA operative on the killing of Che Guevara, remembering the US invasion of Iraq, a child of the ...

The Iranian Revolution

02 Feb 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In February 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile to Iran in the defining moment of a revolution that would change his country and the whole Mi...

Vatican II: Reforming the Catholic Church

26 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In January 1959 Pope John XXIII announced a council of all the world's Catholic bishops and cardinals in Rome. It led to sweeping reforms. Plus Carmen...

Strikers in Saris

19 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

How South Asian women led thousands of UK workers in an industrial dispute in the late 1970s, plus Dr Crippen's alleged gruesome crime, Judy Garland's...

When Stalin Rounded Up Soviet Doctors

14 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Stalin's last terror campaign against the best Soviet doctors, Castro's triumphant entry into Havana, the extraordinary story of how a destitute singl...

Vikings in North America

05 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

The discovery that proved the Vikings got to North America, a former Marxist rebel describes how his group overran an army base in El Salvador's bitte...

UFO Sightings: The Rendlesham Forest Incident

29 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The most striking and well documented UFO "sightings" there have ever been plus the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the theft of the Stone of Des...

Stopping The 'Shoe Bomber'

22 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Passenger Kwame James recalls how he helped overcome the British-born Richard Reid on American Airlines flight 63. Reid had hidden explosives in his s...

Apollo 8

15 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

At Christmas 1968, the biggest audience in TV history watched NASA's Apollo 8 mission beam back the first pictures from an orbit around the Moon. The ...

Adopted By The Man Who Killed My Family

08 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

A child survivor of a Guatemalan army massacre during the country's brutal civil war, the women who cleared up post war Berlin, plus Armenia's 1988 ea...

The Man Who Inspired Britain's First Aids Charity

01 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The first man in Britain to die of AIDS, whale hunting in the South Atlantic in the 1950s, how Norway voted not to join the EU, the American adventure...

The 'Braceros' - America's Mexican Guest Workers

24 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

From 1942 to 1964 the US actively encouraged American farmers to hire tens of thousands of migrant workers to come to work legally from Mexico - they ...

Japanese Murders in Brazil

17 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

How Japanese immigrants in Brazil fell out with each other after the end of the WW2, how Britain helped to get disabled people on the road in the 1940...

The End of World War One

10 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

11th November 1918 saw the end of a four year war that had killed an estimated 20 million soldiers and civilians around the world. We hear eyewitness ...

When Russia's Richest Man Was Jailed

26 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Russia's struggles with big business, when Nigeria struck oil, why Maximilian Kolbe was made a saint, the London arrest of Chilean dictator Augusto Pi...

The Nazi Black Book

26 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The Nazi black book, a list of those to be arrested and dealt with if Germany occupied Britain, privation in wartime and Allied-occupied Austria, raci...

When Belgium Banned Coca Cola

20 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

A strange illness strikes Belgian teenagers, Brazil's forgotten Amazon war, diverting Mount Etna's lava, arguments over aid and trade in the UK, and t...

The Street Battle That Rocked Brazil

06 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In October 1968, students from two neighbouring universities in the centre of São Paulo clashed in a battle which left one dead and many injured. We ...

The Arnhem Parachute Drop

22 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Operation Market Garden - the failed attempt to end the war against Hitler; plus, a deadly nuclear accident in Brazil, the film of the Battle of Algie...

How I Survived a Fire on a Plane

15 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

A lucky escape from a jet plane fire in the 1970s, Chamberlain's talks with Hitler in 1938 plus the killing of the South African anti-apartheid campai...

Living under Gaddafi

08 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Award-winning writer Hisham Matar on life in Gaddafi's Libya, plus how British Bengalis faced the far-right in 1970s east London, the last battles of ...

Surviving the "Death Railway"

01 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

A former prisoner of the Japanese in WW2, plus Hitler's girl guides, how Benidorm became a tourist hotspot, Italian migrant tragedy in post-war Belgiu...

Albert Speer - Hitler's Architect

25 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Hitler's architect and minister of war, Albert Speer, was one of the few top Nazis to live on into old age. In the late 1970s, following his release f...

Vera Brittain: Anti-Bombing Campaigner

18 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Baroness Shirley Williams recalls her mother, WW2 anti-bombing protestor; 20 years since a mass killing in Omagh, the African-American photographer wh...

WW1: Britain's Conscientious Objectors

04 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The treatment of Britain's First World War conscientious objectors, Iran bends the nuclear rules, the CIA's first coup in Latin America, what happened...

The Whitewashing of Zimbabwe's Ancient History

27 Jul 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The true history of the Great Zimbabwe ruins uncovered after independence, why Churchill lost the post-war election also the first women at the US mil...

The Killing of the Russian Tsar

21 Jul 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The murder of the Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, four daughters and young son in 1918, plus how the Soviet Union struggled to feed its people ...

Smiling Buddha: India's First Nuclear Test

14 Jul 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The scientist at the forefront of India's first successful nuclear test in 1974, plus how an undersea mission finally found the remains of nearly 300 ...

When The US Shot Down An Iranian Airliner

07 Jul 2018

Contributed by Lukas

How a US warship downed a passenger jet killing 290 people, plus the story behind The Toilet, the controversial 1990s Russian 'masterpiece', Madelein...

The Ex-President and the Gun Lobby

30 Jun 2018

Contributed by Lukas

This week, how former US President George Bush Senior took on the all-powerful National Rifle Association; the murder of the campaigning Irish journal...

Korea Divided: A Bitter History

16 Jun 2018

Contributed by Lukas

From the 1945 division of the peninsula, to the Korean war and the death of Kim II-sung, we have first-hand accounts from the turbulent recent history...

The 1968 Belgrade Student Revolt

09 Jun 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The 1968 student revolt in Communist Yugoslavia, an assassination attempt that sparked Lebanon's war, Adolf Eichmann's execution, plus the sudden deat...

Free Health Care for All

03 Jun 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The birth of the British health service in 1948; the battle for compensation over Thalidomide; the world's first bicycle-sharing scheme; discovering a...

The Fall of Suharto in Indonesia

26 May 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1998, the Indonesian dictator, President Suharto, resigned after 31 years in power. He stood down in the wake of nationwide demonstrations sparked ...

May 1968 Paris Riots

19 May 2018

Contributed by Lukas

A French riot policeman's view of the violence that swept through France in May 1968; plus the man who led a team that made safe two nuclear weapons t...

The Last King of Bulgaria

12 May 2018

Contributed by Lukas

From child king in the Second World War to post-communist prime minister, the story of Bulgaria's King Simeon II; the first ever surgery performed on ...

When Margaret Thatcher Came to Power

05 May 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Working for Britain's first female PM, the rare story of prisoners on the high seas in WW2, plus the Children's Crusade for civil right in 60s Alabama...

The Oslo Peace Talks

28 Apr 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The story behind the secret Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Oslo in 1993, the woman who swam from the USA to the Soviet Union, plus remembering Pab...

Earth Day

21 Apr 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The birth of the modern environmental movement, Germany's 1918 Spring Offensive, the discovery of the concentration camp horrors of Bergen-Belsen pl...

The Zimbabwe Massacres

14 Apr 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In this week's episode, Robert Mugabe's brutal crack down on the opposition in the 1980s, a mass expulsion of Soviet spies from Britain in the 1970's ...

The Good Friday Agreement

31 Mar 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1998, the political parties in Northern Ireland reached a peace agreement that ended decades of war. We hear from Paul Murphy, the junior minister ...

The Battle of the Airwaves in Latin America

17 Mar 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Why the BBC started broadcasting to South and Central America, plus the My Lai Massacre, Brazil's careful transition to democracy, and Moscow's show t...