British black history special

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 ...  عرض المزيد

We start with the street artist Banksy, and his 2015 dystopian 'bemusement park'.Then, we talk to roller coaster enthusiast Megan MacCausland, from the European Coaster Club. Plus, we go back through the BBC archives to tell the story of the coelacanth, a fish believed to have be ...  عرض المزيد

On the 8th of June 1948, the HMT Windrush sailed from Kingston with almost 500 migrants on board, destined for England. The ship docked at Tilbury on the 22nd of June, and history was made. Since that day the legend of Windrush has gradually come to characterise an increasingly b ...  عرض المزيد

There remains a tendency to reduce the history of African and Caribbean people in Britain to a simple story: it is one that begins in 1948 with the arrival of a single ship, the Empire Windrush. Yet, from the very beginning, from the moment humans first stood on this rainy isl ...

The most famous Black African in Tudor England is John Blanke, a musician in the courts of Henry VII and Henry VIII. The discovery of Blanke, originally by Professor Sydney Anglo, was made famous by Dr. Miranda Kaufmann’s 2017 book Black Tudors, The Untold Story</ ...

Drag is an art form that's seen a great deal of success – and a little controversy – in recent years. Yet, as Jacob Bloomfield argues in his recent book, Drag: A British History, it's also entertained British audiences for decades, stretching back to the music halls of the Victor ...  عرض المزيد