The History Hour

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes including the story behind Mick Jagger and David Bowie's duet for Live Aid in 1985 and the Chinese artist who was jailed for his art inspired by the Sichuan earthquake in 2008. He speaks to music journalist ... Show More

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service, all related to trains and journeys which have helped to shape our world.Our guest Nicky Gardner, travel writer and co-author of Europe by Rail: the Definitive Guide, discusses t ... Show More

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.This programme includes outdated and offensive language.It’s 50 years since the original Jaws film was released in cinemas across America. The movie premiered on 20 June 1975. Ou ... Show More

At the end of the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people in South Africa were still dying from HIV/Aids because effective drug treatments were prohibitively expensive for a developing country. Under pressure from Aids activists, the government of Nelson Mandela took the big inter ... Show More

The assassination of Chris Hani was a pivotal moment in the dismantling of South African apartheid. On the 10th of April, 1993, he was shot dead as he returned to his home in a quiet suburb of Johannesburg. Negotiations between Nelson Mandela's party and the ruling apartheid gove ... Show More

There remains a tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush. Yet, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isle, ... Show More

The war between the Union and the Confederacy is a major turning point in the history of the United States. But why did it happen? From slavery and states' rights, to economic, legislative, moral, and political issues, in this episode, Don and Professor Adam Smith explore how the ... Show More

During the spring of 1921, eleven bodies were found in in rural Georgia. These men were victims of horrific murders, and also of a more widespread crime - peonage. Whilst enslavement had legally ended with the surrender at Appomattox and the 13th Amendment, black people across th ... Show More

How one man used research by historians at University College London into Britain's forgotten slave-owners to track down the descendants of the family who'd owned his ancestors two centuries earlier. Dr James Dawkins tells Louise Hidalgo how his quest led him to the famous evolut ... Show More

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the role of slavery in the Roman world, from its early conquests to the fall of the Western Empire. The system became so entrenched that no-one appeared to question it, following Aristotle's view that slavery was a natural state. Whole populations ... Show More

At the turn of the 20th century alcoholism was a major problem in Irish society. The island had 17,300 pubs while around 40% of all prison sentences were alcohol related. There was a general sense alcohol addiction was out of control. The stereotype of the happy-go-lucky drunk ce ... Show More

En 1990, Nelson Mandela est enfin libéré de sa prison où il se trouvait depuis 27 ans !Il avait été emprisonné pour avoir dénoncé et lutté contre l’apartheid, le système terrible de séparation entre les blancs et les noirs dans son pays, l’Afrique du Sud.Mises en place en 1948, c ... Show More

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the notorious events off Jamaica in 1781 and their background. The British slave ship Zong, having sailed across the Atlantic towards Jamaica, threw 132 enslaved Africans from its human cargo into the sea to drown. Even for a slave ship, the Zong w ... Show More