The Hindenburg airship disaster

During the Vietnam War, North Vietnamese VietCong guerrillas built a vast network of tunnels in the south of the country as part of the insurgency against the South Vietnamese government and their American allies. The tunnel network was a key base and shelter for the North Vietna ... Show More

In May 2002, former US President Jimmy Carter paid a controversial visit to Cuba, which had been subject to a US trade embargo for more than 40 years.The trip culminated in a speech, broadcast live on Cuban radio and television, in which Carter called for the US to lift economic ... Show More

In April 1980, thousands of Cubans tried to escape the country by claiming asylum at the Peruvian embassy in Havana. In response, Cuban President Fidel Castro opened the port of Mariel to anyone who wanted to leave, including criminals. From April until October more than 100,000 ... Show More

The tragic story of the British airship R101—which went down in a spectacular hydrogen-fueled fireball in 1930, killing more people than died in the Hindenburg disaster seven years later—has been largely forgotten. But airships, those airborne leviathans that occupied center stag ... Show More

In the early hours of 17 May 1943 a bold World War II attack destroyed two dams in the Ruhr Valley in Germany's industrial heartland, causing 1,600 casualties and catastrophic flooding which hampered the German war effort.The dams were highly protected but 617 Squadron of the Roy ... Show More

<p>It's the worst accident in US commercial nuclear power history. In March 1979, the Unit 2 reactor at Three Mile Island nuclear generating station came half an hour from full meltdown. Two days later, an explosive bubble of hydrogen gas was found in the reactor.</p><br><p>To ta ... Show More

The 1963 film The Great Escape immortalised the audacious real-life mass escape of 76 Allied airmen in March 1944 from the German Luftwaffe prisoner of war camp Stalag Luft III in eastern Germany, now Poland. But what was the reality of the escape, who were the characters involve ... Show More

<p>In 1628, a Dutch East India flagship called <em>Batavia</em> set sail from the Netherlands, never to reach her destination.&nbsp;Eight months into the voyage, the ship was wrecked on coral reef off the&nbsp;western coast of Australia.&nbsp;What then befell her surviving crew a ... Show More

<p>Starting with small raids at the start of the war, the aerial offensive grew into a massive operation. Huge air armadas would eventually pulverise Germany, with the Mighty Eigth Airforce flying by day and the Lancasters of Bomber Command by night. This 24-hour campaign serious ... Show More

<p>Max Pearson presents a collection of this week's Witness History and Sporting Witness episodes from the BBC World Service.</p><p>We hear about the unearthing of a mass grave in Sernyky, Ukraine, in 1990, and when the Boston Marathon was the target of a terror attack in 2013.</ ... Show More

On this episode of Our American Stories, Jeremy Saucier of the Strong Museum of Play shares the long, and surprising, history of pinball--from its origins in French parlor games, to its prohibition, and then to its emergence as the immersive and popular game that it is today; The ... Show More