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Witness History Episodes

  1.

    The assassination of the UN's first Middle East mediator

    The first Middle East mediator, Count Bernadotte, was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948

  2. The 1957 flu that killed a million people

    In 1957 a new strain of flu emerged in East Asia and quickly spread around the world

  3. Waria warriors - the fight for trans rights in Indonesia

    The transgender Indonesians who fought for their rights in the 1970s and 1980s

  4. Tennessee Williams on the BBC

    The great American playwright revealed a lot about himself in BBC interviews

  5. The Brompton Manley Ventilator

    The development of a ventilation system that was a precursor to modern ventilators.

  6. Edhi: Pakistan's 'Angel of Mercy'

    Abdul Sattar Edhi built one of the biggest welfare charities in the world

  7. The last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade

    A woman who died in the US in 1940 was captured and enslaved in West Africa as a child

  8. The Deepwater Horizon disaster

    A deadly explosion on a drilling rig led to an environmental disaster in the US

  9. A space crash

    Michael Foale was on board the Mir space station when a resupply vessel crashed into it.

  10. When Skylab fell to Earth

    The space station which was meant to break up and fall into the sea but instead hit land

  11. The last men on the Moon

    In 1972 the American space agency NASA carried out its final Moon mission

  12. Nasa's female aquanauts

    The women who led the way in America's space programme by spending two weeks underwater

  13. The unlikely pioneers of online shopping

    How a 72-year-old grandmother started online shopping before the internet

  14. The first iPhone

    The touchscreen smartphone changed mobile technology for ever.

  15. The Trojan Room coffee pot

    The world's first webcam went online in 1993. Its camera was focused on a coffee pot.

  16. The Homebrew computer club

    A group of Californian computer enthusiasts first began meeting to share ideas in 1975.

  17. Being a Chinese Muslim

    It has never been easy to practice a religious faith in communist China

  18. The Swedish warship restored after 300 years

    A Swedish warship, Vasa, sank in the 17th century but was raised from the seabed in 1961

  19. Avenging the Amritsar Massacre

    A former British governor of Punjab was shot in 1940 as revenge for killings in Amritsar

  20. The trembling giant

    Could the biggest living organism on earth be a colony of quaking aspen trees?

  21. Britain's first woman judge

    Rose Heilbron was a trailblazer for women in the legal profession in Britain.

  22. The AIDS Memorial Quilt

    In 1985 activists made a giant quilt to commemorate those killed by AIDS in the USA.

  23. The Cheonan sinking

    On March 26th 2010 a South Korean naval ship sank after an explosion - 48 sailors died

  24. The Saudi bombardment of Yemen

    In March 2015 Saudi Arabia and its allies began an intense aerial bombardment of Yemen

  25. Sequencing the 1918 influenza virus

    Over 50 million people are thought to have died from influenza around the world in 1918

  26. Hong Kong's abandoned children

    The Chinese babies left on the streets of 1960s Hong Kong in the hope they'd be adopted.

  27. The Chinese cure for malaria

    How scientists in the 1970s discovered an anti-malarial drug using a traditional remedy.

  28. The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope

    How NASA put an orbiting observatory into space in 1990.

  29. Red Hollywood

    Former actress Marsha Hunt remembers the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the late 1940s.

  30. The fight to make sexual harassment a crime

    The story of a landmark ruling for women's rights in the United States.

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