The History Hour

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is food historian Dr Annie Gray. She discusses the impact of the first modern, fitted kitchen - the Frankfurt Kitchen - on the kitchens of today. It all goes back to 1926 and the reluctant Austrian architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky who said she wanted to be remembered for more than d...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. This programme contains distressing details. Our guest is Bárbara Fernández Melleda, Assistant Professor in Latin American Studies at the University of Hong Kong. We start with Chilean author Isabel Allende on her debut novel, The House of the Spirits, in 1982 which reflects Chile’s 20th century...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Professor Barbara Keys, a specialist in US history at Durham University. We start with a celebration of the American Freedom Train, as the US prepares to mark 250 years of independence. Then, the South African railway enthusiast who created one of the most luxurious train services in...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. We learn about how Play-Doh evolved from a cleaning product to a childhood favourite and the creation of one of the best-selling board games of all time, Catan. Our guest is the editor of Toy World Magazine, Caroline Tonks, who takes us through the history of toy crazes. We also hear about the inve...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We learn about how a Norwegian businessman brought salmon sushi to Japan in the 1980s. Our guest is cookbook author Nancy Singleton Hachisu, who tells us more about the history of sushi in Japan and around the world. We hear about the first opera written for TV in 1950s America and how U.S Marsha...

We start with the street artist Banksy, and his 2015 dystopian 'bemusement park'. Then, we talk to roller coaster enthusiast Megan MacCausland, from the European Coaster Club. Plus, we go back through the BBC archives to tell the story of the coelacanth, a fish believed to have been extinct for 65 million years. Next, South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up after the abolishment...

Max Pearson presents a collection of Witness History and Sporting Witness episodes, all with a Nigerian theme. We hear two personal stories of the Biafra war, which began in 1967, including the writer Wole Soyinka who was jailed for trying to stop it. Plus, we hear from Patricia Ngozi Ebigwe about escaping the conflict. She's now better known as TV and music star Patti Boulaye. We speak to Dr Loui...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is literature lecturer Dr Hetta Howes on major literary hoaxes around the world. We hear about Howard Hughes' fake autobiography, the Salt Cathedral of Zipaquirá in Colombia and how the Indian musician Ravi Shankar taught George Harrison the sitar. Plus, the Indian woman who led her cou...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Mercedes Peñalba- Sotorrío, a senior lecturer in modern European history at Manchester Metropolitan University, England. We start with the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975 ending 36 years of dictatorship over Spain. Then, we use archive to hear how King Juan Carlos reclaimed...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is aviation historian Dr Victoria Taylor. We start with an archive interview of American Chuck Yeager who became the first pilot to fly faster than the speed of sound in 1947. Then, a couple who were caught up in the attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris in November 2015. We hear from...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Darja Dankina, who's a palaeontologist from the Natures Research Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. We start with the discovery of the largest dinosaur ever, uncovered by a shepherd on a ranch in Argentina in 2012. Then, we hear from the daughter of Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, who created...

Emerante de Pradines's son, Richard Morse, tells us about his mother’s life and her commitment to de-demonising vodou culture through her music. Haiti expert Kate Hodgson, from University College Cork in Ireland, expands on the history of the country in the 20th Century. The story of how an Argentinian doctor was inspired to create a new treatment for heart disease and when the death of a Catholic...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Sonny Roberts’ daughter tells us about how her father created the UK’s first black-owned music studio - this programme contains outdated and offensive language. Music producer and professor emerita at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Lucy Durán takes us through the history of music stu...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Indian-based author and podcaster Purba Chakraborty talks about the history of fiction writing. We hear about the rise in popularity of 'Nordic Noir', following the publication of Henning Mankell's crime novels. Then we listen to BBC archive of writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges - regarded as one...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We start with a BBC archive interview where one woman recounts what it was like to survive the earthquake and landside in 1961 following the volcanic eruption in Tristan da Cunha. Our guest is Anne Green, a retired schoolteacher from the island of Tristan da Cunha. She describes what it was like...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes. Tea expert Sabita Banerji talks about the history of tea in India. We look back at how women teapickers in 2015 fought for justice - and improved the lives of thousands of tea plantation workers. We hear the story of a famous photo of American president John F Kennedy working at his desk in the White House - with his cheeky...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes taking us from India to Texas. Professor Sunny Singh, author of A Bollywood State of Mind, discusses the origins of Indian cinema in 1912. And we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of Bollywood romance Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. We also head to Paris in 1971, to the launch of what would become one of the world’s...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes, all with an Egyptian theme. We find out more about the 2014 fight against sexual harassment. And we hear from Professor Nicola Pratt, an expert on Middle East feminism about the significance of that moment in the fight for women's rights. Also, we go to the 1960s when antiquities were saved to make way for the Aswan High Dam...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Lucy Durán, a Spanish ethnomusicologist, record producer and Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. We start with an African American artist who recounts exhibiting her work at Nigeria's largest ever festival of African arts and culture in 1977. Then, the...

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's episodes of Witness History. The formation of an unconventional special force during the Second World War sparks a discussion about three others around the world with military historian Lucy Betteridge-Dyson. Plus, the founding of the United States Agency for International Development, the discovery of the wreck of the Titanic 40 years ago and the f...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We learn why the Mount Pleasant riots erupted in Washington DC in 1991, and hear from our guest, Sarah Jane Shoenfeld, a public historian of the US capital. Plus, more on John Lennon’s benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden in New York, his final and only full-length solo shows after leaving T...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Jacquie McNish, author and former Senior Correspondent at the Wall Street Journal. We start with the former co-CEO of BlackBerry, who recounts the company's remarkable boom and bust. Then, the creation of the Spot the dog children's books in the 1970s. We hear the testimony of a US s...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dr Anne-Lot Hoek, a research fellow at the International Institution of Social History in Amsterdam. This week, we’re looking at key moments in Indonesian history, as the country marks 80 years since independence. We start by hearing about the writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who wrote...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Simone Turchetti, Professor of the History of Science and Technology, at The University of Manchester in the UK. It's 80 years since the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, forcing Japan to surrender at the end of the Second World War. We hear from a British prisoner o...

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week’s Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dr Lara Douds, Assistant Professor of Russian history. We start in 1907, the men who would go on to lead the Russian Revolution met in London for a crucial congress marking a point of no return between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Then, in 2000, the launch of Steel Dragon 2000 a...