The assassination of Medgar Evers

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service.Our guest is Michelle Meinhart, a reader in musicology and cultural history at Trinity Laban Conservatoire in London. We start by hearing about a Mexican song that captivated lov ...  Show more

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History interviews from the BBC World Service. First, the story of the Belgian teenager who exposed a scandal within the country’s Royal Family in 1999. Our guest, Professor Kate Williams takes us through some other royal sc ...  Show more

Assassination – the murder of a prominent person, often for political motives. These calamities shock the world and can change the course of history. But as we will learn from the following shocking accounts, violence can only beget more violence. And the aspirations of assassins ...  Show more

In 1978, the World Chess Championship between the Soviet champion and convinced communist, Anatoly Karpov, and the dissident and defector, Viktor Korchnoi, turned into one of the most infamous clashes in the history of the game. At a time of peak Cold War tension, the two players ...  Show more

In June 1982 a young Chinese-American engineer was murdered with a baseball bat by two white men in the US city of Detroit. The lenient sentences the perpetrators received sparked an Asian-American civil rights movement with protests across the US. At the time, America was going ...  Show more

Historian John Withington, author of Assassins’ Deeds: A History of Assassination from Ancient Egypt to the Present Day, explores some of history’s most notorious political killings. From the first known assassination to the plots to kill Franz Ferdinand and JFK, he reveals how t ...  Show more