Witness History

In 2014, Egypt’s outgoing president, Adly Mansour, issued a decree which categorised sexual harassment as a crime punishable by a minimum six-month jail term and a fine of 3,000 Egyptian pounds which is around $60. It was a move campaigners welcomed, saying it was the first step towards ending an endemic problem. Among those who made the change happen was Engy Ghozlan, co-founder of HarassMap, an...

In 1979, Egypt’s former first lady Jehan Sadat helped lead a campaign to grant women new rights to divorce their husbands and retain custody of their children. Married to President Anwar Sadat, she wanted to play a more active role than the wives of previous leaders and told her husband it was his duty to make Egypt more equal for women. After some persuasion, he issued decrees improving the divor...

In June 2012, Mohamed Morsi, representing the Muslim Brotherhood, became Egypt's first democratically elected president. In 2022, Ben Henderson spoke to Rabab El-Mahdi, chief strategist to one of Morsi’s rival candidates. She described what it was like to be involved in the first election of its kind, how Morsi tried to recruit her, and the personal impact of political campaigning in a polarised c...

In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were introduced in Nazi Germany. In 1938, seven-year-old Lotte Hershfield and her family left their home in Breslau, which was part of Germany and is now known as Wroclaw in Poland. Their journey took them across continents by ship, train and on horse and cart. They eventually arrived in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, one of the few places welcoming J...

On 11 September, 2001, a small Canadian town called Gander became a haven for thousands of airline passengers and crew stranded after the 9/11 terror attacks. The attacks on the World Trade Center had forced the closure of US airspace leaving many flights unable to land. Within hours, 38 planes with 7,000 passengers, had been diverted to Gander, effectively doubling the town's population. But what...

In 1969, a satirical book, The Peter Principle, suggested promotion led to incompetence. It was written by a Canadian Professor of Education, Dr Laurence J Peter and playwright Raymond Hull. The book was a parody of management theory, but its core message struck a chord with many: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence". It became an instant classic, selling mil...

On 23 March 1933, the Enabling Act was passed in Germany, handing Adolf Hitler unchecked power. It became the legal foundation of his dictatorship. But in that moment, one voice spoke in defiance. Otto Wels, chairman of the Social Democratic Party, stood alone in the Reichstag: “Freedom and life can be taken away from us, but not honour.” His words were the last to be spoken freely in the German p...

In 1977, Nigeria hosted the largest festival of African arts and culture there had ever been. About half a million visitors attended, as well as 16,000 delegates including Stevie Wonder and Miriam Makeba. Dozens of African nationalities, and people from the African diaspora were represented. Headed by a military dictatorship, Nigeria spent hundreds of millions of dollars hosting nationwide events...

In 2008, Lithuanian student Milda Mitkutė realised she had too many clothes when she was moving out. She told her friend Justas Janauskas and together they came up with a website to sell them. It later became Vinted, the online marketplace, which now has more than 500 million items listed for sale across 23 countries. Milda speaks to Rachel Naylor and tells her that they originally forgot to add a...

In September 2014, the world's first baby was born to a mother with a transplanted womb, making headlines around the globe. Malin Stenberg had the pioneering surgery over a year earlier when she received the donated organ from a family friend, giving birth to her son Vincent at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Sweden. Reena Stanton-Sharma speaks to Prof Pernilla Dahm-Kähler, who was a member of...

During World War Two, an unconventional special force was formed. Known as the Chindits, they fought behind enemy lines in Burma, now Myanmar during 1943 and 1944 in the war against Japan. Their leader was the charismatic Orde Wingate, a British Army officer. This programme is made in collaboration with BBC Archives. It contains outdated and offensive language. Produced and presented by Gill Kears...

On 3 November 1961, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was founded, bringing all existing aid work under one single agency. A key proponent of it was Barbara Ward, a pioneering British economist and journalist who had the ear of presidents and prime ministers across the world. Later known as Baroness Jackson, she spoke to the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Muse...

In September 1985, the wreck of the Titanic was discovered around 400 nautical miles off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, during a joint American-French expedition. It had remained undisturbed, 13,000 feet underwater in the North Atlantic Ocean, since it sank during its maiden voyage in 1912. The team spotted a boiler using a remotely controlled deep-sea vehicle, called Argo, and a robot named J...

In 1972, after leaving The Beatles, John Lennon and Yoko Ono performed in the United States at the One to One benefit concerts at Madison Square Garden, New York. They were helping to raise money for children with disabilities from Willowbrook State School, after a television exposé by journalist Geraldo Rivera showed the conditions and failings. It was watched by millions of people and led to a p...

In 1948, filming began on a post-war thriller that would become one of the greatest British movies of all time. Directed by Sir Carol Reed, the film captured the atmosphere of a divided, ruined Vienna. But much of its lasting power lies with Orson Welles, whose magnetic, menacing turn as Harry Lime stole the show - despite his limited screen time and reputation for being famously hard to pin down....

In May 1991, a female police officer shot and wounded a young immigrant from El Salvador in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood in Washington DC in the United States. It sparked several days of disturbances in the largely Hispanic area, as the population vented its frustrations at years of feeling sidelined by city officials. Shops were burnt down, cars overturned, and dozens of people were arrested...

In 2000, as the internet expanded, websites faced a growing challenge to stop spam bots from flooding their systems. To separate humans from machines, researchers at the United States’ Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, created the Completely Automated Public Turing test. From its early development to its evolution into reCAPTCHA it continues to block millions of automated att...

In 1998, at a conference organised by the United Nations, a blueprint was devised for what would be the world's first permanent International Criminal Court. Judge Phillipe Kirsch chaired the Rome conference that led to the formation of the court. He tells Gill Kearsley about the negotiations, which he describes as the most difficult professional thing he ever did. Eye-witness accounts brought to...

In 1859, Swiss businessman Henry Dunant witnessed the Battle of Solferino, in Italy. He couldn’t believe the lack of aid for the wounded soldiers and came up with two ideas – a voluntary aid organisation and an international treaty to protect those injured in wartime. They went on to become the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1863 and the first Geneva Convention in 1864. Henry’s great...

In the early 2000s, BlackBerry was the phone that ruled the world. But within a decade, it collapsed, overtaken by the touch screen revolution. Sam Gruet speaks to former co-CEO Jim Balsillie about BlackBerry’s meteoric rise, its battle against Apple, and the moment he knew it was all over. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We tak...

In 2010, a book came out in Norway that transformed the way people looked at paperless immigrants. The author, a 25-year-old Russian woman, fled North Ossetia as a child with her parents. They were never granted asylum, yet she managed to earn a university degree and eventually had to make a choice: continue living in hiding or face deportation. Her book triggered a government crisis and a change...

In 1951, at the height of the McCarthy era, a time when the US government pursued suspected communists, Victor Grossman was drafted into the army. A committed communist since his teens, he hid his political beliefs. Stationed in West Germany and under FBI scrutiny, he faced the threat of a possible court martial. To avoid prison, he fled to the Soviet Union in 1952, swimming across the Danube Rive...

In 1978, British artist Eric Hill designed an interactive book about a yellow puppy for his two-year-old son, Chris. Eric had noticed Chris kept lifting up the paper he was working on to see what was underneath and it inspired him to come up with a new format for a children’s book - lift-the-flap. Since Where’s Spot? was published in 1980, more than 65 million copies of Spot books have been sold w...

In 1969, Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer was imprisoned without trial in the notorious labour camp on Buru Island. He spent 10 years there. He is best known for his novels about the rise of Indonesian nationalism. He wrote much of his work in captivity. As he was denied pen and paper on the island, his most famous work, the Buru Quartet, began as oral storytelling. He narrated the stories...

In 2013, Jakarta's governor moved to outlaw the use of dancing monkeys on the city’s streets. The Indonesian tradition saw macaques made to perform for passers-by - often restrained by chains and dressed in plastic masks. Campaigners said the animals were frequently subjected to harsh treatment and poor living conditions. Animal rights activist Femke den Haas played a key role in securing the ban....