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Witness History Episodes

  1.

    I saw the soldiers who killed El Salvador's priests

    Lucia Cerna was the only witness to a murder that shocked El Salvador in November 1989

  2. The 'Woman in Gold'

    How one of Klimt's most famous paintings was returned to the family who'd owned it

  3. The first Tasers

    Why Los Angeles police began using a new weapon in the early 1980s.

  4. The first Indian to win Miss World

    Reita Faria was the first Indian to win the Miss World beauty competition in 1966

  5. The Love Canal disaster

    How the Love Canal neigbourhood in the US came to symbolise the dangers of toxic waste

  6. The demolition of the Babri Masjid

    How Hindu extremists demolished a mosque in India prompting months of communal violence

  7. Cap Anamur: A rescue that led to jail

    Why a captain was arrested after saving shipwrecked Africans in the Mediterranean in 2004

  8. Memories of Wilfred Owen

    The British war poet's younger brother Harold Owen spoke to the BBC in the 1960s

  9. The concert that rocked the Berlin Wall

    The 1987 rock concert that led to the first shouts in East Berlin of 'the wall must go'

  10. The Bhagalpur blindings

    How Indian police tortured petty criminals, blinding them permanently

  11. Britain's secret propaganda war

    How sex, jazz and 'fake news' were used to undermine the Nazis in World War Two

  12. A ground-breaking change to treating breast cancer

    How a Canadian oncologist proved the effectiveness of breast-conserving surgery

  13. Iran hostage crisis: the humanitarian delegation

    How Iranian students invited a group of Americans to Iran to meet the hostages

  14. Saving the Great Barrier Reef

    The 1960s campaigners who fought the government to save the world's biggest coral reef.

  15. 'Jane' - the underground abortion service

    An underground feminist network performed illegal abortions in 1960s Chicago.

  16. The Algerians who fought with France

    When Algeria won independence in 1962 thousands of local French allies faced persecution

  17. The Paris hotel that hosted Holocaust survivors

    The Hotel Lutetia became a reception centre for French Holocaust survivors after WW2

  18. Margaret Thatcher's anti-Europe speech

    The British Prime Minister started expressing doubts about the European Union in 1988

  19. The fall of the Berlin Wall

    The border between communist East Germany and the West opened on November 9th 1989

  20. The Leipzig demonstrations

    The Berlin Wall fell just a month after mass protests in the East German city of Leipzig

  21. East German refugees in the Prague embassy

    Thousands of East Germans sought refuge in the West German embassy in Prague in 1989.

  22. The reburial of a Hungarian hero

    The body of Imre Nagy who had led the Hungarian Uprising was reburied in 1989

  23. The legalisation of Solidarity

    The Polish trade union organisation was banned by the communists until April 1989

  24. Wangari Maathai Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist

    Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai fought to save forests and protect human rights

  25. Britain's worst nuclear accident

    A reactor caught fire at the Windscale nuclear plant in the north of England in 1957

  26. The man who fed the world

    Dr Norman Borlaug’s pioneering work on disease-resistant grains saved millions.

  27. Mexico City slashes car use

    How Mexico City cut its dangerously high air pollution levels

  28. Proving climate change: The Keeling curve

    An American scientist began recording carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere in 1958

  29. Britain's World War Two 'Brown Babies'

    The stigma of growing up as a mixed race child in post-war Britain

  30. The Bristol bus boycott

    How British black activists fought for employment rights in the 1960s

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