Witness History: Witness Archive 2017
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Witness History: Witness Archive 2017
History as told by the people who were there. All the programmes from 2017.
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Matthew Shepard: A killing that changed American law
The murder of gay student Matthew Shepard in October 1998 shocked America. After a decade of campaigning, his mother, Judy Shepard, convinced lawmaker...
The first black American at Ole Miss
There were riots when the first black student was enrolled at the University of Mississippi in the American south in October 1962. Mississippi's white...
Israel Withdraws From Gaza
For five years Maisoon Bashir and her family lived on the front-line of the Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip. Their house was directly opposite o...
The Raising of the Mary Rose
King Henry VIII's favourite warship sank during a naval battle over 400 years ago. But the wreck and its contents were preserved in silt for centuries...
The Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art
A very modern museum opened in the Iranian capital in October 1977. It contains one of the finest collections of Western art outside Europe and North...
The Sudden Death of Pope John Paul I
Just 33 days into his reign, Pope John Paul I unexpectedly died in September 1978. He was discovered in the early morning lying on his bed, a collect...
A Bitter Divorce: When Guinea said "No" to France
Guinea became the first French West African colony to declare independence in October 1958. In a referendum held throughout French colonies, Guinea ha...
Walking the Great Wall of China
It took 508 days for three friends to complete the first trek along the entire length of the ancient structure, well over 8000 kms. They finally reach...
Britain's Land Girls
Around 80 thousand women and girls volunteered to join the Women's Land Army during the Second World War. They helped provide vital food supplies to...
Steve Biko: Black Consciousness Leader
The anti-apartheid activist was buried on September 25th 1977. He had died in police custody just two weeks earlier. Thousands of people attended th...
The Cross Border Horse Race
A showdown on the American/Mexican border on September 14th 1958 - in which two horses raced along either side of the border fence. Lucy Burns speaks...
Roselle - The 9/11 Guide Dog
After the 9/11 attacks, a New York guide dog called Roselle was hailed as a hero for helping her owner safely down 78 flights of stairs and away from...
Australia's Rabbit Plague
For decades, Australia's countryside was ravaged by billions of rabbits. So in the 1950s, the government released the disease myxomatosis to kill off...
Shark Attack Survivor
When Australian spearfishing champion Rodney Fox survived an horrific attack by a Great White Shark in 1963, it inspired him to learn more about the p...
The Transatlantic Locust Plague
A plague of African desert locusts flew 5,000 kilometres non-stop to the Caribbean in 1988 in a journey never before recorded. They are thought to hav...
Sabra and Shatila - A Massacre in Lebanon
A doctor working in Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon recalls the massacre there in September 1982. Over the course of three days, Lebanese Ch...
The German Schoolboy Arrested for Writing a Letter
Karl-Heinz Borchardt was arrested just after his 18th birthday by communist secret police in East Germany. His crime was writing a letter to the BBC...
The Hippydilly Squat
A group of hippies known as the London Street Commune occupied a sixty-room mansion in central London in September 1969. 144 Piccadilly became a flash...
The Collapse of Northern Rock
Customers queued for hours to take their savings out, fearing the mortgage lender was about to go under. The Bank of England had to step in to suppor...
Nok Terracottas: Nigeria's Ancient Treasure
When West African tin miners unearthed evidence of a lost civilization. In the 1920s, terracotta heads and figurines were unearthed near the village o...
France's Last Guillotine
The last man to be executed by guillotine in France was a disabled Tunisian murderer, Hamida Djandoubi. He was beheaded on September 10th 1977 at the...
BBC Proms: Audience Member Rescues Concert
In 1974 during a live broadcast of Carl Orff's, Carmina Burana as part of the BBC classical music season 'The Proms', the principal baritone singer c...
Biosphere 2: Building A New World
An ambitious ecological experiment was launched in Arizona in September 1991. It aimed to see if human beings could produce everything they needed to...
The Fairy Photos
The photos taken in 1917 by two young girls were heralded by the Sherlock Holmes author, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as proof of the existence of fairies....
Jamaica's Worst Train Accident
A train carrying day-trippers crashed in September 1957 near the small town of Kendal, Jamaica. More than 200 passengers died and over 700 were injure...
The Funeral of Princess Diana
Diana's brother Earl Spencer made a passionate speech at her funeral, which was interpreted by many as an attack on the Royal Family and the British p...
The Birth of eBay
The online auction site first went live in September 1995. Initially, it targeted collectors of antiques and memorabilia. Soon, you could sell virtu...
George Orwell and Animal Farm
The novel Animal Farm was an allegory about the dangers of Soviet communism and of the communist leader Joseph Stalin. It was first published shortly...
The Revolutionary Head Scan
1983 saw a major breakthrough in the treatment of facial deformities. When the first three-dimensional reconstruction of a human head using CT scans...
Notting Hill Race Riot
In August 1958, Britain was shocked by nearly a week of race riots in the west London district of Notting Hill. The clashes between West Indian immigr...
The Rostock-Lichtenhagen Riots
Germany saw its worst racial violence since World War Two in August 1992, when a home for asylum seekers was set on fire in the city of Rostock. Lucy...
Medicine In World War One
In BBC archive recordings, veterans tell the story of how medical care dealt with the horrors of WW1.
Photo: Australian wounded on the Menin Ro...
The Discovery of Botox
How an ophthalmologist and a dermatologist in Vancouver, Canada, discovered that small amounts of a deadly toxin could make frown lines disappear. Ch...
The Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials
Hear from one of the German prosecution lawyers who helped put Nazi war criminals on trial 20 years after World War Two had ended. Gerhard Wiese has...
Rabindranath Tagore
In August 1941 one of the greatest poets India has ever produced died. Known as the "Bard of Bengal" Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European t...
The Division of Cyprus
In August 1974, Turkey ordered its troops into northern Cyprus for the second time in less than a month, leading to the division of the island into a...
The Buenos Aires Herald
The English-language newspaper was credited with standing up to Argentina's military dictatorship during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It published...
Nike and the Sweatshop Problem
In the 1990s students began boycotting Nike after it became linked to sweatshops. Many were horrified to find their trainers were being made by poorly...
Germany's Nudists
For years Germans have been bathing nude at the beach. Many are members of a naturist movement called the FKK, which was banned under the Nazis and fa...
Reagan's Bombing Joke
"We have outlawed Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes". It was just an unscripted joke by US President Ronald Reagan but it terrified ord...