The Treaty of Rome

The document which formed the basis for what is now the European Union was signed in 1957

• 9 mins

London's first black policeman

Norwell Roberts endured years of racist abuse within the Metropolitan police

• 9 mins

Cixi: China's most powerful woman

The Empress Dowager Cixi ruled for 47 years until her death in 1908.

• 9 mins

Witnessing the birth of a new language

In the 1980s deaf children in Nicaragua invented a completely new sign language

• 9 mins

The Native American casino boom in the US

How a small Californian tribe won the right for Indian communities to host gambling.

• 9 mins

The release of Nelson Mandela

The day that South Africa's anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was freed

• 9 mins

Chairman Mao's Little Red Book

The collected thoughts of China's communist leader that became an unexpected best-seller

• 9 mins

The man who first published Harry Potter

The man who spotted the potential of the boy wizard books in 1996

• 9 mins

Diary of life in a favela

A shocking account of the realities of the slums of São Paulo

• 9 mins

The best-seller Fear of Flying

Erica Jong's best-selling book about sex, creativity and love, published in 1973

• 9 mins

The Rules: A dating handbook

The best-selling dating handbook was published on Valentine's Day 1995

• 9 mins

The Pale Blue Dot

How the Voyager space probe captured a famous image of Earth as it left the Solar System.

• 9 mins

How meditation changes your brain

In 2002, a landmark study on Buddhist monks showed that meditation can alter the brain.

• 9 mins

Fighting oil pollution with art in Nigeria

"Battle Bus" was a sculpture in memory of Nigerian environmentalist Ken Saro Wiwa

• 9 mins

Saddam Hussein's 'Supergun'

Building the largest gun in the world for Saddam Hussein's Iraq

• 9 mins

Saving Antarctica

A 1980s campaign to preserve Antarctica for science.

• 9 mins

An Antarctic mystery

Human remains were found on a remote island in Antarctica in 1985 but whose were they?

• 9 mins

The first mobile phone call

The American inventor who made the first mobile phone and the first mobile phone call

• 9 mins

The rebel nuns who left their convent behind

A group of Californian nuns left their convent and set up their own community in 1970

• 9 mins

The last smallpox outbreak

Thousands of people died in the world's last major smallpox epidemic in India in 1974.

• 9 mins

Freeing American prisoners from Iran

The diplomacy behind the release of three US citizens who unknowingly hiked into Iran.

• 9 mins

Womenomics in Japan

Japan faces a demographic time-bomb. Could the answer be Womenomics?

• 9 mins

The petrol that was poisoning children

The EU finally banned lead in petrol in 2000 - decades after the US, Canada and Japan.

• 9 mins

Strikers in saris

How South Asian women workers won the support of the British trade unionist movement

• 9 mins

Battling Soviet psychiatric punishment

One man's stand against the psychiatric abuse of political dissidents in the Soviet Union

• 9 mins

The Major and the VW Beetle

How a British army officer saved Hitler's Volkswagen Beetle at the end of World War Two

• 9 mins

The 'Spanish' flu

In 1918 an extremely deadly form of influenza killed millions around the world

• 9 mins

The Ebola virus

The first documented outbreak of the deadly disease occurred in the 1970s in Zaire

• 9 mins

The polio vaccine

Scientists in the US led by Dr Jonas Salk develop an effective vaccine against polio

• 9 mins

The SARS epidemic

How the world battled a deadly respiratory disease in 2003.

• 9 mins

Marburg virus

A deadly new disease infected laboratory workers in a small town in West Germany in 1967.

• 9 mins

The 'I Love You' computer virus

How a virus created by a Filipino college dropout sparked global panic in May 2000

• 9 mins

The fight to make sexual harassment a crime

The story of a landmark ruling for women's rights in the United States.

• 9 mins

Red Hollywood

Former actress Marsha Hunt remembers the anti-Communist witch-hunt of the late 1940s.

• 9 mins

The launch of the Hubble Space Telescope

How NASA put an orbiting observatory into space in 1990.

• 9 mins

The Chinese cure for malaria

How scientists in the 1970s discovered an anti-malarial drug using a traditional remedy.

• 9 mins

Hong Kong's abandoned children

The Chinese babies left on the streets of 1960s Hong Kong in the hope they'd be adopted.

• 9 mins

Sequencing the 1918 influenza virus

Over 50 million people are thought to have died from influenza around the world in 1918

• 9 mins

The Saudi bombardment of Yemen

In March 2015 Saudi Arabia and its allies began an intense aerial bombardment of Yemen

• 9 mins

The Cheonan sinking

On March 26th 2010 a South Korean naval ship sank after an explosion - 48 sailors died

• 9 mins

The AIDS Memorial Quilt

In 1985 activists made a giant quilt to commemorate those killed by AIDS in the USA.

• 9 mins

Britain's first woman judge

Rose Heilbron was a trailblazer for women in the legal profession in Britain.

• 9 mins

The trembling giant

Could the biggest living organism on earth be a colony of quaking aspen trees?

• 9 mins

Avenging the Amritsar Massacre

A former British governor of Punjab was shot in 1940 as revenge for killings in Amritsar

• 9 mins

The Swedish warship restored after 300 years

A Swedish warship, Vasa, sank in the 17th century but was raised from the seabed in 1961

• 9 mins

Being a Chinese Muslim

It has never been easy to practice a religious faith in communist China

• 9 mins

The Homebrew computer club

A group of Californian computer enthusiasts first began meeting to share ideas in 1975.

• 9 mins

The Trojan Room coffee pot

The world's first webcam went online in 1993. Its camera was focused on a coffee pot.

• 9 mins

The first iPhone

The touchscreen smartphone changed mobile technology for ever.

• 9 mins

The unlikely pioneers of online shopping

How a 72-year-old grandmother started online shopping before the internet

• 9 mins

Nasa's female aquanauts

The women who led the way in America's space programme by spending two weeks underwater

• 9 mins

The last men on the Moon

In 1972 the American space agency NASA carried out its final Moon mission

• 9 mins

When Skylab fell to Earth

The space station which was meant to break up and fall into the sea but instead hit land

• 9 mins

A space crash

Michael Foale was on board the Mir space station when a resupply vessel crashed into it.

• 9 mins

The Deepwater Horizon disaster

A deadly explosion on a drilling rig led to an environmental disaster in the US

• 9 mins

The last survivor of the transatlantic slave trade

A woman who died in the US in 1940 was captured and enslaved in West Africa as a child

• 9 mins

Edhi: Pakistan's 'Angel of Mercy'

Abdul Sattar Edhi built one of the biggest welfare charities in the world

• 9 mins

The Brompton Manley Ventilator

The development of a ventilation system that was a precursor to modern ventilators.

• 9 mins

Tennessee Williams on the BBC

The great American playwright revealed a lot about himself in BBC interviews

• 9 mins

Waria warriors - the fight for trans rights in Indonesia

The transgender Indonesians who fought for their rights in the 1970s and 1980s

• 9 mins

The 1957 flu that killed a million people

In 1957 a new strain of flu emerged in East Asia and quickly spread around the world

• 9 mins

The assassination of the UN's first Middle East mediator

The first Middle East mediator, Count Bernadotte, was assassinated in Jerusalem in 1948

• 9 mins

The Galapagos sea cucumber dispute

How fishermen and conservationists battled in the species-rich waters of the archipelago

• 9 mins

Hiroshima's trees of hope

Trees which survived the atomic bomb in Hiroshima are still growing in the Japanese city

• 9 mins

The Wehrmacht exhibition that shocked Germany

An exhibition about the German army’s role in WW2 caused a scandal in 1995.

• 9 mins

The death of Hitler

First-hand accounts of Hitler's death from the BBC's archives

• 9 mins

The battle for Berlin

Eyewitness accounts of the final battle for the capital of Nazi Germany in 1945

• 9 mins

The Soviet occupation of Berlin

After Germany's surrender to Allied forces in May 1945, Soviet soldiers occupied Berlin

• 9 mins

VE Day

After Nazi Germany surrendered to the Allies in May 1945 'Victory in Europe' was declared

• 9 mins

The liberation of the Channel Islands

The only part of the British Isles to be occupied during WW2 was liberated in May 1945

• 9 mins

The first 24-hour children's helpline

When a free helpline for kids was set up it showed just how widespread child abuse was

• 9 mins

Fighting for the pill in Japan

It took until 1999 for Japanese women to be allowed to take the contraceptive pill.

• 9 mins

Confessions of a Prince

How Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands broke his silence to reveal a love child

• 9 mins

Sweden's fishy submarine scare

Could farting fish have triggered Sweden's Cold War submarine hunts?

• 9 mins

The Miami riots

After four white policemen were acquitted of killing a black man - Miami rioted in 1980

• 9 mins

Kowloon Walled City

How Hong Kong’s city within a city was torn down in 1993.

• 9 mins

The first 3D printer

The creator of the 3D printer had no idea how revolutionary this technology might become.

• 9 mins

Explaining autism

One scientist's ground-breaking work that revolutionised our understanding of autism

• 9 mins

Britain's World War Two crime wave

How criminals from looters to con artists thrived in London during the Blitz.

• 9 mins

The book that changed the way we eat

The book that highlighted the health and environmental benefits of a plant based diet

• 9 mins

Risking my life to protect Congo's forest

How a conservationist tried to protect Congo's rainforest during the country's civil war.

• 9 mins

The Gwangju massacre

The South Korean army crushed a popular uprising in the city of Gwangju on 27 May 1980

• 9 mins

Winston Churchill's doctor

Winston Churchill's personal doctor published his memories of the British leader in 1966

• 9 mins

Ann Lowe - African American fashion designer

Ann Lowe designed Jackie Kennedy's wedding dress but for years few people knew her name

• 9 mins

The start of eco-tourism

How Costa Rica's Monteverde cloud forest reserve became a major tourist site

• 9 mins

The Zanzibar Revolution

Just one month after gaining independence there was an uprising in Zanzibar in 1964.

• 9 mins

How Christo wrapped the Reichstag

The artist who delighted post-Cold War Berlin by wrapping its greatest monument

• 9 mins

The origin of the WHO

How the cold war helped shape the creation of the WHO and what role China played.

• 9 mins

The portable defibrillator

How Northern Irish doctor Frank Pantridge revolutionised heart-attack treatment.

• 9 mins

Brown v the Board of Education

A landmark case about racial segregation in the USA.

• 9 mins

The 16th Street church bombing

Four young black girls were killed in a racist attack on a church in Alabama in 1963

• 9 mins

Black basketball pioneers - Texas Western

How an all-black college team overturned racist assumptions about basketball in the USA

• 9 mins

Rodney King and the LA riots

People rioted in Los Angeles after police who had assaulted a black man were acquitted

• 9 mins

Three Strikes Law

One man's experience of the controversial US law that saw thousands locked up for life

• 14 mins

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and the Five Stages of Grief

The remarkable Swiss psychiatrist who changed the way we think about dying.

• 9 mins

Beethoven's role in China's Cultural Revolution

Chairman Mao banned all classical music in 1966, but some musicians defied the order.

• 9 mins

Sex trafficking and peacekeepers

Whistle-blowers implicated UN peacekeepers in sex trafficking in Bosnia in the late 90s

• 9 mins

The friendship train

The passenger train service between India and Bangladesh was resumed after 43 years.

• 9 mins

The ‘Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes’ anti-racist exercise

A teacher decided to separate pupils according to eye colour to teach them about racism.

• 9 mins