Mao's Cultural Revolution

We hear from one man who took part in China's brutal Cultural Revolution.

• 9 mins

The 1967 Hong Kong riots

How workers and students filled the colony's streets, pressing for an end to British rule

• 9 mins

China opens up to capitalism

How China's Communist rulers established the country's first Special Economic Zones

• 9 mins

Learie Constantine - fighting racism in the UK

The great West Indian cricketer who fought against racism in the UK

• 9 mins

The first black woman MP in Britain

In 1987 Diane Abbott became the first black woman to be elected to the British Parliament

• 9 mins

The Notting Hill riots

Inter-racial violence broke out in west London in the summer of 1958

• 9 mins

The Bristol bus boycott

How British black activists fought for employment rights in the 1960s

• 9 mins

Britain's World War Two 'Brown Babies'

The stigma of growing up as a mixed race child in post-war Britain

• 9 mins

Proving climate change: The Keeling curve

An American scientist began recording carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere in 1958

• 9 mins

Mexico City slashes car use

How Mexico City cut its dangerously high air pollution levels

• 9 mins

The man who fed the world

Dr Norman Borlaug’s pioneering work on disease-resistant grains saved millions.

• 9 mins

Britain's worst nuclear accident

A reactor caught fire at the Windscale nuclear plant in the north of England in 1957

• 9 mins

Wangari Maathai Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist

Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai fought to save forests and protect human rights

• 9 mins

The legalisation of Solidarity

The Polish trade union organisation was banned by the communists until April 1989

• 9 mins

The reburial of a Hungarian hero

The body of Imre Nagy who had led the Hungarian Uprising was reburied in 1989

• 9 mins

East German refugees in the Prague embassy

Thousands of East Germans sought refuge in the West German embassy in Prague in 1989.

• 9 mins

The Leipzig demonstrations

The Berlin Wall fell just a month after mass protests in the East German city of Leipzig

• 9 mins

The fall of the Berlin Wall

The border between communist East Germany and the West opened on November 9th 1989

• 9 mins

Margaret Thatcher's anti-Europe speech

The British Prime Minister started expressing doubts about the European Union in 1988

• 9 mins

The Paris hotel that hosted Holocaust survivors

The Hotel Lutetia became a reception centre for French Holocaust survivors after WW2

• 9 mins

The Algerians who fought with France

When Algeria won independence in 1962 thousands of local French allies faced persecution

• 9 mins

'Jane' - the underground abortion service

An underground feminist network performed illegal abortions in 1960s Chicago.

• 9 mins

Saving the Great Barrier Reef

The 1960s campaigners who fought the government to save the world's biggest coral reef.

• 9 mins

Iran hostage crisis: the humanitarian delegation

How Iranian students invited a group of Americans to Iran to meet the hostages

• 9 mins

A ground-breaking change to treating breast cancer

How a Canadian oncologist proved the effectiveness of breast-conserving surgery

• 9 mins

Britain's secret propaganda war

How sex, jazz and 'fake news' were used to undermine the Nazis in World War Two

• 9 mins

The Bhagalpur blindings

How Indian police tortured petty criminals, blinding them permanently

• 9 mins

The concert that rocked the Berlin Wall

The 1987 rock concert that led to the first shouts in East Berlin of 'the wall must go'

• 9 mins

Memories of Wilfred Owen

The British war poet's younger brother Harold Owen spoke to the BBC in the 1960s

• 9 mins

Cap Anamur: A rescue that led to jail

Why a captain was arrested after saving shipwrecked Africans in the Mediterranean in 2004

• 9 mins