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Fighting for the pill in Japan

Why did it take so long for the oral contraceptive pill to be legalised in Japan?

• 9 mins

The Tsunami and Fukushima

How an earthquake and tsunami devastated Japan and triggered a nuclear emergency in 2011

• 9 mins

Dorothy Butler Gilliam: American news pioneer

The first African American woman to be hired as a reporter by the Washington Post

• 9 mins

Chipko: India’s tree-hugging women

How a grassroots environmental movement won its fight against deforestation in India

• 9 mins

Escaping Nigeria’s Civil War

Patti Boulaye recalls frightening times as a 13-year-old girl in the Biafran War in 1967.

• 9 mins

Afghanistan's battle of the airwaves

When the Taliban fell in 2001 Afghans could listen to music and news again

• 9 mins

Gay activism in 1990s India

Pawan Dhall helped form the Counsel Club, one of India's first gay support groups

• 9 mins

The building of the Berlin Wall

In August 1961, East Germany began building the wall that symbolised Cold War Europe

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Escaping from East Berlin

East Germans used all sorts of methods to escape from communism across the Berlin Wall

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Exiled from East Germany: Wolf Biermann

East Germany's most famous singer-songwriter was exiled to the West in 1976

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East Germany's nudists

The communist regime restricted many things in the GDR but not the freedom to go naked

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Inside an East German jail

Vera Lengsfeld was imprisoned by the communist authorities in East Germany in 1988

• 9 mins

The man who coined the term genocide

The Holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide and spent his life trying to stop it

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US withdrawal: The fall of Saigon

The desperate scramble to evacuate US personnel and locals at the end of the Vietnam war

• 9 mins

India's secret freedom radio

When Gandhi was jailed in 1942 activists launched a secret radio station for independence

• 9 mins

Saddam Hussein's foreign hostages

A British Muslim family was among hundreds of foreign nationals held hostage in Iraq

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When The Queen met Ceaușescu

It was the first time a communist leader had been given a full state visit to the UK

• 9 mins

John Maynard Keynes

The remarkable man who transformed 20th century economics and changed our world.

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My father survived the sinking of the Titanic

How six Chinese sailors were rescued from the Titanic, but then faced racism in America.

• 9 mins

Campaigning for Mexico's women with disabilities

Activist Maryangel Garcia-Ramos on the struggle faced by Mexico's disabled women

• 9 mins

Syria's rebel poet

Nizar Qabbani is one of the Arab world’s most famous poets but his legacy is contested

• 9 mins

Nigeria's 'War Against Indiscipline'

A campaign to make life in Nigeria more orderly in the 1980s

• 9 mins

The strike that changed Poland

Shipyard workers in Gdańsk changed communism in Poland when they went on strike in 1980

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The first modern electric car

The first mass-produced modern electric car was launched by GM in 1996

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Surviving the fall of Saigon

When South Vietnam fell in 1975, most could not escape.

• 9 mins

The businessman who defied the Mafia

How an anti-Mafia businessman paid the ultimate price for standing up to organised crime

• 9 mins

North Korea's founding father

How Kim Il-sung came to power in communist North Korea

• 9 mins

The warnings before 9/11

Throughout 2001 the US administration was being given warnings a terror attack was coming

• 9 mins

The killing of Ahmed Shah Massoud

Two days before 9/11, al-Qaeda killed a key Afghan leader in a suicide bombing.

• 9 mins

With the president on 9/11

How the White House chief-of-staff broke the news of 9/11 to President George W Bush.

• 9 mins