Weegee the Famous

Despite Pierre de Coubertin's vision of the Olympics being for male athletes only, women did participate in the games starting in 1900. But the road to equal participation was long and filled with disappointments. Research: Barker, Philip. “Women’s Sporting Pioneer Milliat Rememb ...  Show more

"Fumifugium" was a treatise on air pollution written in 1661. In addition to warning about the dangers of coal smoke, John Evelyn wrote this work to improve the reputation of King Charles II. Research: Chambers, Douglas D. C. "Evelyn, John (1620–1706), diarist and writer." Oxford ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week’s Witness History stories. We focus on some of the world’s best known photographs - and the photographers who took them. We find out why Lee Miller was in Hitler’s bath in the dying days of World War Two; and historian Dr Pippa Oldfi ...  Show more

New York journalism in 1897 was in a pretty technicolor space. Newspapers, so long the grey, stolid, medium of the merchants and businessman, were instead being filled with lurid stories of murder, scandal and drunken debauchery and the public were loving it. As papers fought for ...  Show more

In 1888 Louis Le Prince shot the world’s first motion picture in Leeds, England. In 1890, weeks before the public unveiling of his camera and projector – a year before Thomas Edison announced that he had invented a motion picture camera – Le Prince stepped on a train in France ...

English-born artist Thomas Cole emigrated to the United States in 1818. Six years later he began what is now known as the Hudson River School, which became the first art movement of the United States.. Betsy Jacks, director of the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, tells Don ...