In June 2015 an American anti-racist activist climbed a flagpole on the South Carolina state house grounds to take down the Confederate flag. The protest followed the killing of 9 black people at a historic Charleston church by a white supremacist who was pictured holding the flag. We discuss the history of this divisive symbol of America's racist past. Also how life in the Chinese countryside has been dramatically changed by 40 years of migration to the cities. Plus, from the 1980s, a British T...
Jun 19, 2021•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast On 7 June 1981 Israeli fighter jets launched a surprise attack on the Osirak nuclear reactor located outside Baghdad, killing 11 people. The French-built reactor was still under construction and there was no leakage of nuclear material, but the bombing was widely condemned internationally. We hear from Dr Fadhil Muslim al Janabi, a former consultant for Iraq's nuclear agency. Also this week, eye-witness testimony to the fall of Madrid in 1939; Hamas' unexpected election victoryin 2006, the pligh...
Jun 12, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast US President Richard Nixon declared illegal drugs 'public enemy number one' in 1971 and launched a worldwide 'war' on the narcotics trade. 50 years on we revisit key moments in the ongoing fight against the powerful criminal groups involved from Columbia to Afghanistan. We'll hear personal stories from the front line of drug addiction, plus journalist and author Ioan Grillo joins our presenter Max Pearson to discuss, what went wrong in the war on drugs? Photo: US President Richard Nixon (BBC)...
Jun 05, 2021•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast We remember Amilcar Cabral, who led the armed struggle against Portuguese colonial rule in West Africa in the 1970s and speak to Dr Nayanka Perdigao about his legacy. Plus the shocking fallout of the Indian rail strike in 1974 which was - at the time - the biggest industrial action on record and from a century ago, the Tulsa race massacre, when thousands of African Americans were left homeless and hundreds were killed. We'll also find out how Lotfia Elnadi became the first Arab woman pilot in 19...
May 29, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Under the slogan 'kefaya' which means 'enough' in Arabic, in 2004 Egyptians began protesting in Cairo against the rule of President Hosni Mubarak. The months of demonstrations took place several years before the Arab Spring swept through the region and drew many people onto the streets for the first time in their lives. We get an eye-witness account. Plus, Ariel Sharon's controversial visit to the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem in 2000, the women who staged strikes against military rule in South Ko...
May 22, 2021•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast # Warning: This programme contains descriptions of drug use # In 1955 Christopher Mayhew MP took the hallucinogenic drug mescaline for a TV experiment. We look back at the history of psychedelic research and speak to Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, head of the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London. Plus, the battle to legalise contraception in Ireland, a pro-democracy activist in China, the chemical and biological weapons programme in apartheid South Africa, and why thousands of Je...
May 15, 2021•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast The IRA hunger strikes of 1981 – Max Pearson hears from Suzanne Breen of the Belfast Telegraph about the impact of the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland. Plus, one man’s story of surviving Guantanamo Bay, how a French winemaker exposed a wine fraudster, feminist science fiction pioneer Ursula Le Guin, and cannabis coffee shops in Amsterdam.
May 08, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast It is 10 years since the al-Qaeda leader was killed. We look at the US special forces operation that finally tracked him down to a city in northern Pakistan, the 1979 siege of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, one of the events that shaped his world view; we talk to a Western-based journalist who met him, hear from a survivor of the attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 and hear about the hunt for the al-Qaeda leader in the mountains of Afghanistan after 9/11. (Photo: Osama B...
May 01, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast The origins of the gun lobby in the US. Plus we speak to Prof Robert Spitzer about the power of the National Rifle Association. Also, the mysterious American who killed two men in Pakistan and triggered a diplomatic crisis, the historic trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in 1961, the battle to reclaim a Native American sacred lake, and the first space shuttle mission. Photo: National Rifle Association Holds Its Annual Conference In Dallas, Texas. DALLAS, TX - MAY 05 2018. Credit: Just...
Apr 24, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sandra Day O'Connor was appointed to America's top court in 1981. She'd been nominated by newly-elected Republican president Ronald Reagan. Also in the programme: an eye-witness on the beaches during the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba, the worm that unlocked secrets of genetics in the 1960s, the decline of the South Asian vulture and China's "kingdom of women". Photo:Sandra Day O'Connor is sworn in at the Senate confirmation hearing on her selection as a US Supreme Court justice, September ...
Apr 17, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast We hear from the women who started "Reclaim the Night" marches in the north of England in 1977 - a time when a serial killer nicknamed the Yorkshire Ripper was murdering women. The women felt police were policing their behaviour rather than that of men by instructing them to stay home at night. We speak to Hallie Rubenhold author of The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper for a comparison of the treatment and expectations of women in the 19th and 20th century. Plus we g...
Apr 10, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast On Easter Sunday 1967 the Reverend Albert Cleage re-named his church in Detroit the Shrine of the Black Madonna. He preached that if man was made in God's image there was little chance that Jesus was white as most of the world's population is non-white. Plus, how British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher wowed the Soviet Union with a live TV interview in 1987; how the death of singer Karen Carpenter raised the profile of the anorexia eating disorder; and the story of two Englishmen who were kidna...
Apr 03, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast South Africa fights for cheaper drugs during the AIDS epidemic, the man born into slavery in Mauritania, trying to end the troubles in Northern Ireland, Banksy’s first street art and a sex therapy legend. With Max Pearson
Mar 27, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast The hunt to find the Jamaican drug lord wanted for extradition to the United States, the six men trapped in a simulated space ship for a year and a half, the mother of the Swedish welfare state, the New York drag scene of the 1990s and a classic cold war chess match which was much more than just a game. With Max Pearson (Jamaican police on patrol after a frenzy of gang and drug violence in Kingston, May 24 2010. Credit: Anthony Foster/Getty Images)
Mar 20, 2021•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast The women of Egypt's Arab Spring; the underground abortion network in 1960s America; Greece's champion of the Parthenon Marbles, Melina Mercouri; China’s most powerful 19th-century ruler, and the doctor who was India’s 1966 Miss World. Photo: Hend Nafea protesting in Tahrir Square in January 2011. (Copyright Hend Nafea)
Mar 13, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Churchill's Iron Curtain speech about the Cold War, the Sharpeville massacre in South Africa which radicalised many anti-apartheid movements and we hear from a man whose relatives were killed when police bombed the home of African-American radicals in the US. Plus how Nauru became a Pacific island limbo for asylum seekers and the first man to dive to the deepest point on the planet - the bottom of the Mariana Trench. We'll also hear from a BBC science correspondent about why we know more about s...
Mar 06, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast An eyewitness account of the overthrow of Ghana's famous independence leader. And we examine Nkrumah's legacy with Prof. Gareth Austin from Cambridge University. Plus the story of a heroic African WW2 airman, the scientists who alerted the world to the threat of acid rain, a Nobel Peace Prize winner on the 1990s campaign to ban landmines and an inside account of Ireland's financial crisis. Photo: Kwame Nkrumah c 1955 (Getty Images)
Feb 27, 2021•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast As part of our Black History coverage we look back at the Black Panthers and ask Professor Clayborne Carson of Stanford University "How radical was the US black rights group?" Also, we bring you an archive interview with Mary Wilson of the Supremes, we delve into the question of compensation after the abolition of slavery - and no, not compensation for the people who had been enslaved, but for the former slave owners. Also, how one descendent of slaves, James Dawkins, discovered his ancestors' c...
Feb 20, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast More than 400 civilians were killed when two US precision bombs hit the Amiriya air raid shelter in western Baghdad on the morning of 13 February 1991. The Americans claimed that the building had served as a command and control centre for Saddam Hussein's forces. It was the largest single case of civilian casualities that ocurred during Operation Desert Storm. Also in this week's programme, a drug scandal from the 1970s which blighted the lives of generations, rare archive of the celebrated Brit...
Feb 13, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In August 1988, people took to the streets of Burma, or Myanmar, to protest against the country's military government. The bloody uprising would lead to the rise of Aung San Suu Kyi as the country's pro-democracy leader. Also, the epidemic of drug use among US troops in Vietnam in the 1970s, the first Eurostar train service and the launch of the spectacular Moscow State Circus in 1971 PHOTO: Protestors in Rangoon in 1988 (Getty Images)
Feb 06, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the early months of 2011 a wave of social unrest swept across the Arab world as people protested against repressive and authoritarian regimes, economic stagnation, unemployment and corruption. It began with reaction to the self-immolation of a young market trader in Tunisia, but soon became an outpouring of resentment after generations of fear. On The History Hour, Professor Khaled Fahmy of Cambridge University, helps us unravel the roots of the uprisings, describes what it was like to be the...
Jan 30, 2021•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Hitler made his first attempt at seizing power in Germany in 1923, ten years before he eventually became Chancellor. The failed "beer hall putsch" - so named because it started in a beer hall in the southern city of Munich - would become a foundational part of the Nazis' self-mythology. Professor Frank McDonough tells us more. Plus, more Nazis with The Turner Diaries, the novel that inspired the US far right; anti-Sikh riots in India; the birth of Swahili-language publishing; and the house fire ...
Jan 23, 2021•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1954, Puerto Rican militants opened fire in the US House of Representatives, wounding five Congressmen - we hear how the assault was one of many previous attacks on American democracy. Plus, the coup attempt in Spain in 1981, India's first woman lawyer and landing a probe on Titan, one of Saturn's moons. PHOTO: Lolita Lebron and two other Puerto Rican activists are arrested in 1954 (Getty Images)
Jan 16, 2021•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast How US inmates turned to Buddhism to face execution in 1990s Arkansas, and we look at the history of the death penalty in the US with Prof Vivien Miller. Plus, the truth of a space "strike", the 70s book that predicted global decline in 2020, sequencing the Ebola virus and we hear the world's oldest song. Photo: Anna Cox and inmate Frankie Parker.
Jan 09, 2021•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Unesco - the United Nations Scientific, Cultural and Educational Organisation - was set up 75 years ago, in the aftermath of the Second World War. It’s probably best known for its work protecting cultural monuments and areas of natural beauty around the world, but when it was founded, its aim was to use education as a means of sustaining peace after the horrors of the war. In this episode of The History Hour: Unesco’s work on race and tolerance, its effort in the 1960s to save Egyptian treasures...
Jan 02, 2021•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast We hear from eye-witnesses to some classic moments in cinema history – from It’s a Wonderful Life to Satyajit Ray’s Apu trilogy via Studio Ghibli, the Sound of Music and Charlie Chaplin’s Great Dictator. Plus, film critic Helen O’Hara tells us about the history of Christmas movies. Photo: one of the final scenes from Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life, featuring James Stewart, Donna Reed, Carol Coombs, Jimmy Hawkins, Larry Simms and Karolyn Grimes, clockwise from top (photo by Herbert Dorfman/C...
Dec 26, 2020•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast How Pakistan's first democratic elections in 1970 led to war, the break up of Pakistan and the creation of a new country, Bangladesh. Also Gibraltar under Spanish blockade plus refugees from Namibia’s war of independence, Britain’s first reality TV family and Bing Crosby’s White Christmas. Photo East Pakistan 1971 The flag of Bangladesh is raised at the Awami League headquarters. Credit Getty Images
Dec 19, 2020•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Chief Albert Luthuli won the Nobel Peace Prize he was living under a banning order in rural South Africa. He won the prize for advocating peaceful opposition to the Apartheid regime. We hear from his daughter Albertina and speak to a South African historian about his legacy. Plus the cave discovery in France that changed the way we think about Neanderthals, the best-selling African-American crime writer Chester Himes, celebrating 100 years since a cinematic first and the reintroduction of b...
Dec 12, 2020•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In May 1991, the brutal Ethiopian dictator, Colonel Mengistu and his military regime were on the verge of collapse after years of civil war. The end came when a Tigrayan-led rebel movement advanced on the capital Addis Ababa and took power. We get a first-hand account from an American diplomat and hear how the events of 1991 contributed to the current crisis in Ethiopia. Plus, the controversy in France over banning headscarves and other religious symbols from schools, the Nazis' terrifying V1 bo...
Dec 05, 2020•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast We look back at the fight for disability rights in the UK and India in the 1990s, plus the remarkable life of Helen Keller as told by her great niece, how a Rwandan Paralympic volleyball team made history, and the invention of the iconic disability vehicle, the Invacar. And we speak to Colin Barnes, Emeritus Professor of Disability Studies at Leeds University, about the historic struggle for disabled rights and recognition. Photo: A disabled woman on her mobility scooter is carried away by four ...
Nov 28, 2020•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
