Witness History
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Witness History
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by and curious about the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to...
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Operation Mincemeat
In the early hours of 30 April, 1943, the most audacious hoax of World War Two has just got underway. Its code-name - Operation Mincemeat.
The b...
The Irish priest who built an airport
In May 1986, a new airport opened in Knock in the west of Ireland. It was the dream of an Irish priest, Monsignor James Horan, who raised millions to...
Weekend listening: The History Bureau
If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft turns out to be flawed? The History Bureau revisits the defining stories of ou...
The deadly Vargas mudslides in Venezuela
In December 1999, torrential rain in Venezuela led to floods and mudslides. Government estimates put the number killed at 3,000 but other reports sugg...
Battle of Gallipoli
It's 110 years since the end of the Battle of Gallipoli. It was one of the deadliest in World War One. Among the 40,000 dead was a large contingent of...
Sazae-san: World's longest-running cartoon
In 1969, a cartoon about a traditional Japanese family premiered on Fuji TV.
More than 55 years later, Sazae-san still airs in its original time...
Creating the board game Catan
In 1995, Klaus Teuber’s board game Catan launched in Germany.
The board is made up of hexagonal tiles, and it's a game about strategy and colle...
How the hoverboard was created
It was Back to the Future II that made a generation of children dream of travelling by hoverboard.
In the 1989 film, the hero Marty McFly escape...
Inventing Play-Doh
In 1956, one of the world’s most beloved children’s toys went on sale for the first time, but its origins were surprising.
The modelling clay ha...
The first television opera
On 24 December 1951, in the United States, television history was made with the live broadcast of Amahl and the Night Visitors, the first opera ever c...
India's disability law
In December 1995, India's parliament passed the country's first disability rights legislation.
The landmark law aimed to give full participation...
Building the New Afrika Shrine in Nigeria
It's 25 years since the opening of the New Afrika Shrine, an open-air entertainment centre in Nigeria.
A hub for Afrobeat music and culture, it...
Ravi and George
Following the Beatles final concert tour, George Harrison travelled to India in 1967 to learn sitar under the renowned musician Ravi Shankar.
Fl...
India goes to the UN
In 1946, an Indian woman made history by leading her country’s first delegation to the United Nations.
Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit described it as a m...
The British oil tanker sunk in Indonesia
In 1958, the British oil tanker, SS San Flaviano, was sunk in the harbour of Balikpapan, Indonesia, while a rebellion was underway against President A...
My aunt created The Moomins
The first Moomins story about a family of nature-loving white round trolls was published in 1945 during World War Two. The Moomins and the Great Flood...
Helen Fielding: The creator of Bridget Jones
In 1995, a single 30-something woman with big knickers and blue soup first appeared in a weekly column, published by British newspaper The Independent...
The trial of Soviet writers Daniel and Sinyavsky
In 1965, two writers were accused of publishing anti-Soviet material abroad.
The arrest of Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky was seen as symbolic...
Jorge Luis Borges: 'Father' of Latin American fiction
In 1961, the Argentine poet and short story writer Jorge Luis Borges won the Formentor Prize for literature.
Borges’ stories were characterised...
Wallander and the rise of Nordic Noir
Published in 1991, Faceless Killers was the first of Henning Mankell’s crime novels featuring police inspector Kurt Wallander. The series changed the...
How BRICS got its name
In 2001, a few months after 9/11, economist Jim O’Neill was working at Goldman Sachs when he wrote a report about which countries might become big pla...
Japan surrenders in Beijing
Eighty years ago, in the autumn of 1945, World War II surrender ceremonies took place across the Japanese Empire.
The one in China was held at t...
The remote island that was evacuated to 10,000km away
On 10 October 1961, a volcanic eruption threatened the population of Tristan da Cunha, a British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, and all 264...
'I designed the Indian rupee symbol'
In 2009, the Indian government launched a national competition to find a design for the Indian rupee.
With more than 3,000 entries and five fina...
The home video war
Before streaming and catch-up TV, owning a video recorder was one of the only ways to watch on-demand entertainment.
In 1975 Sony launched Beta...
The acquittal of OJ Simpson
It’s 30 years since American football star OJ Simpson was acquitted of murdering his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.
'I took the famous photo of JFK and his son'
On 2 October 1963, American photographer Stanley Tretick took the best picture of his life – a photo of President John F Kennedy working at the Resolu...
The Cradock Four killings
On 27 June 1985, four anti-apartheid activists from the rural town of Cradock in South Africa’s Eastern Cape were abducted at a roadblock. Their bodie...
Guinea stadium massacre
On 28 September 2009, around 50,000 people took part in a rally to protest reported plans by military leader Moussa Dadis Camara to stand in the presi...
The secretary who made millions from her typos
In the 1950s, secretary Bette Graham from Texas was struggling to cope with her new electric typewriter.
“My fingers would hang heavy on the sen...
DDLJ: India’s longest-running film
Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, the ultimate Bollywood romance was released to critical acclaim in October 1995, becoming the longest-running movie in In...
The birth of Médecins Sans Frontières
In 1971, 13 men sat down in a Paris office to launch what would become one of the world’s best known humanitarian organisations: Médecins Sans Frontiè...
The start of Scouting
In the early 1900s, while serving in the British Army, Lord Robert Baden-Powell laid the foundations for what would become one of the largest internat...
Omar Sharif stars in Lawrence of Arabia
In 1962, Egyptian actor Omar Sharif made his Hollywood debut in Lawrence of Arabia, a sweeping epic that would become one of cinema’s most popular fil...
The Aswan High Dam
In the early 1960s, Unesco appealed for scientists to go to Egypt to save antiquities that were threatened by the construction of one of the largest d...
Egypt criminalises sexual harassment
In 2014, Egypt’s outgoing president, Adly Mansour, issued a decree which categorised sexual harassment as a crime punishable by a minimum six-month ja...
Reforming Egypt’s divorce laws
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...
Mohamed Morsi: Egypt's first democratically elected president
In June 2012, Mohamed Morsi, representing the Muslim Brotherhood, became Egypt's first democratically elected president.
In 2022, Ben Henderson...
How the Philippines saved Jews during World War Two
In September 1935, the Nuremberg Laws were introduced in Nazi Germany.
In 1938, seven-year-old Lotte Hershfield and her family left their home i...
9/11: The generosity of Gander
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...