Witness History

Ceausescu's 'House of the People'

03 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In the early 1980s the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu ordered the construction of a massive building in central Bucharest. Dubbed the "House of t...

Barbara Cartland - Queen of Romance

02 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

Dame Barbara Cartland was best known for her historical romances and is thought to have sold hundreds of millions of books around the world. She was s...

Brazil's Marijuana Summer

01 Jan 2019

Contributed by Lukas

In September 1987, fishermen and surfers in the states of Rio and São Paulo started spotting mysterious tin cans floating in the sea. Soon those tins...

Rebels Rout The Army In El Salvador

31 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

On December 30 1983 Marxist rebels in El Salvador attacked and occupied the El Paraiso army base in the north of the country. It was the first time an...

When Animals Go To War

28 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In December 1943, a British charity created the Dickin Medal to honour the bravery of animals serving in war. The first medals went mainly to pigeons ...

Trautonium: A Revolution in Electronic Music

27 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

'I like it, carry on', said Joseph Goebbels, after listening to the trautonium, invented in Berlin. It was used first in classical music in the early ...

UFO Sightings: The Rendlesham Forest Incident

25 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

At Christmas 1980 strange objects and lights were seen over a US military base in Suffolk, England, for three consecutive nights. Several military se...

Scotland's Stone of Destiny

24 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

On Christmas Eve 1950 four young Scottish students took the 'Stone of Destiny' from Westminster Abbey. The symbolic stone had been taken from Scotlan...

Stopping The 'Shoe Bomber'

21 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

On December 22 2001 a British-born man tried to bring down American Airlines flight 63 from Paris to Miami. His plan failed when the bomb didn't go of...

The Woman Who Wrote Mary Poppins

20 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Writer PL Travers created a children's classic when she invented the magical English nanny. But was the character built around her own personality? Vi...

Hacking The First Computer Password

19 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Scientists at MIT in the 1960s had to share computer time. They were given passwords to access the computer and could not use more than their allowanc...

Theatre in the Sahara

18 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Theatre director Peter Brook led a troupe of actors on a three-month-long journey across the Sahara Desert starting in December 1972. They performed i...

China and Japan at War

17 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Japanese troops reached the Chinese city of Nanjing in December 1937. The violence that followed marked one of the darkest moments in a struggle that ...

The US Apologises for Wartime Internment

17 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act which gave a presidential apology and compensation to Japanese Americans interned durin...

Englandspiel: The Deadly WW2 Spy Game

13 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1942, a Dutch secret agent was captured by German military intelligence in the Netherlands. The agent's name was Haub Lauwers and he worked for the...

Cicely Saunders And The Modern Hospice Movement

12 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1967, Dame Cicely Saunders opened the first modern hospice in South London. St Christopher's inspired the creation of thousands of similar hospices...

Apollo 8

12 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

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

When China Joined the WTO

11 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

China had to relax its strict communist system to join the World Trade Organisation. Charlene Barshefsky was the US trade negotiator looking after Ame...

Angela Merkel's Rise to Power

07 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Angela Merkel rose to power in German politics after the fall of her mentor, Helmut Kohl. He had accepted secret donations on behalf of their politica...

Adopted By The Man Who Killed My Family

06 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Ramiro Osorio Cristales was just five years old when his family was murdered by the Guatemalan army, along with more than 200 other civilians from the...

The Armenian Earthquake

05 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

A catastrophic earthquake hit northern Armenia on the morning of December 7th 1988. At least 20,000 people were killed and thousands more injured. An...

The Coronation of Jean-Bédel Bokassa

04 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Jean-Bédel Bokassa crowned himself Emperor of the Central African Republic in a lavish ceremony on the 4th of December 1977. He'd already been Presi...

Berlin's Rubble Women

03 Dec 2018

Contributed by Lukas

At the end of WW2 much of Germany's capital had been destroyed by bombing and artillery. Almost half of all houses and flats had been damaged and a mi...

Norway's EU referendum

30 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

At the end of November 1994, Norway voted in a referendum not to join the European Union. The issue had split the country, and Norway was the only one...

The Discovery of Dinosaur Eggs

29 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The discovery of a nest of complete dinosaur eggs in Mongolia in 1923 provided the first proof that the prehistoric creatures hatched out of eggs rath...

The man who inspired Britain's first Aids charity

28 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1982, Terrence Higgins became the first known British victim of a frightening new disease called HIV/AIDS. In his memory, his friends set up the Te...

The Antarctic Whale Hunters

27 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

A personal account of the huge Antarctic industry which left whales on the brink of extinction. For centuries, whaling had been big business. Whale pr...

The Destruction Of Iraq's Marshlands

26 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein ordered the draining of southern Iraq's great marshes. It was one of the biggest environmental disasters of the twe...

The USSR Opens Up to the West

23 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1957, just four years after Stalin's death, 30,000 students from 130 countries attended the 6th International Youth Festival in Moscow, a two week ...

The Last Days of Yasser Arafat

22 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat died in November 2004. French doctors treating him at the military hospital in France where he died said Arafat h...

The Story Behind The Man Who Shot JFK

21 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

What did Lee Harvey Oswald do for two years in the Soviet city of Minsk? And why did the American authorities let him return without any fuss in 1963?...

The 'Braceros', America's Mexican Guest Workers

20 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

During the last years of World War Two, the American government began hiring poor Mexicans to come to work legally on US farms. The scheme was known a...

The Funeral of the Duke of Wellington

19 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

A man recorded by the BBC shares his memories of the funeral of the Duke of Wellington in 1852. The Duke was given a state funeral after defeating Nap...

Britain's Little Blue Disability Car

16 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

For decades disabled people in the UK were offered tiny, three-wheeled, turquoise cars as their main form of transport. They were known as Invacars an...

Japanese Murders in Brazil

15 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

When WW2 was over, a fanatical group of Japanese immigrants living in Brazil refused to believe that Japan had lost the war. They decided to punish th...

The Shah in Exile

13 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In November 1979, Iranian students seized the American embassy in Tehran after Washington agreed to allow the deposed Shah into the US for medical tre...

Jewish in Imperial Russia

13 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Pearl Unikow was a young woman who grew up in a segregated Jewish community in Russia before WW1. Her stories, recorded in Yiddish in the 1970s, provi...

How The Brazilian Dictatorship Made My Father Disappear

12 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

On a hot summer day in 1971, six armed men invaded the house of former Congressman Rubens Paiva in Rio de Janeiro. He was taken from his wife and chil...

WW1: Revolution in Germany

08 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

After four years of war Germany was on the verge of defeat. Its armies were exhausted and in retreat, its civilian population enduring hardship and hu...

Women Nurses during World War One

07 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

During World War One, two British nurses set up a first aid station just a few hundred metres behind the trenches of the Western Front. Mairi Chisholm...

African Troops during World War One

06 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

At the start of World War One, British and German colonial forces went into battle in East Africa. Tens of thousands of African troops and up to a mil...

The Battle of Passchendaele

05 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

It was one of the defining battles of the First World War.Britain and its allies had ambitious plans to break through German lines - but they ended up...

A Kristallnacht story

02 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

On 9 November 1938 Nazis led attacks on Jewish homes and businesses across Germany. Because of the number of windows that were smashed it would be rem...

Why I Slapped the German Chancellor

01 Nov 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In November 1968 a young activist hit Germany's leader in public, to draw attention to his Nazi past. The activist was Beate Klarsfeld - the Chancell...

Princess Margaret And The War Hero

31 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In October 1955, Britain was gripped by a romance between the young Princess Margaret and a glamorous, but divorced, ex-fighter pilot called Captain P...

Life With America's Black Panthers

30 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Eldridge Cleaver, one of the leaders of the radical African American Black Panther party, spent more than three years in exile in Algeria in the late ...

The KGB's Whistleblower

29 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Senior KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin risked his life smuggling thousands of top-secret Soviet intelligence files out of KGB headquarters, and bringin...

The Day Nigeria Struck Oil

26 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

An eyewitness account of a discovery that changed Nigerian history. Chief Sunday Inengite was 19 years old when prospectors from the Shell D'Arcy oil ...

When Russia's Richest Man Was Jailed

25 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

When Russian tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky was jailed in 2003, it was the start of President Putin's crackdown on the oligarchs. He shares his memories ...

The Arrest in London of Augusto Pinochet

23 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The former Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet, was arrested in London in October 1998. Spanish lawyers wanted him extradited to Spain to face charges ...

Desmond Tutu Wins the Nobel Peace Prize

22 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In October 1984, one of South Africa's most well-known human rights activists, Desmond Tutu, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his opposition to a...

When Belgium Banned Coca-Cola

19 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1999 Belgian teenagers started to become ill after drinking Coca-Cola. Many ended up in hospital and the government banned the sale of all Coca-Col...

The Pergau Dam Affair

18 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In October 1993 news broke about an arms deal with Malaysia that led to the biggest development aid scandal in British history. It became known as the...

Brazil's Hidden War in the Amazon

17 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In the early 1970's, at the peak of political repression and persecution in Brazil, a collection of left-wing students and liberal professionals decid...

The 1973 Oil Crisis

16 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In October 1973 Arab nations slashed oil production in protest at American support for Israel during it's war against Egypt and Syria. Oil prices sky ...

Fighting Mount Etna

15 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The Italian authorities tried to divert the stream of molten lava pouring down the slopes of the Etna volcano on the island of Sicily in 1983. Susan ...

Archbishop Oscar Romero

12 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The murdered Archbishop of San Salvador, Oscar Romero, is being made a saint of the Roman Catholic church. He was killed in 1980 by a right-wing deat...

Austria at War

11 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In October 1945, Austria got its first provisional government since its annexation by Nazi Germany a year before the Second World War. Wilfriede Iwani...

The Nazi Black Book

10 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

During World War Two the German secret service compiled a book listing all the people they wanted to arrest in Britain if it fell to the Nazis. The to...

Anti-traveller Riots in Sweden

09 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1948 racist violence broke out against Romany-speaking traveller people in Sweden. The riots in the town of Jönköping lasted for several days. ...

Reform of the House of Lords

08 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Britain's Labour government was determined to get rid of the unelected aristocrats sitting in the House of Lords - Parliament's second chamber. But th...

Howl: The Poem That Revolutionised US Writing

05 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Allen Ginsberg first read his poem Howl, at an art gallery in San Francisco in October 1955. It marked a turning point in American literature and is c...

The Soviet Union's Fashion Revolutionary

04 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Slava Zaitsev was the first designer to create high fashion collections in the Soviet Union. He tells Dina Newman about the challenges he faced workin...

The Invention of Artificial Skin

03 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

How a chemist and a surgeon found a way of helping burns to heal. Chemist Ioannis Yannas was working alongside surgeon John Burke when they first made...

The Street Battle That Rocked Brazil

02 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

On the 2nd and 3rd of October 1968, students from two neighbouring universities in the centre of São Paulo clashed in a battle which left one dead an...

Racial Equality in Britain - Learie Constantine

01 Oct 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The former West Indies cricketer, Learie Constantine, took the Imperial Hotel in London to court in 1943. It had refused to let him and his family sta...

The Bridge Which United Sweden and Denmark

28 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1993 work began to build Europe's longest road and rail bridge. The Oresund Bridge links Sweden to Denmark connecting them by land for the first ti...

Fighting in the Iran-Iraq War

27 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The war lasted for eight years. The death toll is estimated at over a million people. It began when Saddam Hussein sent planes and troops into Iran i...

The Creation of the Cervical Cancer Vaccine

26 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

How a scientific breakthrough led to the invention of the revolutionary cancer vaccine. In the 1980s, it was established that cervical cancer was caus...

Isadora Duncan - Dance Pioneer

25 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Sometimes called the 'Mother of Modern Dance' she was born and brought up in the USA. Isadora Duncan performed across Europe in the early 20th Centur...

The South African Army In Lesotho

24 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

South Africa sent 600 soldiers into Lesotho to quell political unrest in September 1998. Mamello Morrison was an opposition protestor. She spoke to D...

Brazil's Nuclear Accident

21 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In September of 1987, two waste pickers in the Brazilian town of Goiania broke into a disused medical clinic and stole a radiotherapy machine, trigger...

The Arnhem Parachute Drop

20 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Thousands of Allied troops parachuted into the Nazi-occupied Netherlands in September 1944. At that point, it was the most ambitious Allied airborne o...

The Battle of Algiers

20 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In September 1966, a film was released that has come to be seen as one of the great political masterpieces of 20th-century cinema. Shot in black-and-w...

The Cuban Five

18 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Five Cuban spies were arrested in Miami by the FBI in September 1998. After a controversial trial, they were given lengthy jail sentences. The last of...

The Fifteen Guinea Special

17 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The train which marked the end of the steam age on Britain's main-line rail network. The Fifteen Guinea Special was a passenger service which ran from...

The Truth About Crop Circles

14 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1991 a mystery was solved when two English men claimed responsibility for the creation of crop circles. The huge patterns had been appearing on far...

How I Survived a Fire on a Plane

13 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Ricardo Trajano was the only passenger to survive a fire on a plane in 1973. His flight from Brazil was forced to make an emergency landing outside P...

The Killing of Steve Biko

12 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

On September 12th 1977 the anti-Apartheid activist and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa died from injuries sustained while i...

Appeasement

11 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In September 1938 Britain's Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain flew back and forth to Germany to negotiate with Adolf Hitler. He hoped to guarantee ...

The Ship that Dumped America's Waste

10 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1988 a ship named 'Khian Sea' dumped 4,000 tons of incinerated ash close to the beach in the town of Gonaives, in northern Haiti. The ash had origi...

WWI: The Hundred Days Offensive

07 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

First-hand accounts of the Allied offensive which finally brought the war to an end. The offensive took place on the Western Front in the summer and a...

From Leningrad to St Petersburg

06 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1991 as the communist system was collapsing, in a hugely symbolic act, Leningrad voted to drop Lenin's name abandoning its revolutionary heritage a...

Living Under Gaddafi

05 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In September 1969, a military coup in Libya brought Muammar Gaddafi to power. Louise Hidalgo has been speaking to award-winning writer Hisham Matar ab...

The Battle for Brick Lane

04 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1978 the racist murder of a young Bangladeshi textile worker in east London galvanised an immigrant community. Farhana Haider has been speaking to ...

The First MRI Scan

03 Sep 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The first magnetic resonance scan of a human body was attempted by Dr Raymond Damadian and two students in 1977. It marked a breakthrough in efforts t...

Surviving the "Death Railway"

31 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

During World War Two the Japanese forced prisoners of war to build a 400 kilometre railway from Thailand to Burma. Tens of thousands died during the c...

The Mine Disaster That Devastated Post-War Italy

30 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In August 1956, a fire at a coal mine in Belgium killed 262 people. The tragedy caused grief across Europe, but particularly in Italy because more tha...

The Lake Nyos Disaster

29 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

On 21 August 1986 villagers in the north-west of Cameroon awoke to find that many of their friends and neighbours had died in their sleep. More than 1...

Hitler's League Of German Girls

28 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The League of German Girls was the girl's wing of the Nazi party's youth movement, Hitler Youth. Open to girls aged ten years upwards, it was a key pa...

Benidorm

27 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The Spanish town of Benidorm is now one of the world's most popular holiday resorts - receiving more than 10 million visitors a year. The hotels and s...

Hitler's Architect

24 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Among the leading Nazi inmates in Berlin’s Spandau prison, which was closed in August 1987, was Hitler's architect and minister of war, Albert Speer...

Baba of Karo

23 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The story behind the groundbreaking autobiography of a woman who grew up in 19th century pre-colonial Nigeria. The book is the story of Baba a Hausa w...

USSR Wages War on Alcohol

22 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

Sales of alcohol in the USSR were severely limited in 1985 in a bid to fight drunkenness. But the anti-alcohol campaign was abandoned three years late...

Prague Spring

21 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

A former student, Olda Cerny, tells Alan Johnston about how he made a desperate appeal for the support of the outside world as invading Soviet tanks ...

The Gladbeck Hostage Crisis

20 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

An intriguing story from West Germany in August 1988, of a bank robbery, a three-day car chase that had the country holding its breath, and a journali...

The Invention of Instant Noodles

17 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In August 1958 the Japanese entrepreneur, Momofuku Ando, came up with the idea of a brand new food product that would change eating habits of people a...

When TV Came To South Africa

16 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

The apartheid government finally launched a TV service in 1976. For years the Afrikaner dominated government had opposed the introduction of televisio...

Photographing Martin Luther King and His Family

14 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

In 1969 photo journalist Moneta Sleet became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for journalism. He won for the black and white image o...

Vera Brittain: Anti-Bombing Campaigner

13 Aug 2018

Contributed by Lukas

During WW2 the feminist and writer, Vera Brittain, spoke out against the saturation bombing of German cities. Her stance won her enemies in Britain a...