Witness History
Episodes
The killing of Amadou Diallo
12 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When police in New York shot a young immigrant 41 times in 1999, thousands of people took to the streets to protest. But Amadou Diallo's mother Kadiat...
The IRA siege at Balcombe Street
10 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In December 1975, four members of one of the IRA’s deadliest units were chased by police through the streets of London before hiding out in a small ...
The battle of the Louvre pyramid
09 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1983 French president Francois Mitterand commissioned a major renovation of Paris' most famous art museum, the Louvre. But the resulting great glas...
The Cuban writer who defied Fidel Castro
06 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...
Jaslyk – Uzbekistan’s infamous prison
05 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A prison camp called Jaslyk opened in the desert in western Uzbekistan in 1999. Even by the standards of the Uzbek prison system it would become notor...
The British sculptor who won over the world
04 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
During the 20th century a British coal miner's son changed the world of art. Henry Moore revolutionised sculpture, altering the way we view the human ...
Shackleton
03 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Hear first hand accounts from the doomed Antarctic expedition which became a legendary story of survival. In 1914, polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleto...
The killing of Pablo Escobar
02 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Colombian drug trafficker, once one of the richest men in the world, was shot dead by police on 2nd December 1993. He had been on the run from the...
The first confirmed case of HIV in America
29 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Robert R was a teenager who died of a mysterious illness in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1969. It was only in the 1980s that doctors studying the Aids epi...
Handing back Uluru
28 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1985 Australia's most famous natural landmark, Uluru, the huge ancient red rock formerly known as Ayers Rock, was handed back to its traditional ow...
From cakes to computers
27 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1950s, the leading British catering firm, J Lyons & Co, pioneered the world's first automated office system. It was baptised LEO - th...
India's economic revolution
26 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1990s India began to open up its largely state-controlled economy to foreign investment. Subramanian Swamy wrote the blueprint for reform and h...
The man who gave his voice to Stephen Hawking
25 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
American scientist Dennis Klatt pioneered synthesised speech in the 1980s. He used recordings of himself to make the sounds that gave British physicis...
Exploring Arabia's Empty Quarter
22 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1940s, British gentleman explorer Wilfred Thesiger travelled extensively in one of the world's harshest environments - the Empty Quarter of Ara...
The man who got Delhi on track
21 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
India's capital city built a brand new mass transit system to tackle its traffic jams and air pollution. The first section of the Delhi Metro was open...
I saw the soldiers who killed El Salvador's priests
20 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In November 1989 Salvadoran government soldiers dragged six Jesuit priests from their beds and murdered them along with their housekeeper and her teen...
The 'Woman in Gold'
19 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The 'Woman in Gold' was one of Gustav Klimt's most famous paintings. It was a portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer, but it was taken from her family by the N...
The first Tasers
18 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1970s, an American engineer Jack Cover designed a new experimental stun gun. He called it a Taser. But the device only really became popular wh...
The first Indian to win Miss World
15 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Reita Faria was the first Indian to win the Miss World beauty competition in 1966. She was studying medicine in Mumbai when a spur of the moment decis...
The Love Canal disaster
14 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the late 1970s toxic chemicals were discovered oozing from the ground in a neighbourhood in upstate New York. The neighbourhood was called Love Can...
The demolition of the Babri Masjid
13 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Hindu extremists demolished a 16th century mosque in the Indian city of Ayodhya in December 1992 prompting months of communal violence across India. P...
Cap Anamur: A rescue that led to jail
12 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...
Memories of Wilfred Owen
11 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Wilfred Owen died just a few days before the end of World War One but his poetry ensured he would be remembered. Little is known about the man behind ...
The concert that rocked the Berlin Wall
08 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Former Berlin resident David Bowie was among the performers at a pop concert in West Berlin in 1987 credited with helping to create the atmosphere tha...
The Bhagalpur blindings
07 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
WARNING: This programme contains distressing descriptions of violent torture from the beginning.In 1980 police in a small city in the Indian state of ...
Britain's secret propaganda war
06 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How sex, jazz and 'fake news' were used to undermine the Nazis in World War Two. In 1941, the UK created a top secret propaganda department, the Polit...
A ground-breaking change to treating breast cancer
05 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1975 the Canadian oncologist Dr Vera Peters released ground-breaking data to prove that breast-conserving surgery could at times be as effective as...
Iran hostage crisis: the humanitarian delegation
04 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
On November 4th 1979 revolutionary students overran the US Embassy in Tehran and took everyone inside hostage. In February 1980 the students invited a...
Saving the Great Barrier Reef
01 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1960s conservationists began a campaign to prevent the Queensland government from allowing mining and oil drilling on Australia's Great Barrier...
'Jane' - the underground abortion service
31 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A group of feminists working under the name “Jane” carried out underground abortions in 1960s Chicago – when abortions were still illegal in mos...
The Algerians who fought with France
30 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Harkis were Algerian Muslims who volunteered to fight with France in Algeria's war of independence. When the conflict came to an end in 1962 and F...
The Paris hotel that hosted Holocaust survivors
29 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
At the end of the Second World War the grand Parisian hotel, the Lutetia, was allocated to receive thousands of prisoners and Nazi concentration camp ...
Margaret Thatcher's anti-Europe speech
28 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The British Prime Minister started expressing doubts about the European Union during a speech in the Belgian city of Bruges in 1988. The now famous "B...
The fall of the Berlin Wall
25 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The border between communist East Germany and the West opened on November 9th 1989. It marked the beginning of the collapse of communism in Eastern Eu...
The Leipzig demonstrations
24 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Mass demonstrations in the East German city of Leipzig in October 1989 shook the communist authorities to their core. The protests are seen as paving...
East German refugees in the Prague embassy
23 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Thousands of East Germans fled to the West in the summer and autumn of 1989, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many of them sought refuge in the Wes...
The reburial of a Hungarian hero
22 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1989 the body of Imre Nagy, Prime Minister during the 1956 Hungarian uprising, was reburied in a public ceremony in Budapest. He had been executed ...
The legalisation of Solidarity
21 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When the banned Polish trade union organisation, Solidarity, was legalised in April 1989 it was one of the first signs that communism was about to col...
Wangari Maathai Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist
18 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Kenyan Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She was an environmentalist and human rights activist who ...
Britain's worst nuclear accident
17 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Things started to go wrong at the Windscale nuclear plant in October 1957. A reactor was overheating and workers were rushed in to help. In 2011 Chris...
The man who fed the world
16 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1970 the American scientist, Norman Borlaug, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his pioneering work developing disease-resistant crops. At the t...
Mexico City slashes car use
15 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
By the 1980s a deadly cocktail of factory fumes and car exhausts had turned Mexico City into the world's most polluted city. Hundreds of thousands of ...
Proving climate change: The Keeling curve
14 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How a young American scientist began the work that would show how our climate is changing. His name was Charles Keeling and he meticulously recorded l...
Britain's World War Two 'Brown Babies'
11 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The US first began sending troops to the UK in 1942 to help in the war effort. It is estimated that at least two million American servicemen passed th...
The Bristol bus boycott
10 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1963 a small group of British black activists started a pioneering protest against racism within the local bus company in Bristol. It had specified...
The Notting Hill riots
09 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1958 Britain was shocked by nearly a week of race riots in the west London district of Notting Hill. The clashes between West Indian immigra...
The first black woman MP in Britain
08 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1987 Diane Abbott became the first black woman elected to the British Parliament. The daughter of first generation immigrants she was one of only f...
Learie Constantine - fighting racism in the UK
07 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The great West Indian cricketer, lawyer and member of the House of Lords took a London hotel to court when it refused to let him and his family stay t...
China opens up to capitalism
04 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In May 1980 China allowed capitalist activity for the first time since the Communist Revolution, in four designated cities known as the Special Econom...
The 1967 Hong Kong riots
03 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout much of 1967 striking workers and students filled the streets of Hong Kong. They were inspired by the Cultural Revolution in China and dema...
Mao's Cultural Revolution
02 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1966 Chairman Mao declared the start of the Cultural Revolution in Communist China, a radical and brutal attempt to reshape Chinese society. Saul Y...
My memories of Chairman Mao
01 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
American Sidney Rittenberg first met Mao Zedong in the 1940s during the final years of China's civil war and before Mao's victory over the Nationalist...
The birth of the People's Republic of China
30 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
On 1 October 1949 Chairman Mao declared China to be a communist state. Zhu Zhende was a young recruit in the People's Liberation Army who marched in t...
The death of a matador
27 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In September 1984, the famous Spanish matador, Francisco Rivera, also known as Paquirri, was gored to death by a bull during a fight in the small town...
The Large Hadron Collider
26 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In September 2008, the world's biggest science experiment, the Large Hadron Collider, was started up for the first time at the European Organisation F...
Fighting the Islamic State group online
25 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 his...
Being black in Nazi Germany
24 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Theodor Wonja Michael was a child when Hitler came to power in Germany. The son of a German mother and a Cameroonian father he faced discrimination an...
The Sound of Music on Broadway
23 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical was first performed on stage in New York in 1959, several years before it was made into a film. Vincent Dowd has b...
Sir Anthony Blunt - Soviet spy
20 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Sir Anthony Blunt, a distinguished British art historian and curator of the Queen's pictures was exposed as a former Soviet spy in the autumn of 1979....
CS Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia
19 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The first book in the Chronicles of Narnia series by the Northern Irish-born writer CS Lewis was published in autumn 1950. The Lion, the Witch and the...
Free breakfast with the Black Panthers
18 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Black Panther Party hit the headlines in the late 1960s with their call for revolution. But they also ran a number of "survival programmes" to hel...
The repeal of 'Don't ask, don't tell'
17 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
LGBT servicemen and women in the US armed forces had to keep their sexuality secret until the 'Don't ask, don't tell' policy was repealed in 2011. Lie...
An Ethiopian war hero
16 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 1950s the Ethiopian Emperor, Haile Selassie, sent thousands of Ethiopian troops to fight in the Korean war. They were called the Kagnew B...
Magellan and the first voyage around the world
13 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In September 1519, a fleet led by the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan set off on what would be the first circumnavigation of the world. Magella...
Conflict timber in Liberia's civil war
12 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How the timber industry fuelled a brutal civil war in West Africa. In the late 1990s, timber companies worked closely with Liberia's warlord-turned-pr...
India's affirmative action controversy
11 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1990 the Indian government introduced an affirmative action plan that had been lying unimplemented for a decade. The Mandal Commission recommended...
The TV series Friends
10 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A new show called Friends hit American TV screens in September 1994. It was based on the lives of six young New Yorkers and became one of the most suc...
The coup, the president and the embassy
09 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In September 2009 the deposed president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya, made a sudden return from exile, seeking refuge in the Brazilian embassy in the Ho...
The businessman who defied the Italian Mafia
06 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1991, Palermo businessman Libero Grassi published an open letter in Sicily’s main newspaper denouncing the Mafia for constantly demanding extorti...
The Holocaust denial trial
05 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The controversial historian, David Irving, tried to sue Penguin Books and professor Deborah Lipstadt for libel after she called him a Holocaust denier...
Inside lunar astronaut quarantine
04 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When the crew of Apollo 11 returned to earth after their historic mission to the Moon, they were immediately placed in quarantine for 3 weeks. It was ...
The first all-women peacekeeping unit
03 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The UN deployed its first all-female contingent of peacekeepers in Liberia in West Africa. The country was still recovering from its long civil war wh...
The outbreak of World War Two
02 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. I...
The paedophile identified by his hands
30 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 2009 a paedophile was convicted with the help of a new form of identification - hand analysis. Dame Sue Black of Lancaster University explains how ...
Nina Simone moves to Liberia
29 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The great African-American jazz singer Nina Simone moved to the Liberian capital Monrovia in September 1974. Simone was famous for her vocal support f...
The Kindertransport children who fled the Nazis
28 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the months leading up to outbreak of World War Two in September 1939, some 10,000 unaccompanied children were sent by their parents out of Germany ...
Mexico's murdered women
27 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1993 young women began disappearing in the Mexican border town of Ciudad Juarez. Since then hundreds are reported to have been kidnapped and killed...
The murder of black teenager Emmett Till
26 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Emmett Till, a black teenager from Chicago, was brutally murdered in Mississippi, in the USA.His death was one of the key events that energized the Am...
The death of Brazil's Getulio Vargas
23 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1954 the President of Brazil took his own life rather than quit his post. Getulio Vargas had been one of Brazil’s most influential leaders...
The return of the wolf
22 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park in 1995. It was the start of one of the most famous and controversial wildlife restoration pro...
I helped liberate Paris from the Nazis
21 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
On August 25 1944 General Charles De Gaulle, who had been in exile in London for the majority of World War 2, finally entered Paris at the head of the...
Finding El Salvador's missing children
20 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
At the end of El Salvador's civil war human rights investigators began the search for hundreds of children reportedly kidnapped by the army during ant...
The first human Cyborg
19 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1998, a transponder or silicon chip was surgically implanted into the forearm of a British scientist. It sent identifying signals to a central comp...
Dr Seuss: the man who taught America to read
16 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Dr Seuss books revolutionised the way American children learnt to read in the 1950s. Books like 'The Cat in the Hat' were designed to help young c...
Catching 'Carlos the Jackal'
15 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1980s Ilich Ramírez Sánchez known as 'Carlos the Jackal' was seen as the world's most-wanted terrorist. He had carried out bombings, killings...
The warnings before 9/11
14 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Throughout 2001 the US authorities were being given warnings that a terror attack was imminent. A Congressional Commission, FBI officers and the CIA w...
The daily disposable contact lens
13 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The contact lens was once a precious and expensive piece of eyewear which had to be looked after and carefully cleaned every night. But that all chang...
The division of Kashmir
12 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In October 1947, an invasion of Kashmir by tribal fighters led to the division of the state between India and Pakistan. Andrew Whitehead speaks to vic...
The Yangtze Incident
09 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1949 a British warship, HMS Amethyst, launched a daring escape after it was held captive for months by Chinese Communists on the Yangtze river. The...
British troops take to the streets of Northern Ireland
08 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1969 the British Army was first deployed in Northern Ireland. Their job was to keep the peace on the streets of Londonderry where sectarian...
Criminals in the community
07 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1970s the UK tried to reduce its growing prison population. An experimental new punishment was introduced for convicted criminals. It was calle...
Under the North Pole
06 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1958 the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus travelled under the North Pole. Julian Bedford spoke to retired vice Admiral Kenneth Carr in 2012 about the...
The mass exodus of Algeria's 'Pieds Noirs'
05 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Hundreds of thousands of French people who'd been living in Algeria for generations fled for safety to France in the summer of 1962. It was in the las...
The invasion of Kuwait
02 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Thousands of Iraqi troops and tanks began pouring into Kuwait on 2 August 1990. The tiny, oil-rich Gulf state was immediately taken over by Saddam Hus...
The Warsaw uprising
01 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
On 1 August 1944, resistance fighters in the Polish capital rose up against German occupying forces. The uprising lasted for 63 days and some 200,000 ...
The anti-nuclear protesters who won
31 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In 1980 the Bavarian government announced plans to build a nuclear reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf in southern Germany. Eight years later constructi...
The treasures of Sutton Hoo
30 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
One of the most remarkable archaeological discoveries in British history was made in the summer of 1939, when a huge hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold was fou...
The death of David Kelly
29 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How the death of a UK weapons inspector intensified arguments over Britain's involvement in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Rebecca Kesby has been spea...
Humanity's earliest ancestor
26 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In July 2001 a team of palaeontologists led by Michel Brunet discovered a seven million year-old fossilised skull in the Djurab desert in Chad. Ahount...
When Tunisia led on women's rights
25 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When Tunisia achieved independence it brought in a new equality law that revolutionised women's lives. In August 1956 under the socialist President Ha...