Nordic Noir and the Moomins

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week’s Witness History episodes from the BBC World Service. We learn about how Play-Doh evolved from a cleaning product to a childhood favourite and the creation of one of the best-selling board games of all time, Catan. Our guest is the e ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. We learn about how a Norwegian businessman brought salmon sushi to Japan in the 1980s. Our guest is cookbook author Nancy Singleton Hachisu, who tells us more about the history ...  Show more

As a beautiful young TV star in the 1990s, Gulchehra Hoja was important to the Chinese state: the acceptable face of China's Uyghur Muslim minority. Then in 2001, Hoja did an about-turn, fleeing to the United States and working with Radio Free Asia, reporting on human rights abus ...  Show more

From the Taiping and Boxer Rebellions, to the Chinese Revolution and Civil War, through the Long March and the rise of Mao Zedong, to the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, all the way to Deng's Reform and China today, Professor of East Asian and Global History Dr. Ken H ...  Show more

In 1961, Black college students fought segregation. Four years later, their Supreme Court case secured First Amendment rights for future protesters. Sylvia Copper was a freshman at Southern University when she was suspended for her participation in the historic protest. She knew ...  Show more

In May 1980 China allowed capitalist activity for the first time since the Communist Revolution, in four designated cities known as the Special Economic Zones. The most successful was Shenzhen, which grew from a mainly rural area specialising in pigs and lychees to one of China's ...  Show more