The History Hour

The plane crash that killed eight of Manchester United's top players, the courage of the British Suffragettes, uncovering South Africa's nuclear secrets, plus tracking down Nazis in South America and the attack on a South Korean airliner ahead of the Seoul Olympics. (Photo: Plane wreckage at Munich airport - AFP/Getty Images)

In January 1968, North Vietnamese troops and Viet Cong guerrillas launched a huge surprise attack on towns, cities and military bases across South Vietnam. The events of the Tet offensive had a profound impact on American public opinion and marked a turning point in the war. Plus the roots of the Rohingya crisis, the birth of gospel music, Ireland's Bloody Sunday, and the end of corporal punishmen...

When North Korea and the US came close to war in 1968; plus Salvador Dali, re-creating Francis Bacon's studio, the first veggie burger and the origins of Lego Photo: Members of the USS Pueblo's crew being taken into custody. Credit: Korean Central News Agency/Korea News Service

After Apartheid was abolished in the 1990s, South Africa set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to try to confront the legacy of its brutal past. We speak to Justice Sisi Khampepe, who served on the Commission. Plus, the inspiring story of the disabled Irish author, Christoper Nolan; an inside account of two of America's most famous presidential speeches; and the role of British women in Wor...

When France stopped Britain joining Europe in the 1960s, the boy who set a record for continuously staying awake, the launch of the first iPhone, hands reaching out in friendship between Britain and Germany after the Second World War, and a notorious massacre during Algeria's bitter internal conflict of the 1990s. Photo: Charles de Gaulle, President of France, at a press conference on 14th January...

Mrs Yeltsin, on the day her husband shocked the world, half a century since the Mafia's grip on America was exposed, the 1999 protests in Iran - the biggest since the revolution - a student tells us how a photograph led to his death sentence and the Brazilian woman hijacker who took her kids along for the ride.

How Black activists invented a new holiday, flying around the world without refuelling, what not to do if you win a fortune, and the mountaineers who risked their lives climbing the spires of Leningrad during WW2. Then there's the obligatory Christmas board game - Trivial Pursuit. Picture: Children at the first Kwanzaa celebration - courtesy of Terri Bandele.

One of the most successful American films of all time was released on Christmas Day 1962. Based on the best-selling book by author Harper Lee, To Kill A Mockingbird starred Gregory Peck as a lawyer who stood against prejudice in the Deep South of the USA. Louise Hidalgo has been speaking to Gregory Peck's son Carey Peck. Plus, the life of Indian independence leader BR Ambedkar; a short-lived perio...

The African-American lab technician, Vivien Thomas, who pioneered surgery that saved millions of babies, Otis Redding remembered 50 years on from his tragic death, the killer smog of the 1950's London, the man brave enough to hypnotise Uday Hussein and the Australian Prime Minister - lost at sea. (Photo: Vivien Thomas, US Surgical Technician, 1940) (Audio: Courtesy of US National Library of Medici...

Fifty years since Aden gained independence from Britain, plus an amazing discovery under the oceans, a celebration of Finnish independence, Russian art punished by the Bolsheviks and the building of Mount Rushmore's famous statues. Photo: Aden 1967 Copyright: Alamy.

In November 2006, the world was shocked by the murder in London of former Russian intelligence officer, Alexander Litvinenko. We hear from his widow Marina about his life and agonising death, and get an analysis of the case from Luke Harding, author of "A Very Expensive Poison". Also in the programme, an astonishing assassination plot during El Salvador's Civil War, a huge oil spill in Spain, and...

The secret battle for the holiest site in Islam in 1979; the coup that changed the Vietnam war, plus an East German musical icon, prosecuting Charles Manson and Toy Story's digital revolution. Photo: Fighting at the Grand Mosque in Mecca after militants seized control of the shrine, November 1979 (AFP/Getty Images)

The women searching for their loved-ones who went missing during the Lebanese civil war, plus the man who first discovered diamonds in Botswana, a pioneer of the Indian restaurant business in the UK, an exploding whale, and naked dancing in post-war London. Photo: West Beirut under shellfire in 1982.(Credit:Domnique Faget/AFP/Getty Images)

Eye-witness accounts from the Russian Revolution of October 1917; the first dog in space; Sabah, one of the biggest 20th-century stars of the Middle East; the last journalist to interview Osama Bin Laden; and horror and heartbreak: memories of the First World War. Picture: Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin addressing crowds in the capital Petrograd during the Russian Revolution of 1917. (Credit: Hul...

The German monk who began a religious uprising; the book that made us think of humans as animals; how the murder of a Brazilian journalist by the secret police became a symbol of Brazil's military brutality; plus the Lebanese architectural dream that was overtaken by war and the fight that ended sex censorship online. Photo: A portrait of Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder on display at the...

How tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews escaped the Nazis by using false papers; what happened when abortion became illegal overnight in 1960s Romania; the murder of campaigning Nigerian journalist Dele Giwa; the creation of British satire magazine Private Eye; and the love affair between writers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Photo: False Hungarian ID document (BBC)

How Jewish veterans fought fascism in post war Britain; plus investigating the death of Mozambique's president Samora Machel, we hear from a survivor of the Moscow theatre siege, inside the Cuba Missile Crisis and the mystery of Booker prize winner JG Farrell. Photo:British Fascist Sir Oswald Mosley speaking at a rally, Hertford Road, Dalston, London, May 1st 1948. (Getty Images)

In October 1967 the Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara was captured and killed in Bolivia - we hear from the CIA operative who was one of the last people to speak to him. Plus, the plan to rescue Italy's art from the Nazis; remembering a hero of Catalan nationalism; the policeman and friend who testified against OJ Simpson, and Madonna - the early years. (Photo: Felix Rodriguez (left) with the capt...

Why the brutal killing of a young gay man in Wyoming prompted change, how white people came to terms with their past after segregation in deep south America, living alongside Israeli soldiers in Gaza, plus modern treasures uncovered in Iran and rediscovered Tudor treasures raised from the English seabed. (Photo: Matthew Shepard with his parents, Judy and Dennis, on holiday at Yellowstone National...

Walking the Great Wall of China; the death of Pope John Paul 1 after just a month in the job; turning against a colonial power - how Guinea gained independence from France; the life and times of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, and the British Land Girls of World War Two. (Picture: Yaohui Dong, Wu Deyu and Zhang Yuanhua on the Great Wall of China. Courtesy of Yaohui Dong)

Five remarkable stories of animals in recent history - from the guide dog who led her owner out of the World Trade Center on 9/11 to a ferocious shark attack to the locust swarm that flew more than 5000 miles across the Atlantic ocean. Photo: a Great White Shark - Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

The run on a British bank which signalled the coming global financial crisis, a schoolboy arrested in East Germany for writing a letter, a doctor remembers the Sabra Shatila massacre in Beirut, and a Nigerian archaeological treasure trove. Photo: Northern Rock customers queuing outside the Kingston branch, in order to take their money out on September 17th 2007. Credit: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Imag...

The search for a spirit world after WW1 that led people to believe that photographs of fairies were real. Plus Jamaica's worst train crash, France's last execution by guillotine, the man who saved the Proms and life in a giant greenhouse in Arizona - Biosphere 2. Photo: Frances Griffiths and the "Cottingley Fairies" in a photograph made in 1917 by her cousin Elsie Wright with paper cut-outs and ha...

Princess Diana's brother remembers the passionate speech he gave at her funeral, and one of the doctors who treated her at the scene of her fatal car crash remembers her death. Plus, how George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, the development of a revolutionary new 3D medical scanning technique, and the birth of the online auction site eBay. Picture: Earl Spencer and Prince William at Princess Diana's fu...

In BBC archive recordings, veterans tell the story of how medical care dealt with the horrors of WW1. Plus when Germany put Nazis on trial, race riots in London's Notting Hill in 1958, and in East Germany in 1992. And the inventors of Botox. Photo: Australian wounded on the Menin Road on the Western Front, 1917 (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)