The History Hour

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Stories of resistance and protest from around the world Sep 19, 2020

Show notes

Max Pearson brings you a roundup of this week’s Witness History stories of resistance from the last 70 years. From the early days of opposition to President Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, through the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, a photographer's memories of the 1989 demonstrations in China, an iconic civil rights story from the USA, to Argentina and the women who are still demonstrating in the hope of discovering what became of their children under military rule.

Photo: a lone protestor, who became known as Tank Man, in Tiananmen Square in China in June 1989. Credit: Stuart Franklin/Magnum.

Prohibition in India Sep 12, 2020

Show notes

How Indian women in the 1990s campaigned to stop the sale of alcohol in the state of Andhra Pradesh to protect women from domestic violence and safeguard family finances. The history of America's healthcare system, how the UN was eventually persuaded to apologise for the 2010 cholera outbreak in Haiti and the horror of being caught up in one of the most notorious hi-jackings of the 1970s, plus the birth of Reddit, one the world's most successful websites.

Photo A shop selling alcohol in India. Credit Getty.

Inventing James Bond Sep 05, 2020

Show notes

How author and former intelligence officer Ian Fleming created the British super-spy, James Bond plus, how the British government shifted social care for the disabled away from large institutions and into the community and the Cape Town bombings in 1990s South Africa. Also how a British Airways jumbo jet flew through a volcanic ash cloud and survived and the birth of the Sony Walkman, a device that changed listening habits forever.

Photo: Ian Lancaster Fleming, British author and creator of the James Bond character, in 1958. (Getty Images)

Margaret Ekpo - Nigeria's feminist pioneer Aug 28, 2020

Show notes

Margaret Ekpo helped establish Nigerian independence and became one of the country's first female MPs. We hear from her grandson and speak to a Nigerian feminist about why Nigeria has so few women in government today. Plus the US Supreme Court decision that threatens the voting rights of Black Americans, the policeman turned protestor who was part of the Occupy Wall Street protest, America's first woman combat pilot and the bittersweet memories of the Gaelic-speaking community who left the remote islands of St Kilda in 1930.

PHOTO: Margaret Ekpo in London in August 1953 (ANL/Shutterstock)

The siege at Ruby Ridge Aug 22, 2020

Show notes

Randy Weaver was a white separatist in Idaho in the north-west United States who was wanted by the government on firearms charges. When government agents approached his remote cabin on Ruby Ridge in August 1992, it was the start of an eleven day siege involving hundreds of police officers – which ended with the deaths of Weaver’s wife and teenage son, along with a US marshal. The incident would become a touchstone for the American far right.

Plus, growing up with Saddam Hussein, the invention of the asthma inhaler and digging up King Richard III of England.

PHOTO: Randy Weaver (C) shows a model of his Ruby Ridge, Idaho cabin to US Senator Arlen Specter, R-PA, during Senate hearings investigating the events surrounding the 1992 standoff with federal agents (PAMELA PRICE/AFP via Getty Images).

Beirut's hotel war Aug 15, 2020

Show notes

At the start of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, Beirut’s luxury hotel district was turned into a battlefield, with rival groups of gunmen holed up in some of the most expensive accommodation in the Middle East. We hear from two former employees of the Holiday Inn about what came to be known as the Battle of the Hotels. Also in today's programme, the first radar, the invention of the ventilator, and how women in Turkey overhauled decades-old laws on rape and sexual assault.

Photo: The ruins of the Holiday Inn. (Credit: Getty Images)

The Second World War in Japan Aug 08, 2020

Show notes

It’s 75 years this week since the dropping of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which led to Japan’s surrender to Allied forces and the end of the Second World War. We hear first-hand accounts of military turning points in the Pacific including the attack on Pearl Harbour and the Battle of Midway, and historian Ian Buruma explains the context for Japan’s attack on the US. We also hear about the impact of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki on civilians, about Japanese-American citizens imprisoned in internment camps in the US, and about the writing of Japan’s post-war constitution.

Picture: Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki after bombing by atomic bomb on 9th August 1945 ( US Air Force photo/PA)

Adrift for 76 Days Aug 01, 2020

Show notes

Surviving the Atlantic alone in a liferaft, Spain's historic 1960s tourism boom, the death of the infamous Nazi Heinrich Himmler, plus fighting Australia's bushfires and we remember a groundbreaking Latino writer. Photo: Photo: Steve Callahan shows how he hunted fish from his life raft. © Steve Callahan

The Million Man March Jul 25, 2020

Show notes

On 16th October 1995 hundreds of thousands of black American men marched on Washington D.C. in an attempt to put black issues back on the government agenda. We hear from one woman who went on the march. Plus the first women's refuge opens in Afghanistan, the son of the man behind the failed plot to kill Hitler in 1944, campaigning to protect the Borneo rain forest, and the world's fastest vaccine maker.

(Photo:The Million Man March, Credit:TIM SLOAN/AFP/Getty Images)

South Korea's 1980s prison camps Jul 18, 2020

Show notes

The horrors of South Korea's so-called Social Purification project, the vanished Chinese sailors who left their mark on Liverpool after the Second World War and the return of a huge ancient monument to Ethiopia from Italy. Also fighting for the rights of Jewish women at the Western Wall in Jerusalem plus the origins of the holiday camp, Club Med.

Photo: Seung-woo Choi talking to reporters. Credit BBC.

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