Witness History

In 1966, at Johns Hopkins University in the US, a little-known glamorous French philosopher called Jacques Derrida took to the stage and eviscerated the prevailing philosophy of the day, making him an overnight sensation. The following year, he published three hugely influential books making the case for his theory of “deconstruction”, which questioned the foundations of Western thought and knowle...

In 1981 the first major series of English lessons was broadcast on Chinese television. President Deng Xiaoping had allowed private enterprise and was pursuing an era of “opening up” to the rest of the world. It followed a decade of educational turmoil when teachers had been castigated as bourgeois by the former leader Mao Zedong. Kathy Flower presented the English education programme, Follow Me, s...

A series of unprecedented teachers’ strikes temporarily shut most of New York’s schools in the late 1960s, provoked by an ongoing dispute over whether parents could have a say in the running of their children’s schools. ‘Community control’ over the city’s schools was a divisive issue at the time, part of the civil rights and Black Power movement, in the USA. Linda Mannheim spoke to Monifa Edwards,...

In the aftermath of World War Two, children were left orphaned, or separated from their families. They were forced to flee East Prussia when the Red Army advanced. Whilst trying to survive, on their way to Lithuania, they were likened to hungry wolves roaming through forests. Now aged 84, 'wolf child' Luise Quitsch tells Megan Jones about her journey and what life was like growing up in Lithuania....

On 23 August 1989, approximately two million people joined hands to form a 690-kilometre human chain across Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. It was a key moment in the protests in Eastern Europe that became known as the Singing Revolution. In 2010, Damien McGuinness spoke to MEP Sandra Kalniete, a Latvian organiser of the event. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for...

On 16 March 1988, loyalist paramilitary Michael Stone killed three mourners and injured 60 others attending a funeral for IRA members killed in Gibraltar. The so-called Gibraltar Three had been shot dead by the British Army and brought home to Belfast to be buried in the city’s Catholic Milltown Cemetery. American journalist Bill Buzenberg, who was covering the funeral for National Public Radio in...

In August 1995, Microsoft released a new operating system - Windows 95 – following one of the computer industry’s biggest and most expensive marketing campaigns. Queues formed outside shops at midnight as people around the world waited to be among the first to buy it. The new software was designed to be more user friendly, easier to understand and aimed at ordinary people not professional programm...

On 29 November 1995, Tibetan Buddhist leaders attended a secret ceremony in the Tibetan capital, Lhasa. They were present to witness the choice of the next Panchen Lama, a position in Tibetan Buddhism second in importance to the Dalai Lama. They were met by Chinese armed guards, sent to ensure Chinese influence over the choice of Panchen Lama. The Dalai Lama's choice of Panchen Lama had been kidna...

On 27 March 1995, fashion heir Maurizio Gucci was shot dead outside his office in Milan, Italy. Five people, including his ex-wife, Patrizia Reggiani, and her clairvoyant, were jailed in connection with his murder. The media called it the 'trial of the century'. Rachel Naylor speaks to Carmine Gallo, the police officer who cracked the case. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness...

In 1995, an obscure Japanese religion launched a chemical attack on the Tokyo metro. Members of the doomsday cult, which called itself Aum Shinrikyo, dropped plastic bags containing sarin liquid on the floors of five different trains and then pierced them. As the liquid evaporated, passengers began inhaling the deadly fumes. Thirteen people were killed and thousands more injured. One of the passen...

During a 17-year bombing campaign, an elusive terrorist known as the Unabomber killed three and injured 23 Americans. In 1995, he contacted The New York Times and The Washington Post promising to stop his terror attacks if they published his 35,000-word manifesto. The document explained his aim: to dismantle modern industrial society. On the advice of the FBI and the Attorney General, the newspape...

Drum was considered to be the first African lifestyle magazine with a readership of 40,000 in its 1950s heyday. It was first printed in South Africa in 1951 and became a voice of resistance during Apartheid. Drum hit newsstands in 12 countries across the continent after former World War Two pilot Jim Bailey bought the publication after the first two editions flopped. Jim changed the focus by telli...

In 1980, Australian author Thomas Keneally stumbled across the story of Oskar Schindler while buying a briefcase in Beverly Hills, in the USA. The owner of the shop, a Polish Jew called Leopold Pfefferberg, told Thomas that a Nazi party member had saved him, his wife and many others from the Holocaust, by employing them in his enamel factory. Thomas tells Rachel Naylor why Oskar was such a compell...

On 17 January 1995, an earthquake devastated the port city of Kobe, in west Japan. More than 6,000 people died and around 300,000 people were left homeless. It was one of the most powerful earthquakes in the country's history. Rachel Naylor speaks to Kiho Park who, aged eight, had to jump off his balcony to escape when his home was damaged. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness...

In 1978, former first lady of the United States, Betty Ford, announced that she had an addiction to alcohol and prescription medication, and would be seeking treatment. Wife of the 38th US president Gerald Ford, her openness and honesty about her addictions was remarkable for its time and was headline news. But it was her daughter, Susan Ford, who had organised the family intervention to confront...

In 1933, newly-elected US President Franklin D Roosevelt attempted to drag the United States out of the depression with the New Deal. One of the biggest public spending projects in history, the programme funded hundreds of infrastructure projects and created thousands of jobs. In 2020, Lucy Burns listened to archive interviews and spoke to author Adam Cohen about how the deal changed American peop...

Yörük Işık is a ship spotter who logs all the boats that pass through the narrow Bosphorus Strait near his home in Istanbul, Turkey. In October 2015, he noticed something unusual - Russian military trucks on a civilian ship bound for Syria. The photos he took were the first evidence that Russia was supplying armed forces to support President Bashar al-Assad. It followed months of denial from Mosco...

Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat, saved thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazis during World War Two. Once Soviet troops reached Budapest, Wallenberg reported to Soviet officials on 17 January 1945. But he was never seen in public again. Rumours of his fate have circled ever since: a Soviet government report said he died of a heart attack in prison, while former officials said he was execut...

In the 1970s, Norwegian Tor Sornes invented the hotel key card. He wanted to improve security in hotels after he heard the news that one of his favourite singers, Connie Francis, was attacked in her hotel room. After making a prototype in his garden shed, Tor then had the challenging task of selling his invention globally. Tor’s son, Anders, tells Gill Kearsley how persistence paid off for Tor, an...

On 7 January 2015, 12 people were shot dead at the offices of a satirical magazine in Paris, the capital of France. The two gunmen had targeted Charlie Hebdo because it had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. Rachel Naylor speaks to Riss, a cartoonist who was shot in the shoulder. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take...

In 2011, Japanese tidying expert Marie Kondo’s first book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up was published. Overnight she went from tidying other people’s homes to being known around the world for her KonMari method. It encourages people to only keep items that spark joy and to sort by category, not location. Now a best-selling author with hundreds of her consultants decluttering homes around t...

The smart speaker Alexa is used by hundreds of millions of people around the world every day, but did you know its voice was created by two people in Poland back in 2000? Lukasz Osowski and Michal Kaszczuk were final year students at Gdansk Technical University when they decided to create a device which could understand you and talk back in a voice which sounded like a human. They went through a f...

German-born physicist Klaus Fuchs played a key role in the development of the first atomic bomb during World War Two. The project, known as the Manhattan Project, was led by scientist J Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in the US. But, in January 1950, Fuchs admitted passing top secret nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union and was sentenced to 14 years in jail. His nephew Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski tells...

In December 1918, sports writer and cartoonist Robert Ripley was struggling to find some content for his column in the New York Globe. So he compiled and illustrated some of the quirkiest sports facts from the year and created what would go onto become the ‘Believe It or Not’ cartoon. Its popularity grew and, by the time of America’s Great Depression, Ripley was a multi-millionaire who would trave...

An earthquake off the coast of Indonesia on 26 December 2004, triggered a tsunami which cost the lives of an estimated 230,000 people around the Indian Ocean. It was one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded. Dendy Montgomery was living in the city of Banda Aceh in Indonesia which was laid to waste by the disaster. He spoke to Rebecca Kesby in 2013. For nine minutes every day, we take you back...