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
The fall of Kwame Nkrumah
The Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah, was one of Africa's most famous independence leaders. But in 1966, while he was out of the country, the Ghanaian military and police seized power in a coup. The ...
24 Feb 202114min
Ireland's bank bailout
In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis Ireland had to borrow billions to stop its banks from going under and to keep its economy afloat. The IMF, the EU and the European Central Bank provided...
23 Feb 20218min
Acid rain
In the 1960s, Swedish scientists documented how acid rain was poisoning lakes, killing fish, damaging soils and forests. Crucially they said it was an international problem, because the acid rain was ...
22 Feb 202112min
Mary Wilson
The Motown group The Supremes had a string of number one hits in 1964. They would become the most popular girl group of the 1960s. One of the three original singers, Mary Wilson, spoke to Vincent Dowd...
19 Feb 20218min
Free breakfasts with the Black Panthers
The Black Panther Party hit the headlines in the late 1960s with their call for a revolution in the USA. But they also ran a number of "survival programmes" to help their local communities - the bigge...
18 Feb 20219min
The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks
The story of an African American woman who played a largely unsung role in countless medical breakthroughs over more than half a century. Henrietta Lacks had cells taken from her body in 1951 when she...
17 Feb 20219min
Britain's forgotten slave owners: Part two
How one man used research by historians at University College London into Britain's forgotten slave-owners to track down the descendants of the family who'd owned his ancestors two centuries earlier. ...
16 Feb 20219min
