Main content

Witness History Episodes

  1.

    China opens up to capitalism

    How China's Communist rulers established the country's Special Economic Zones in May 1980

  2. Soviet nuclear missile alert

    The Soviet colonel who realised that a warning of a US nuclear attack was a false alarm.

  3. Fighting for Uyghur rights in China

    A first-hand account of taking on the Chinese Communist Party in the 1980s

  4. The chemistry of cannabis

    How an Israeli scientist discovered the crucial compounds in the widely-used drug

  5. Roe v Wade

    How a young lawyer from Texas got the US abortion laws changed in 1973

  6. Surviving the Falkands War

    British soldier Simon Weston was severely burned in an Argentine attack in 1982.

  7. The sinking of the Belgrano

    An Argentine survivor remembers being torpedoed by the British during the Falklands War.

  8. Algeria's rebel footballers

    Algerian players secretly left their French clubs to form their own national team in 1958

  9. The Algerians who fought for France

    The bitter experiences of the fighters who opposed their own country's independence.

  10. Algeria: The Massacre in Paris

    How French police turned on Algerian demonstrators in Paris in 1961, killing dozens.

  11. The War in Algeria: A French soldier's experience

    A first-hand account of the brutal French tactics against Algerian independence fighters

  12. Algeria’s Milk Bar Bomber

    Zohra Drif targeted an ice-cream parlour in Algiers during the war of independence

  13. The battle for Kinder Scout

    How workers in Manchester fought for the right to walk in the nearby countryside.

  14. Iranian revolution: The Kurdish uprising

    A boy caught up in the forgotten battle for Kurdish autonomy in Iran in 1979

  15. Britain's Soviet spy scandal

    In 1971 during the Cold War, the UK expelled 90 Soviet diplomats suspected of spying.

  16. Women's rights in Basra

    How women in the southern Iraqi city were persecuted for "anti-Islamic" behaviour

  17. Erasmus: Europe's student exchange scheme

    The programme that's let millions of EU students live and study in other countries.

  18. The World Wide Web

    How the World Wide Web was created

  19. How Tinder changed the dating game

    How the dating app with the swipe revolutionised the world of online romance

  20. Greece's Great Famine

    How hundreds of thousands of Greeks starved to death under Nazi occupation.

  21. The largest war crimes trial in history

    The former Serbian president, Slobodan Milosevic, went on trial at The Hague in 2002.

  22. Nato intervenes in Kosovo

    How the US and its allies backed air strikes against Serbian forces to stop atrocities.

  23. The Great American Grain Robbery

    How a catastrophic trade deal between the US and Moscow sparked a global food price shock

  24. The handshake in Space

    How Russian cosmonauts and American astronauts met up in space during the Cold War

  25. The Soviet Union's Afghan War

    How what Moscow planned as a short military operation turned into the Soviet "Vietnam".

  26. The Falklands War - an Argentine account

    An Argentine conscript remembers his country's doomed military campaign in 1982.

  27. The Falklands War - An islander's account

    A local radio broadcaster remembers keeping calm as Argentine troops invaded his studio.

  28. Escaping a Maoist cult

    Aravindan Balakrishnan ran a cult in London for 30 years; then two of its members fled.

  29. Selling Van Gogh's Sunflowers

    How one of the Dutch artist's masterpieces was auctioned for a world record in 1987.

  30. Afghanistan's women's newspaper

    Aina-E-Zan, or Women's Mirror, was launched in 2002 at a time of hope for Afghan women.

  2. 1
  3. …
  4. 37
  5. 38
  6. 39
  7. 40
  8. 41
  9. …
  10. 155