The History Hour

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dr Natalia Grincheva, an expert in cultural diplomacy from Lasalle, University of the Arts in Singapore. We start by hearing about when US president Bill Clinton was presented with a saxophone on a 1994 visit to Prague and he and the Czech president Vaclav Havel performed together on...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dina Esfandiary, Middle East Geo-economics Lead at Bloomberg Economics. We start in 2015 with insider accounts of the Iran nuclear deal and the Greek debt crisis. Then, the 1995 'Turbot War' between Canada and Spain. We hear how international broadcaster Voice of America was born dur...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes, all with an Argentine theme. We find out more about the 1985 ‘trial of the juntas’ when the country’s former military leaders stood accused of torturing and murdering thousands of their own people. And we hear from historian Dr Victoria Basualdo about life in Argentina, both before and after the trial. Also, the story of the...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes including the story behind Mick Jagger and David Bowie's duet for Live Aid in 1985 and the Chinese artist who was jailed for his art inspired by the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. He speaks to music journalist Alice Austin to explore other concerts in world history that have had a political impact. Also, the American politician...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service, all related to trains and journeys which have helped to shape our world. Our guest Nicky Gardner, travel writer and co-author of Europe by Rail: the Definitive Guide, discusses the origins of train travel. The first story involved the hijacking of a train in 1950s communist Czechoslovakia which w...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. This programme includes outdated and offensive language. It’s 50 years since the original Jaws film was released in cinemas across America. The movie premiered on 20 June 1975. Our guest is Jenny He, senior exhibitions curator at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles. She tells us...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dolly Jørgensen, Professor of History at the University of Stavanger in Norway and a specialist in the history of extinction. We start in 2012 with the death of a famous Galapagos tortoise called Lonesome George, who was the last of his species. Then, the incredible tale of how an Ir...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dr Jeni Millard, a science presenter, astrophysicist and astronomer. First, how two astronomers announced they had discovered the first two planets outside our solar system. Then, German twins Frederik and Gerrit Braun on building Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, which is now a world-...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dr Nivi Manchanda, a reader in international politics at Queen Mary University in London. First, a moment when two cultures clashed in 1985 at Stonehenge. We hear about an English language novel from 1958, called Things Fall Apart. Then, the 1992 creation of the iconic Champions Leag...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. The expert guest is Dr Mirjam Brusius, a research fellow in colonial and global history at the German Historical Institute. First, we hear about Martín Chambi - Peru's pioneering documentary photographer. Then Amaize Ojeikere talks about his father, JD 'Okhai’ Ojeikere, who created an iconic coll...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dr Elizabeth Abbott, writer, historian and author of the book, "Sugar: A Bittersweet History". First, we confront the dark history of sugar. We hear how a researcher in the 1990s uncovered the unethical aspects of Sweden’s Vipeholm experiments in the 1940 which led to new recommendat...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Rubina Raja, professor of classical archaeology and art at Aarhus University in Denmark. First, we go back to May 2015, when the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria was about to fall to Jihadist fighters and how of a group of men risked their lives to preserve the world-famous archaeolo...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service about the Vietnam War and the invention of the hugely popular mobile phone game, Snake. Don Anderson, a former BBC TV reporter during the final days of Vietnam, discusses the atmosphere in Saigon as the North Vietnamese forces closed in. We also hear about the network of tunnels in the south of th...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is World War Two military historian and archivist Elisabeth Shipton. We start by concentrating on two events from the last year of the Second World War. Exercise Tiger took place in April 1944 in preparation for the D-Day landings of Allied forces in Normandy. But during that rehearsal...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. It’s 50 years since soldiers of the communist Khmer Rouge party stormed into the capital, Phnom Penh. It was the start of a four year reign of terror which resulted in up to two million people being killed. We hear two stories from people affected by the regime. Our guest is journalist and author...

8th May 1945 was a day of rejoicing in Britain, the US and many other countries: Germany had surrendered, and World War II was over, at least in Europe. Yet it was not a day of celebration for everyone: for the vanquished Germans, it marked the end of bombings and of Nazi rule. But it was also a time of deprivation and chaos, fear and soul-searching. Millions of ethnic Germans had fled their homes...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. Our guest is Dr Katrin Paehler, Professor of modern European history at Illinois State University. First, a journalist describes how he accompanied Hitler through the embers of the Reichstag fire in 1933. Then, the harrowing recollections of a doctor who saved survivors of the 1995 Oklahoma City...

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. We hear from the first woman to lead DC Comics - the home of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. Jenette Kahn began turning the company around in the 1970s. Our expert is Dr Mel Gibson, associate professor at Northumbria University. She has carried out extensive research into comics and graphic nov...

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. We hear about the historic moment in Nigerian politics when Goodluck Jonathan made a phone call to General Buhari marking the peaceful handover of power in 2015. Our expert is historian and creator of the Untold Stories podcast, Adesuwa Giwa-Osagie, who takes us through Nigeria's political history...

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. This week we’re looking at the history of space travel, including the 60th anniversary of the first ever space-walk by Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. Also, the speech that would have been given if the Apollo 11 astronauts didn’t make their way back from the moon; the founding of the European Spa...

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. We find out about the landmark protest in 1990 when wheelchair users crawled up the steps of the US Capitol Building in Washington DC, campaigning for disability rights. Our expert is Dr Maria Orchard, law lecturer at the University of Leeds, who has carried out research into disability and inclus...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We find out how Sylvan Goldman’s invention of the shopping trolley in 1930s America turned him into a multi-millionaire. Our expert is Rachel Bowlby, Professor of Comparative Literature at University College London, who is also the author of two books on the history of shopping. We hear about Toy...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We hear about the moment Dr Max Perutz discovered the haemoglobin structure. Our expert is Professor Sir Alan Fersht, who is a chemist at the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology and knew Dr Perutz personally. We also hear about 22 Inuit children from Greenland's indigenous po...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We hear about the death of one of the oldest languages in the world, when an 85 year old woman died and took it with her in 2010. Our expert guest is Dr Mandana Seyfeddinipur, who is the Head of the Endangered Languages Archive which endeavours to preserve languages that are disappearing at “an a...

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We discuss the 1992 speech given by Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, in which he acknowledged the moral responsibility his government should bear for the horrors committed against Indigenous Australians, with our guest Dr Rebe Taylor from Tasmania University. We also look at two female or...