Washington DC’s Mount Pleasant riot
In May 1991, a female police officer shot and wounded a young immigrant from El Salvador in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood in Washington DC in the United States. It sparked several days of disturban...
27 Aug 20259min
Creating CAPTCHA
In 2000, as the internet expanded, websites faced a growing challenge to stop spam bots from flooding their systems.To separate humans from machines, researchers at the United States’ Carnegie Mellon ...
26 Aug 202510min
The creation of the International Criminal Court
In 1998, at a conference organised by the United Nations, a blueprint was devised for what would be the world's first permanent International Criminal Court.Judge Phillipe Kirsch chaired the Rome conf...
25 Aug 202510min
Geneva Conventions
In 1859, Swiss businessman Henry Dunant witnessed the Battle of Solferino, in Italy. He couldn’t believe the lack of aid for the wounded soldiers and came up with two ideas – a voluntary aid organisat...
22 Aug 202510min
The rise and fall of BlackBerry
In the early 2000s, BlackBerry was the phone that ruled the world. But within a decade, it collapsed, overtaken by the touch screen revolution.Sam Gruet speaks to former co-CEO Jim Balsillie about Bla...
21 Aug 20259min
The book that changed Norway’s view of immigrants
In 2010, a book came out in Norway that transformed the way people looked at paperless immigrants. The author, a 25-year-old Russian woman, fled North Ossetia as a child with her parents. They were ne...
20 Aug 202510min
One man’s escape from McCarthyism
In 1951, at the height of the McCarthy era, a time when the US government pursued suspected communists, Victor Grossman was drafted into the army. A committed communist since his teens, he hid his pol...
19 Aug 202510min
Spot the Dog
In 1978, British artist Eric Hill designed an interactive book about a yellow puppy for his two-year-old son, Chris.Eric had noticed Chris kept lifting up the paper he was working on to see what was u...
18 Aug 202510min
