Witness History

On 1 June 1985, a convoy of New Age Travellers set off for the ancient stone circle of Stonehenge in the south of England. They were planning to hold a festival there for the summer solstice, but the…

On 31 May 2006, police launched one of the largest raids in Swedish history, seizing servers from The Pirate Bay - a hugely popular but highly controversial file-sharing website.

Co-founder Peter Sund…

In 1958 Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe, published his first book, Things Fall Apart.

Set in pre-colonial rural Nigeria, it examines how the arrival of foreigners led to tensions within traditional Ig…

In 2015, rockstar and Canadian icon Gord Downie was given months to live, after doctors found he had a terminal brain tumour.

But instead of quietly exiting the stage, Gord and his band, the Tragical…

In 1992, European football was at a turning point. The European Cup was going to be replaced with a new format: The Champions League.

European football’s governing body, Uefa wanted a classical them…

It is only since Vivian Maier's death in 2009 that the 150,000 photographs she rarely showed to anyone have come to light.

Working as a nanny in the suburbs of Chicago in the United States in the 195…

In the aftermath of World War Two, a group of famous photographers brought their individual styles into one powerful collaboration, over a celebratory bottle of champagne.

On 22 May 1947 the agency, …

Martín Chambi is regarded as one of the most important indigenous Peruvian photographers of the 20th century. Famous for his black and white images of local Andean people and the surrounding countrys…

J. D. 'Okhai Ojeikere, who was known as Nigeria’s top photographer, started documenting women’s hairstyles in 1968. He built up a portfolio of around 2,000 negatives revealing the elaborate ways Afri…

In the 1940s, some vulnerable Swedish hospital patients were fed large amounts of sugary sweets as part of an experiment to see what it would do to their teeth.

Researchers considered the study a succ…

In 2013, Mexico’s government approved a tax on sugary soft drinks. The country has one of the highest rates of fizzy drink consumption in the world.

Some rural homes do not have access to safe drinki…

On 14 May 1955, the leader of the Soviet Union and leaders from seven European countries met to sign the Warsaw Pact.

In the years following World War Two, the Soviet Union and the United States star…

By 1915, the two great rivals, Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison, had brought electricity to the world.

It was reported that they were set to share the Nobel Prize for Physics, but it never happened.

In…

In 1980, Finnish singer Marion Rung won the Intervision Song Contest.

Born in the 1960s, Intervision was the Eastern Bloc’s answer to Eurovision. It ran until 1980, although in 2025 Russia’s Presiden…

In May 2015, when the ancient city of Palmyra in Syria was about to fall to jihadist fighters, a group of men risked their lives to load centuries-old artefacts from the city’s museum onto trucks and…

The end of the Second World War in Europe came on 8 May 1945, after more than five years of conflict.

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill announced that people could allow themselves "a brief per…

On 7 May 1915, the British ocean liner, the Lusitania, was sunk by a German submarine off the Irish coast, as it sailed from New York to Liverpool.

Thousands of passengers were onboard and 1,200 peopl…

In 1955, entrepreneur and engineer Yoshitada Minami came up with a way to liberate women from two to three hours of housework a day.

When his water-heating business started losing sales, he was tasked…

In April 2005, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger became Pope Benedict XVI following the death of Pope John Paul II.

The new leader of the Catholic Church was elected after four ballots of the papal conclave.

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