A collection of this week's Witness History programmes, presented by Max Pearson. The guest is Nicholas Smith, author of "Kicks: The Great American Story of Sneakers" and Presenter of the BBC's "Sneakernomics" podcast. He explains how footwear revolutionised sport and became high-fashion. In 1948, two brothers from a small German town called Rudi and Adi Dassler created the sportswear firms Puma and Adidas. Reena Stanton-Sharma hears from Adi Dassler’s daughter, Sigi Dassler, who remembers her f...
Oct 01, 2022•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast We look at some of the broadcasts delivered by Queen Elizabeth II including her first radio address to the children of the Commonwealth on 13 October 1940. Former BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond looks back on the Queen's significant moments in front of a microphone. Pope Paul VI's first visit to Africa when he travelled to Uganda in 1969, and was hosted by an Ismaili Muslim family and the start of the Iran-Iraq war in September 1980. (Photo: Princess Elizabeth makes a broadcast from the gard...
Sep 24, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast We hear personal accounts of historical moments during the seventy year reign of Queen Elizabeth II. Memories from the Queen's maids of honour from her coronation in 1953; the huge race her horse very nearly won as well as the Windsor Castle fire and the opening to the public of Buckingham Palace. Presented by Max Pearson. (Photo: Queen Elizabeth II. Credit: Getty Images)
Sep 18, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stories from Brazil, ahead of the presidential election in October, including the murder of Tim Lopes, the hero of Brazilian democracy and the Candelaria Massacre. Plus the creation of the capital, Brasilia, and the history of the Fusca - the car that charmed Brazil. This programme contains descriptions of violence and some listeners may find parts of it distressing. (Photo: Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Buena Vista Images)
Sep 11, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast The former President of the Soviet Union's reforms in 1987, known as Perestroika, and the release of the dissident poet Irina Ratushinskaya in 1986. Plus a survivor of the Marikana Massacre in South Africa, the Native American nicknamed 'the Last Indian' and Princess Diana's dance with John Travolta at the White House. (Photo: Mikhail Gorbachev (centre right) meets with the Warsaw Pact Foreign Ministers' Committee in Moscow in 1987. Credit: AFP / Getty Images)
Sep 03, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast A compilation of witness accounts from when inflation and the cost of living were seriously affecting people's lives, among other topics. In 1971, inflation was a huge problem in the USA so the President, Richard Nixon, made one of the most drastic moves in economic history; abandoning the Gold Standard. It became known as the 'Nixon Shock' and nearly caused a trade war between America and its allies. But, it also saved the US economy from a crisis. Ben Henderson spoke to Bob Hormats, an economi...
Aug 27, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Max Pearson presents a compilation of stories marking 75 years since India's Partition. We'll hear the stories of people from both sides of the divide and find out about partition’s effect on the subcontinent’s diaspora. Also, the daughter of the last British Viceroy in India, Lord Mountbatten, remembers the transfer of power in 1947. Plus, we'll hear about the death of India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and how one of India’s greatest poets known as the ‘Bard of Bengal’, Rabindranath...
Aug 20, 2022•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Max Pearson introduces first-hand accounts of the nightclub that changed Ibiza, some of the worst forest fires in history, the resignation of Richard Nixon, discovering the Hale Bopp comet and Sweden’s pronoun battle. (Photo: Sunset over the sea in Ibiza with boats in the distance. Credit: BBC and Minnow Films)
Aug 13, 2022•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast Compilation of stories marking 50 years since Idi Amin expelled thousands of Asians from Uganda in 1972. We hear about why they migrated there, their expulsion, and what they did next. Jamie Govani’s grandparents always dreamed about finding a better life away from India. After getting married in the Indian state of Gujarat in the 1920s, they decided to pack their bags and move to Uganda with their young family. It was a wonderful place to grow up for Jamie, but racial segregation lingered in th...
Aug 06, 2022•52 min•Transcript available on Metacast A student protest in Ukraine, the Surkov leaks, the world’s deadliest ever earthquake, a leaflet bomber in South Africa and the invention of the nicotine patch. (Photo: Oksana Zabuzhko wearing a red jumper at the Revolution on Granite in 1990)
Jul 30, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast The history of television from around the world and its enduring impact, including a look at Nigeria's sitcom Papa Ajasco and an interview with actor turned food writer and Indian TV cook Madhur Jaffrey. Also we take you behind the scenes of telenovelas- Mexican soap operas and one of the most successful drama schools in Latin America The Centro de Educación Artística.
Jul 23, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stories from around the world on women's reproductive rights. Women fighting both sides of the abortion debate as well as the first Muslim country to legalise abortion. Also, the development of the Pill and why Japan took so long to make it legal for women. (Image: Speakers from Tunisia Women's Union at an event. Credit: Saida El Gueyed)
Jul 16, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 1961 the first openly gay person ran for public office in the United States. He was a drag queen called Jose Sarria, well-known for his performances at the bohemian 'Black Cat' bar in San Francisco. He was determined to stop gay people being second-class citizens. His friend and fellow drag performer Mike-Michelle spoke to Josephine McDermott about his memories of the campaign. In 1928 the smear test was invented by Dr George Papanicoloau, a Greek immigrant who had made a new life in the Unit...
Jul 09, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stories from Hong Kong, 25 years on since the handover from British to Chinese rule. We hear from the last governor of Hong Kong, a pro democracy campaigner and about life in Kowloon Walled City. (Photo: Chris Patten at the handover ceremony of Hong Kong from Britain to China. Credit: Getty Images)
Jul 02, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast In June 2012, Egypt held its first ever free democratic Presidential election. Mohamed Morsi, representing the Muslim Brotherhood, emerged victorious. 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 such a polarised country. In June 1982 a young Chinese-American engineer was murdered with a...
Jun 25, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 2009, Rob Hamill testified in the trial of Comrade Duc, who ran the notorious Tuol Sleng prison during the Cambodian genocide. Josephine McDermott spoke to him. It is 50 years since Kim Phuc's village in Vietnam was bombed with napalm. The photograph of her, running burned from the attack, became one of the iconic images of the Vietnam War. Kim Phuc talks to Christopher Wain, the man who helped save her. In 2001 a violent, sectarian dispute took place outside Holy Cross Primary School in Belf...
Jun 18, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast Max Pearson introduces first-hand accounts of the 2006 suicide bombing attack on Sri Lanka's president, the 75th anniversary of Anne Frank's diary and the 1968 assassination in the US of Bobby Kennedy. Plus, the birth of a crime fighting women's rights group in India and the moment the President of Gabon was shown the treasures of the rainforest.
Jun 11, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Max Pearson introduces first-hand accounts of the 2013 chemical weapons attack in Syria and the opening of a refugee camp for Syrians fleeing the civil war. Plus, how lynching was finally outlawed in America, the opening of the Sydney Opera House and the Queen's coronation. PHOTO: A UN inspector at work in Ghouta, Syria in August 2013 (Reuters)
Jun 04, 2022•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast Max Pearson introduces the memories of people who knew Picasso, Frida Kahlo and Georgia O'Keeffe; plus, how a collector in the Soviet Union managed to open a museum for Russian artists banned by Stalin, and how a festival in Senegal in the 1960s inspired artists across a newly-independent Africa. PHOTO: Pablo Picasso in 1955 (Getty Images)
May 28, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Max Pearson introduces first-hand accounts of the rule of Ferdinand Marcos Senior in the 1970s and 80s; plus, Shanghai during World War Two, and the opening of the first McDonald's in the Soviet Union. The History Hour also hears how the murder of a young West Indian called Kelso Cochrane changed race relations in Britain in the late 1950s. PHOTO: Imelda and Ferdinand Marcos in Manila in 1977 (Getty Images)
May 21, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast With speculation mounting that President Putin might mount an attack on Moldova, Max Pearson hears a first-hand account of the war in the 1990s between the Moldovans and Russian-backed separatists in the disputed region of Transnistria. There's also a chilling story from the Cold War about how a Soviet air defence official prevented a potential catastrophe by realising that a computer warning about a US nuclear attack was a false alarm. In the second-half of the History Hour, an Egyptian poet re...
May 14, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Max Pearson gets a first-hand account of how the minority Uyghur community in China staged some of the first protests against the all-powerful Communist Party in the 1980s. Plus, the young lawyer who won the landmark Roe v Wade abortion rights case in the US, the chemistry of cannabis and the personal stories of two veterans of the 1982 Falklands War. PHOTO: A Uyghur yurt on the Xinjiang steppe (Getty Images)
May 07, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sixty years after Algeria's independence from France, first-hand accounts of a traumatic 'birth of a nation': a female Algerian bomber who was part of the battle for Algiers; how the French military responded with brutal tactics; a massacre on the streets of Paris; and reprisals against Algerians who fought alongside the French. Plus,the flowering of a national spirit through football. (Photo: French soldiers in the kasbah of Algiers, 1960. Credit: Getty Images)
Apr 30, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast On the fortieth anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands, Max Pearson hears two contrasting accounts of the war with Britain. Patrick Watts was the manager of the radio station on the Falklands; he kept broadcasting calmly as Argentine troops burst into the studio. Patrick Savage was a conscript in the Argentine army; for him, the fighting was a cold, frightening and brutal experience that culminated in defeat. Max also gets analysis of the conflict from Argentine political ...
Apr 09, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Starting in late 2011, tens of thousands of protestors took to the streets to try to stop what they saw as a power grab by Russian leader Vladimir Putin. The movement was not successful, but analysts say it worried the Russian leader so much that he launched a crackdown on dissent that has lasted to this day. We hear from Russian rock journalist, Artemy Troitsky, who composed a song that became an anthem of what was sometimes called the "Snow Revolution". Also, the launch of the first women's ne...
Apr 02, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast To mark the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a special edition on episodes from Ukrainian history. In April 1986 a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine. Sergii Mirnyi monitored radiation levels in the exclusion zone around the plant. How the international community - including both Russia and the USA - offered security "assurances" to Ukraine in return for giving up its share of the Soviet nuclear arsenal. A survivor's account of Ukraine's great famine in the 1930s...
Mar 26, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast To celebrate International Women's Day, a special edition on five women who've made their mark on history. US feminist Gloria Steinem remembers founding Ms Magazine in 1972; Iranian lawyer Shirin Ebadi discusses the human rights campaigning which won her the Nobel Peace Prize; and a friend of Anna Akhmatova remembers the great Russian poet. Plus, a leading Italian feminist on the international movement in the 1970s which demanded women get paid for housework; and the Australian women who helped ...
Mar 12, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast How Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, rose to power and transformed Russia. We hear eyewitness accounts of Putin's war in Chechnya, his campaign against Russia's independent media, and the war in Georgia, which became a blueprint for the invasion of Ukraine. Plus the BBC's Russia specialist Lucy Ash tells us why Putin was shaped by his experience of the end of the Cold War, and we talk to Dr Katerina Tertytchnaya of UCL about Putin's popularity and a turning point in Russian popular protest. P...
Mar 05, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the 1990s, doctors in Berlin began a cutting-edge treatment programme that led to a patient being cured of HIV/AIDS. The so-called "Berlin patient" was Timothy Ray Brown: he was suffering from leukemia as well as HIV/AIDS, and was given a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation which killed off the HIV virus. We find more about Timothy Ray Brown's story and the latest research on an HIV cure. Also, in a special edition on LGBT history, how Bollywood lesbian drama "Fir...
Feb 19, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast Former presidents and protestors recount two key moments in the history of the Ukraine crisis - from the historic meeting that ended the USSR to the dramatic anti-government protests in Ukraine in 2013-14. And the BBC's Lucy Ash explains how Russian-Ukrainian relations have evolved. Also in the programme, an eyewitness account of the forgotten mass killings in Burundi in 1972, plus the inventors of Google Maps and how Manolo Blahnik became a legend in the world of shoes. Photo: Kyiv, Ukraine - D...
Feb 12, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
