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The story of our times told by the people who were there.
The anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko, leader of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa, died in a police cell in 1977. The South...
John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, dyed his skin black to experience segregation in America's Deep South. John Howard Griffin wrote a...
In May 1992 the people of South Central Los Angeles took to the streets in fury at police brutality. They were angry that Los Angeles police...
Debra Hocking was taken from her indigenous Australian family as a baby and was placed with a foster family. It was part of a government pol...
During World War II, African soldiers were a vital part of the Allied forces. Many of them were sent to Burma as reinforcements for the Brit...
It is 40 years since a video game was invented which would change the way we play. An on screen version of table tennis, to begin with Pong...
In December 1999 a young Dutch man won the first ever Big Brother reality TV show. It was to be the start of a global television phenomenon....
In December 1980, thousands were killed in the Nigerian city of Kano following an uprising by an Islamic sect. The sect was led by a radical...
40 years ago the Americans launched their heaviest aerial bombardment of the Vietnam War. It was to become known as the Christmas bombing ca...
Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu were executed by firing squad on 25 December 1989. It was the end of one of the most repressive regimes in forme...
In 1964 the British popstar Dusty Springfield went on tour in apartheid South Africa. She said she would only play to racially mixed audienc...
In the 1990s it became clear that a brain disease could be passed from cows to humans. The British government introduced a ban on beef on th...
In December 2003 Colonel Gaddafi announced Libya was giving up trying to make weapons of mass destruction. United Nations weapons inspectors...
It is 40 years since the last moon mission returned to earth. One of the three astronauts on board was geologist Harrison Schmitt. He looks...
In 1912, Britain's top paleontologists were tricked by one of the biggest hoaxes in scientific history - a skull thought to be the "missing...
How exiles from the Nazis helped British intelligence listen in on German prisoners-of-war. Ninety-three-year-old Fritz Lustig, a refugee fr...
Twenty years ago a former economist from France, Franck Goddio, began underwater excavations which unearthed a 2000 year old palace belongin...
In the late 1960s a young black American woman rolled up in 'Swinging' London. Although Marsha Hunt says she couldn't sing, she ended up a s...
In 1992, a Paraguayan human rights activist called Martin Almada discovered a huge cache of documents in a run-down police station. The file...
The story of the 1992 film which launched Nigeria's hugely successful movie industry. It was called "Living in Bondage". We speak to one of...
Twenty-five years ago, during the Cold War, a German teenager Mathias Rust, managed to evade Soviet air defences to land his single-engine p...
On 6 December 1989, a college shooting in Canada left 14 women dead. The killer sent all the men out of the classroom before opening fire on...
In 1952, the worst smog in living memory descended over London, reducing visibility so badly that people could barely see a metre in front o...
In 1932 a row between England and Australia over cricket became a diplomatic incident. The row erupted over controversial "Bodyline" tactics...
In December 1984 thousands of people in the Indian city of Bhopal were killed by leak from a chemical plant. The city was enveloped by a clo...
It is 60 years since newspapers in the US announced the successful operation of Christine Jorgensen. Once a soldier called George, she trans...
In November 1979 Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran taking everyone inside hostage. But six Americans escaped - they s...
He was one of the most prolific art forgers of the 20th Century. A talented painter in his own right he became disillusioned with the art wo...
In November 2005 doctors in France carried out the first ever face transplant. The patient, Isabelle Dinoire, had lost part of her face afte...
In November 1975, an incredible mutiny took place aboard a Soviet warship, the Storozhevoy, in the Baltic sea. The Kremlin ordered the Sovie...
Twenty years ago the world's first webcam was created - and it was pointed at a pot of coffee. A camera was set up because computer scientis...
Lee Harvey Oswald, the man accused of killing President John F Kennedy in November 1963 had spent more than two years living in the USSR. He...
In November 1969 the first President of Uganda, Edward Mutesa, died in exile in London. He had been forced to flee his homeland by Milton Ob...
In November 1992, a fire devastated Windsor Castle - a symbol of the British monarchy and Queen Elizabeth's weekend home. Coming at the end...
In November 1971 a young American artist decided to get a friend to take a shot at him. His name was Chris Burden and the shooting would go...
In the 1960s, a wave of strikes and protest marches by Mexican-American farm-workers inspired Latinos across the US. The movement was led by...
In the 1970s the Filipino government annouced they had discovered a group of cave dwellers who were still living as people did in the stone...
A Chinese government think tank has recommended bringing an end to the one-child policy. It was launched in the late 1970s to tackle China's...
It's 27 years since more than 20,000 people died when a volcano erupted in western Colombia. The town of Armero disappeared under tonnes of...
In 1984 doctors in California tried a revolutionary operation on a two-week-old baby girl. She had been born with a fatal heart condition -...
The memories of a German Jew who grew up across the street from Adolf Hitler. As a young boy, Edgar Feuchtwanger watched the comings and goi...
In 1789, one of the most famous naval mutinies of all time took place near Tahiti. Mutineers led by a young officer called Fletcher Christia...
One of the longest-serving leaders of the Soviet Union died on the 10 of November 1982. Hear about his final moments and the glitch at his s...
In London in 1984, a joint Nigerian-Israeli team attempted to kidnap and repatriate the exiled former Nigerian minister Umaru Dikko. Dikko,...
In the 1930s the Nazi party hatched a secret plan to breed an elite race of blonde blue eyed children. Young German women were told it was t...
At the age of 30, the British photographer, Don McCullin, travelled to Asia for his second ever war assignment - Vietnam. His graphic photog...
In 1985 a Frankfurt theatre attempted to stage a play by the provocative German writer, Rainer Werner Fassbinder. But the local Jewish commu...
It is 95 years since the October Revolution which led to the creation of the Soviet Union. Hear an account from the BBC's archive, of a youn...
Allen Ginsberg first read his poem Howl, in San Francisco in October 1955. It marked a turning point in American literature. Michael McClure...
Fifty years ago, the USA and the Soviet Union were poised to go to war over nuclear weapons in Cuba. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev fin...