Witness History

Thousands of people went missing during Lebanon's long and brutal civil war. But in 1982 a group of women started an organisation to try to track down their family members. Nidale Abou Mrad has been…

A British national institution closed in October 1964. The Windmill Theatre had been one of the few places where it was possible to see naked women on stage, due to a loophole in the censorship laws.…

Curry first became popular in the UK in the 1950s with the arrival of immigrants from South Asia. They introduced spicy food to the British diet. Nina Robinson has been speaking to Nurjuman Khan, a…

A dead sperm whale washed up on a beach in Florence, Oregon in November 1970. It was so big that the authorities decided to blow it up - with disastrous consequences. Years later, a local news report…

The Russian street dog was the first living creature to orbit the Earth. She was sent into space in November 1957. She died after orbiting the Earth four times. Professor Victor Yazdovsky was nine…

On 7 November 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the provisional government set up in Russia after the fall of the Tsar earlier that year, and created the world's first communist state - a sta…

Days before Kabul fell to anti-Taliban forces in November 2001, Osama bin Laden met Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir in a secret location before going into hiding. It would be 10 years before he was d…

In 1967 the zoologist and broadcaster, Desmond Morris, wrote about humans in the same way that animals were described. The Naked Ape provoked criticism from religious thinkers and feminists alike, b…

In 1997 the US Supreme Court ruled against censoring sex on the internet. It overturned a law, signed the previous year which had been designed to protect children from sexual content on the internet…

In the Lebanese city of Tripoli there is an exceptional architectural site which has never been used. The great modernist architect Oscar Niemeyer designed all the buildings for an international fair…

When German monk Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of All Saint's Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, he started a religious revolution. The document was about the church's practice…

In October 1975 the prominent Brazilian journalist Vladimir Herzog was killed by the secret police. His murder became a symbol of the brutality of the military regime. Mike Lanchin speaks to his son,…

In October 1929 Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir began their fifty-year love affair after meeting in Paris. Louise Hidalgo speaks to the writer and leading French feminist, Claudine Monteil, w…

Soon after Hitler ordered the invasion of Hungary in March 1944, the Nazis began rounding up hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews. Most were immediately sent to their deaths in the concentration c…

On October 25th 1961 a new satirical magazine called Private Eye was published for the first time in London. It was part of a new era of comedy, poking fun at the powerful and politicians, and helpi…

Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu made abortion illegal in October 1966 - but many women still tried to end their pregnancies, by sometimes desperate means.

Sorina Voiculescu was one of the millions…

How British Jewish ex-servicemen and volunteers came together to form The 43 Group to fight a resurgent British fascist movement on the streets of post-war Britain. Fascist leaders, like Sir Oswald …

When the socialist leader of Mozambique and many of his senior advisers were killed in a plane crash on the border with South Africa, many were suspicious. It was October 19th 1986 and the two countr…