Cixi: China's most powerful woman
The Empress Dowager Cixi ruled China for 47 years until her death in 1908. But it wasn't until the 1970s that her story began to be properly documented. She'd been vilified as a murderous tyrant, but ...
9 Mar 20218min
The women of Egypt's Arab Spring
In 2011 Egyptians took to the streets calling for the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, whose regime had been in power for nearly 30 years. Their uprising was part of a wave of pro-democracy prote...
8 Mar 202110min
Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech
In March 1946, the UK's former wartime leader, Winston Churchill, gave a historic speech which would come to symbolise the beginnings of the Cold War. Churchill had lost power following a crushing ele...
5 Mar 202114min
The Sharpeville massacre
In March 1960, the South African police opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69 people and injuring nearly 200 more. The massacre outraged black South Africa...
4 Mar 20219min
When US police dropped explosives on a Philadelphia home
On 13 May 1985 a police helicopter dropped explosives on a house in residential Philadelphia, in an attempt to end a stand-off with radical black activists from an organisaton called MOVE. Fire spread...
3 Mar 20219min
Refugee Island
In 2001, boats carrying hundreds of, mainly Afghan, refugees arrived on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru. This marked the beginning of the “Pacific Solution” – a policy by the Australian government t...
2 Mar 20219min
The world's deepest dive 11km down
Don Walsh was the first to go to the very bottom of the deepest part of the ocean in 1960 in a specially designed submarine, the Bathyscaphe Trieste. The water pressure was 800 tonnes per square inch,...
1 Mar 202110min
The WW2 airman from Sierra Leone
Johnny Smythe was one of very few West Africans to fly with Britain's air force during WW2. Recruited in Sierra Leone in 1941 he was trained as a navigator and flew 26 missions on RAF bombers before b...
25 Feb 20219min
