Witness History

In March 1965, hundreds of peaceful civil rights protesters in Selma were brutally beaten by Alabama state troops.

They had been marching to demonstrate against the denial of voting rights to Black Am…

In 1987, a decades-long war in Chad reached a dramatic turning point in what would come to be known as the Great Toyota War.

Named after the rugged pick-up trucks that transformed modern desert warfa…

In December 1989, more than 20,000 US soldiers descended on the tiny Central American country of Panama.

The Americans sought to remove the country’s leader, General Manuel Noriega, who sought refug…

In 1937, American supermarket owner Sylvan Goldman came up with a way to get his customers to spend more.

He introduced his 'folding basket carriers' in his Humpty Dumpty chain in Oklahoma, hiring mod…

In 2015, Europe was in the grip of a migrant crisis, as more than one million people fled regions including the Middle East. Many set their sights on a new life in the UK. But, in order to get there,…

In 1953, in what was then the Belgian Congo, four-year-old Marie-José Loshi was forcibly removed from her family’s village and taken more than 600km away to live in a Catholic institute.

The cause o…

In 2010, an 8.8 magnitude earthquake struck the coast of Chile.

It shook the central and southern parts of the country for more than three minutes, causing widespread damage which destroyed buildings…

In 1951, a group of 22 Inuit children from Greenland were sent to live with foster parents in Denmark. It was part of a social experiment aimed at improving the lot of the Inuit people. But, for the …

The Nellie massacre on 18 February 1983 was the worst bloodshed in the country since Indian independence in 1947. It is estimated that 3,000 people died that day.

Bedabrata Lahkar was a journalist w…

What was it in September of 1959 that caused an Austrian scientist to rush out from his lab and buy children's modelling clay?

Austrian born Dr Max Perutz had made one of the greatest scientific disco…

Sixty years ago, on 21st February 1965, the controversial black leader, Malcolm X, was assassinated in Harlem, New York as he was preparing to speak there.

In 2011, Simon Watts spoke to Herman Fergus…

On 29 March 1974, Czesław Kukuczka stormed into the Polish embassy in East Berlin, threatening to detonate a bomb unless he was allowed to escape to the West.

Shot at point-blank range while trying t…

In December 2005, Evo Morales made history in Bolivia when he became the country’s first indigenous president.

The country is one of the poorest in South America and has the highest proportion of in…

In 2010, one of the oldest languages in the world died after the death of its last remaining speaker.

For 40 years, Boa Senior from the Indian Andaman Islands was the only person who spoke the Bo lang…

In 2013, Guinness World Records deactivated the record for the longest kiss after 15 years, saying it had become too dangerous and some of the rules conflicted with their current updated policies.

It…

Eva Peron – otherwise known as Evita - became an icon in 1940s Argentina, famous for her passionate speeches and populist rhetoric.

Born into poverty, she moved to Buenos Aries at the age of 15 to be…

On 10 December 1992, Australia’s Prime Minister, Paul Keating, addressed a crowd in a Sydney suburb called Redfern, to mark the UN’s International Year of the World’s Indigenous People. What started …

When Mary Fisher was diagnosed with HIV in 1991 she did not represent the typical stereotype of someone HIV-positive. She was white, heterosexual and contracted the disease in marriage. She used her …

In January 1961, US President Dwight Eisenhower ended his time in the White House with a farewell address regarded as one of the greatest speeches made by a US president.

He warned Americans against …

Dolores Ibárruri was nicknamed La Pasionaria for her fiery speeches to the anti-fascist forces during the Spanish civil war. The fighting had begun in July 1936. Troops, led by General Francisco Fran…