America's first woman combat pilot
In 1993, Jeannie Leavitt became the first woman to fly a US Air Force fighter plane after the Pentagon lifted its ban on female pilots engaging in combat. After hundreds of F15 missions over Iraq and ...
25 Aug 20209min
Margaret Ekpo - Nigeria's feminist pioneer
One of the leading figures in Nigeria's fight for democracy was Margaret Ekpo, a feminist politician and trades union leader. After Nigerian independence in 1960, Ekpo became an MP and a hero to a gen...
24 Aug 202011min
The siege at Ruby Ridge
Randy Weaver was a white separatist in Idaho in the north-west United States who was wanted by the government on firearms charges. When government agents approached his remote cabin on Ruby Ridge in A...
21 Aug 202010min
The American who put women's rights in the Japanese constitution
In November 1946, Emperor Hirohito proclaimed a new post-war constitution for Japan which contained clauses establishing women's rights for the first time. They were the brainchild of Beate Sirota Gor...
20 Aug 20209min
The Guatemalan syphilis scandal
A team of American doctors, led by the distinguished physician Dr John Cutler, carried out secretive STD tests in Guatemala from 1946 to 1948. The doctors experimented on more than one thousand prison...
20 Aug 202010min
The first modern asthma inhaler
Asthma affects more children than any other non-communicable disease - and it was a teenager who first asked her father "why can't they put my asthma medication in a spray can like hairspray?". Luckil...
19 Aug 202010min
The lost King of England
In 2012, archaeologists from the University of Leicester discovered the lost grave of Richard III under a car park in Leicester. Richard was the King of England more than 500 years ago and for centuri...
18 Aug 202012min
Surviving Saddam
Zainab Salbi grew up in the inner social circle of the Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, in the 1980s because her father worked as Saddam’s personal pilot. It was a world of apparently glamorous parties...
17 Aug 20209min
