Witness History

In 1941, Walt Disney made a tempting offer to a fellow pioneer of the animation industry, Quirino Cristiani - the author of the first animated feature film. Cristiani was an Italian immigrant raised in Argentina who built a career creating animated political satires in the early days of cinema. He authored full-length movies that he drew entirely on his own, sketching and cutting thousands of figu...

On 3 June 2015, tens of thousands of people gathered in the capital, Buenos Aires, and in dozens of cities and towns demanding an end to violence against women. There were demonstrations in Chile and Uruguay in solidarity too. Argentina was reporting a female murder rate of one every 31 hours. The killing of a 14-year-old pregnant girl by her boyfriend was seen as a tipping point. Something had to...

In 1982, Argentine geneticist Victor Penchaszadeh was living in exile in New York when he received a call that would change the course of his career. Two founding members of the campaign group, the Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, were asking for his help to find their kidnapped grandchildren. Between 1976 and 1983, Argentina was under military rule. During this period, thousands of mainly young...

When Eva Peron, Argentina's most famous First Lady, died in 1952, her body was embalmed. Three years later, her widower, Juan Peron, was deposed in a coup. But military officers feared her corpse would become a rallying point of protest against the new government. So they stole it. Over the next few decades, Evita’s body was stored in several different places in several different countries, inspir...

In 1985, Argentina’s former military leaders were put on trial accused of kidnapping, torturing and murdering thousands of their own people. The ‘trial of the juntas’ was the first major prosecution of war crimes since the Nuremberg trials following World War Two. Between 1976 and 1983, around 30 thousand people disappeared or were murdered in Argentina during the so-called Dirty War. Military lea...

In July 1985, music legends Mick Jagger and David Bowie were asked to perform a duet with a twist at Live Aid, the biggest concert in pop history. Utilising the latest satellite technology, Mick would perform on the US stage in Philadelphia, while David would perform on the UK stage at Wembley Stadium. As the technical issues were being discussed, it soon became obvious that a half-second delay in...

On 3 July 1985 Back to the Future was released. The film tells the story of Marty McFly, a 17-year-old high school student, played by Michael J Fox, who is accidentally sent 30 years into the past in a time-travelling DeLorean car invented by his friend, Doc Brown. The screenplay for the genre-bending story was rejected 40 times, but it became a Hollywood blockbuster, dominating contemporary cultu...

Judging by how often US President Donald Trump has repeated the slogan “Drill, baby, drill”, you might think he coined it. But the phrase actually dates back to 2008. It was at the Republican National Convention that former Maryland Lieutenant Governor Michael Steele first used it, arguing the United States needed to become energy independent. The slogan, the result of what Michael describes as a...

On 1 July 2015, a much-loved lion was killed in Zimbabwe by an American trophy hunter. Black-maned Cecil was one of the star attractions at Hwange National Park. He was baited outside the park and shot with a bow. American dentist Walter Palmer, who reportedly paid a local guide $50,000 to shoot Cecil, was widely condemned. He said he didn’t know Cecil was a known local favourite and had relied on...

In 2008, an earthquake in China’s Sichuan province killed almost 90,000 people. Many were crushed when school buildings collapsed, exposing their poor construction quality. To counter perceived government suppression of information, the artist Ai Weiwei made an artwork from 90 tonnes of steel bars salvaged from the schools' wreckage. In 2011, Ai Weiwei was detained in harsh conditions for 81 days...

Between 1945 and 1952, ‘happiness trains’ transported 70,000 children from southern to northern Italy to live with wealthier families. It was a scheme organised by the Union of Italian Women and the Italian Communist Party in an attempt to make the lives of southern Italian children better. Ten-year-old Bianca D’Aniello was one of the passengers to travel from Salerno in the south to Mestre in the...

When the Medellin Metro opened in 1995, the Colombian city had recently been called the “murder capital of the world” due to the high homicide rate caused by Pablo Escobar’s drug wars. The network has grown to include a large cable car network which stretches to the neighbourhoods built into the sides of mountains that surround Medellin. It has helped transform the city into a tourist hot-spot – s...

In June 1968, Senator Robert Kennedy was killed during his campaign for the American presidency. There was nationwide mourning with huge crowds lining the tracks for his funeral train, as it travelled from New York to Washington DC. In 2012, Simon Watts spoke to Kennedy's former press secretary Frank Mankiewicz and to his former bodyguard Rosey Grier. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archiv...

On 11 September 1951, the 9.55am train from Prague to Aš, in Communist Czechoslovakia was hijacked and driven to freedom in West Germany. One hundred and eleven people were on board and 34 of them never returned, starting new lives on the other side of the Iron Curtain. The remaining 77 returned to Czechoslovakia to face state security, the Státní bezpečnost, and many were jailed. Rachel Naylor us...

In 1949, the Gratitude Train arrived in the United States, made up of 49 wagons filled with thousands of gifts from France. The convoy was a thank-you to American families who’d sent food and supplies across the Atlantic, via a ‘friendship train’ in the aftermath of World War Two. It was the idea of a French railworker called Andre Picard. In the same spirit as the friendship train, he asked famil...

It’s 50 years since the original Jaws film was released in cinemas across America. The movie premiered on 20 June 1975. Directed by a young Steven Spielberg, who was relatively unknown at the time, it was considered Hollywood’s pioneering summer blockbuster. The thriller broke records by becoming the first movie to gross over $100 million at the US box office and made millions of people afraid to...

On 28 June 1919, in the Palace of Versailles in Paris the signing of the Treaty of Versailles took place. It was a peace agreement that marked the end of World War One. The terms of the treaty punished Germany for their involvement in starting the war. British journalist, William Norman Ewer attended the signing. He told his story to the BBC World Service in 1967. He recalls the moment of the sign...

On 18 June 1964, black and white protesters jumped into a ‘whites only’ swimming pool at a motel in St Augustine, in Florida. Photos of the Monson Motor Lodge manager, James Brock, pouring cleaning acid into the pool to get them out, made global headlines. The following day, the Civil Rights Act - a landmark bill to end discrimination which had been stalling in the Senate – was finally passed. Usi...

On 17 June 2015, white supremacist Dylann Roof attended a bible group at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in the United States. As it was ending, the 21-year-old started shooting and killed nine people. Polly Sheppard was one of the survivors. She called 911 whilst hiding from Roof. The shootings at the historic African-American church shocked a nation alre...

After the Second World War, in what was then East Germany, or the German Democratic Republic (GDR), tens of thousands of women and girls were forcibly detained and abused in sexual health clinics. In 1977, at the age of 15, Sabine was at a house party in Leipzig when police came for her. She was taken to a so-called ‘Tripperburgen’ which translates to ‘gonorrhoea castle’. After 31 days she was tol...

On 14 June 1985, five politicians met on a boat in the town of Schengen, in Luxembourg, to sign an agreement to get rid of border checks between their countries: Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, France and West Germany. The Schengen Area now encompasses more than 450 million people and 29 countries in Europe. Rachel Naylor speaks to Robert Goebbels, who was Luxembourg’s Secretary of State for...

In 1987 Uunied States President Ronald Reagan spoke at the Berlin Wall. In his speech he called on the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev to "Tear down this wall". The famous words were met with applause and cheers by the large crowd of West Berliners who had lived in a divided city since 1961 when the wall was built. However, that phrase was very nearly omitted from the address. The sp...

In 2012, Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his species died. George, from Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands in the Pacific Ocean, was a global symbol of conservation and brought to the attention of the world the reality of extinction. James Gibbs, vice president of science and conservation at the Galapagos Conservancy knew George well. He looked after the tortoise in life, and in death. James says:...

After the Sino-Indian war in 1962, around 3,000 men, women and children were incarcerated in a disused World War Two prisoner of war camp. Indians of Chinese descent were sent there having fallen prey to government suspicion following the war which only lasted a few weeks. Joy Ma was born in the camp in Deoli, Rajasthan, and spent the first four years of her life there with her family. She speaks...

Between September 1943 and June 1944 in World War Two, the Italian capital Rome was occupied by German soldiers. Italy had surrendered and thousands of Allied prisoners of war had escaped from internment camps in the country. An Irish priest, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty, who was working for the neutral state of Vatican City set in the heart of Rome, did everything he could to help the escaped prison...