Oct 4

India's nine day tea strike and the birth of the Excel spreadsheet

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes.Tea expert Sabita Banerji talks about the history of tea in India. We look back at how women teapickers in 2015 fought for justice - and improved the lives of thousands of tea plantation workers.We hear the ... Show More

59m 20s

Sep 27

The origins of Indian cinema and the start of Scouting

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes taking us from India to Texas. Professor Sunny Singh, author of A Bollywood State of Mind, discusses the origins of Indian cinema in 1912. And we celebrate the 30th anniversary of the release of Bollywood ro ... Show More

1 h

Sep 20

The fight against sexual harassment in Egypt and Omar Sharif enters the world stage

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes, all with an Egyptian theme.We find out more about the 2014 fight against sexual harassment. And we hear from Professor Nicola Pratt, an expert on Middle East feminism about the significance of that moment i ... Show More

59m 58s

Mar 2022

The Chernobyl nuclear disaster

In April 1986 a reactor exploded at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, in the USSR, causing the worst nuclear accident ever. Sergii Mirnyi was in charge of a monitoring unit which measured radiation levels in the 30 km exclusion zone around the plant.(Photo: The Cherno ... Show More

9m 8s

Nov 2023

94. The Bloody History of Russia & Ukraine

The history of Russia and Ukraine has been irrevocably entwined for centuries. When the Bolsheviks took over and Civil War erupted across the Russian Empire, Ukraine was one of the bloodiest centres of the conflict. Antisemitic pogroms and wanton violence destroyed whole communit ... Show More

51m 45s

Mar 2022

Ukraine's Dangerous Independence

Months before Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale military invasion of Ukraine, he published an essay on the Kremlin website called "On The Historical Unity of Russia and Ukraine." In it, he suggested that Ukrainians don't really have their own identity — and that they never hav ... Show More

43m 40s

Nov 2023

95. The History of Putin's War

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine on 24th February 2022, but how did we get to this point? After the brutality of the Second World War, Ukraine was completely under the control of Moscow. Then in the 1980s, with Chernobyl as the catalyst, the Ukrainian nationalist movement regained ... Show More

53m 37s

Mar 2022

Holodomor

“Holodomor” is a name that was coined in the 1980s to describe a famine that struck Ukraine in the early 1930s. There were food shortages taking place in other parts of the Soviet Union at the same time, but Soviet policies toward Ukraine specifically made the situation there muc ... Show More

35m 40s

Mar 2022

The Budapest Memorandum

Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, Ukraine inherited the Soviet-era atomic weapons on its soil and became - for a few years - the world's third biggest nuclear power. After months of tense diplomacy, the newly independent Ukraine agreed to give up the weapons in return f ... Show More

9m 9s

Ukrainian history special