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Witness History Episodes

  1.

    Discovery of the hole in the earth’s ozone

    In 1985, news broke of a major environmental discovery: a hole in the earth’s ozone layer

  2. Earth: A pale blue dot in the universe

    In 1990, a space probe's photograph of Earth captured the enormity of space

  3. Ken Hom's 'Chinese Cookery'

    In 1984, Ken Hom taught TV audiences to cook Chinese food for the first time

  4. The disputed history of pad Thai

    Exploring the different theories behind the creation of pad Thai

  5. Flavr Savr tomato: The world's first genetically-engineered food

    In 1994, a tomato became the world's first genetically-engineered food on sale

  6. Kiwi: How New Zealand hijacked China's fruit

    How the Chinese gooseberry became the kiwi and one of New Zealand’s biggest exports

  7. Inventing Nutella

    How the chocolate and hazelnut spread was created in 1946

  8. 'The bad boy of Welsh politics'

    In 1969, the singer Dafydd Iwan campaigned for official recognition of the Welsh language

  9. Al Jazeera Three: Imprisoned in Egypt

    There was an international outcry in 2014 when three journalists were imprisoned in Egypt

  10. The mysterious death of Pablo Neruda

    In 1973, the poet and prominent communist tried to flee persecution in Chile

  11. The assassination of King Faisal

    In 1975, the king of Saudi Arabia was shot by his nephew

  12. Tsunami devastates Samoa

    In 2009 a tsunami killed 149 people. Lumepa Hald tells the story of destruction and loss

  13. The funeral of Nelson Mandela

    In 2013, South Africa's first black president was buried in his ancestral village

  14. Vatican citizen Emanuela Orlandi disappears

    In 1983, a suspected kidnapping led to scandal

  15. Anna Akhmatova: The poet who defied a regime

    How the great poet kept writing even through the darkest days of Soviet history

  16. Yeltsin speaks at the reburial of the Romanovs

    In 1998, the Russian president condemned the Soviet violence that killed Tsar Nicholas II

  17. Murder of the Romanovs

    In 1918, the Russian royal family were killed by the Bolsheviks

  18. The release of DOOM

    In 1993, a controversial sci-fi video game called DOOM was released

  19. ‘The disappeared’ of Argentina

    In 1977 a woman became one of thousands who disappeared from the streets of Buenos Aires

  20. A Greek coup: The day the colonels took power

    In 1967, army officers seized power in Greece in a US-backed coup

  21. Thousands of Danish brains in plastic buckets

    In 1945, a collection that would amass 9,479 brains was started

  22. La Haine: The film that shocked France

    How Mathieu Kassovitz's critique of policing shocked French society

  23. World's first solar-heated home

    In 1948, the Dover Sun House, in the US, was the first home to be heated by solar power

  24. Tanzania adopts Swahili to unite the country

    Tanzania's leader, Julius Nyerere, made Swahili the official language in the early 1960s

  25. Cameroon’s mysterious lake deaths

    In 1986, remote parts of Cameroon were turned into ghost villages overnight

  26. The bird that defied extinction

    In 1977, the white-winged guan was rediscovered in Peru after a century

  27. Cabbage Patch Kids

    Christmas 1983 saw frenzied shoppers buy three million Cabbage Patch Kids

  28. The Mumbai attacks

    In 2008, 10 gunmen killed more than 100 people in Mumbai’s busiest hot spots

  29. The Paris heatwave

    In 2003, Paris was overwhelmed by the hottest European heatwave for 500 years

  30. Kennedy’s nail-biter election victory

    In 1960, John F Kennedy became the youngest person to be elected United States president.

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