Witness History
A podcast by BBC World Service
1494 Episodes
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The woman born in a prisoner of war camp
Published: 10/06/2025 -
World War Two’s Rome escape line
Published: 9/06/2025 -
Usonia: Frank Lloyd Wright’s ‘utopian’ town
Published: 6/06/2025 -
The discovery of the first exoplanets
Published: 5/06/2025 -
Favela life: The diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus
Published: 4/06/2025 -
The world’s largest model train set
Published: 3/06/2025 -
Dolly Rathebe: South Africa’s first international film star
Published: 2/06/2025 -
The Battle of the Beanfield
Published: 30/05/2025 -
The legacy of The Pirate Bay
Published: 29/05/2025 -
Chinua Achebe’s revolutionary book Things Fall Apart
Published: 28/05/2025 -
The Tragically Hip's final gig
Published: 27/05/2025 -
'I wrote the Champions League anthem'
Published: 26/05/2025 -
Vivian Maier: Secret street photographer
Published: 23/05/2025 -
The founding of Magnum Photos
Published: 22/05/2025 -
Martín Chambi: Peru's pioneering documentary photographer
Published: 21/05/2025 -
Nigerian photographer’s iconic 'Hairstyles' series
Published: 20/05/2025 -
Lunch atop a Skyscraper
Published: 19/05/2025 -
Sweden’s shocking sugar experiment
Published: 16/05/2025 -
Mexico’s soda tax: Confronting soft drink giants
Published: 15/05/2025 -
The founding of the Warsaw Pact
Published: 14/05/2025
Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by 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 examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more. Recent episodes explore everything from the death of Adolf Hitler, the first spacewalk and the making of the movie Jaws, to celebrity tortoise Lonesome George, the Kobe earthquake and the invention of superglue. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: Eva Peron – Argentina’s Evita; President Ronald Reagan and his famous ‘tear down this wall’ speech; Thomas Keneally on why he wrote Schindler’s List; and Jacques Derrida, France’s ‘rock star’ philosopher. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the civil rights swimming protest; the disastrous D-Day rehearsal ; and the death of one of the world’s oldest languages.
