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Witness History Episodes

  1.

    Chipko: India’s tree-hugging women

    How a grassroots environmental movement won its fight against deforestation in India

  2. Dorothy Butler Gilliam: American news pioneer

    The first African American woman to be hired as a reporter by the Washington Post

  3. The Tsunami and Fukushima

    How an earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan and triggered a nuclear emergency in 2011

  4. Fighting for the pill in Japan

    Why did it take so long for the oral contraceptive pill to be legalised in Japan?

  5. The soldier who never surrendered

    A Japanese soldier hid in the jungle in Guam for nearly 30 years after World War Two

  6. The birth of Karaoke

    The man who invented the Karaoke machine speaks to Witness History

  7. Japan's Bullet Train

    Japanese railways launched the fastest train the world had ever seen in October 1964

  8. The paintings of Vincent Van Gogh

    Vincent Van Gogh's great-great nephew recalls growing up among his paintings

  9. When war came to Darfur

    How a 13-year-old boy's life was changed by the war in Darfur in Sudan

  10. Surviving Norway's day of terror

    Lisa Husby recalls running for her life from far-right extremist Anders Breivik

  11. The Battle of Gondar

    In 1941, Italian colonial rule in Africa ended after a last stand by Mussolini's soldiers

  12. Domestic violence in Brazil

    In 2006 Brazil passed the ground-breaking 'Maria da Penha law' to tackle domestic abuse

  13. England's summer of riots

    How six weeks of race riots gripped towns in northern England in 2001

  14. When the Taliban took Kabul

    Taliban fighters first took control of Afghanistan's capital city Kabul in 1996

  15. Jane Goodall and chimpanzees

    Chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall has died aged 91. This is a programme from our archive

  16. Prisoner of the Cultural Revolution

    Kim Gordon and his parents were locked up for two years in a hotel in China in the 1960s

  17. The race for the jet engine

    Inspiration, rejection and war - a personal account of the invention of the jet engine

  18. The bombing of the Rainbow Warrior

    In July 1985 the Greenpeace boat was bombed in New Zealand by French secret agents

  19. The first World Romani Congress

    Roma people from all around Europe met up in England in 1971

  20. The famine in North Korea

    After the fall of the Soviet Union communist North Korea suffered a famine in the 1990s

  21. Britain's wartime gold

    When Britain went to war with Germany in 1939 it had to find somewhere to keep its wealth

  22. Cuba's blindness epidemic

    Up to 50,000 Cubans were inexplicably struck down with sight loss in the early 1990s

  23. China's trailblazing foreign students

    We hear from one of the first students to study overseas after the Cultural Revolution

  24. The Chinese Communist Party

    A small group of revolutionaries founded the Chinese Communist Party in July 1921

  25. The world's first offshore wind farm

    The world's first offshore wind farm was built off the coast of Denmark in 1991

  26. The Syrian playwright who challenged the regime

    A play staged in Damascus undermined official propaganda after the 1967 Six Day War

  27. Zimbabwe's mass UFO sightings

    Around 60 children said they saw 'aliens' near their school playground in September 1994

  28. The repeal of 'Don't ask, don't tell'

    For decades LGBT people in the US military had to keep their sexuality secret

  29. China's LGBT 'cooperative marriages'

    Thousands of gay men and lesbians in China hold fake marriages to avoid family pressure

  30. The secret diaries of 'Gentleman Jack'

    How the sexually explicit journals of a 19th-century English lesbian came to light

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