Witness History: Archive 2013

In January 1953, Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" had its premiere at a small avante-garde theatre in Paris.With its... Read more

It's 100 years since the French writer, Marcel Proust, published the first volume of his modern masterpiece, Remembrance... Read more

In September 1888, one of the most infamous serial killers in history stalked the narrow streets of the East End of Lond... Read more

It is 60 years since an American couple were executed for spying. They had been convicted of passing nuclear secrets to ... Read more

It is 45 years since the Country and Western star played his first gig in a high-security jail. But the singer had been... Read more

In early 1967, the American guitarist, Jimi Hendrix, took London by storm.His flamboyant style and new ways of playing t... Read more

Fifty years ago, the legendary film director, Stanley Kubrick, premiered his classic cold war satire Dr Strangelove. It ... Read more

In October 1964 a group of students helped 57 people escape from communist East Germany despite the wall built to keep t... Read more

For nearly 40 years, the US government conducted an experiment on a group of African-American men without their knowledg... Read more

In December 1963 the 19-year-old son of Frank Sinatra - Frank Jr - was kidnapped for a ransom. He was released unharmed ... Read more

A new film of the great American novel premieres at the Cannes film festival this week. Hear from two people with close... Read more

It is fifty years since the suicide of American poet Sylvia Plath. Hear from the friend Plath stayed with the weekend be... Read more

Following the death of Nelson Mandela we remember the system he was fighting against. Using BBC archive we present a sna... Read more

Hundreds of Jewish slave labourers in a Nazi death camp staged a revolt and escaped in October 1943. Many were caught an... Read more

In 1971 one man leaked thousands of pages of secret US government documents to the press. The papers, relating to Americ... Read more

It is 40 years since the beginning of a Senate investigation which would eventually lead to Richard Nixon standing down ... Read more

British MP John Stonehouse faked his own death in Miami in November 1974 - and was discovered just weeks later in Austra... Read more

On April 30th 1945 as Red Army soldiers closed in on the German capital Berlin, Adolf Hitler killed himself. But first h... Read more

The controversial American union leader, Jimmy Hoffa, was last seen alive on July 30 1975. He is believed to have been k... Read more

On 21 December 1988 an American airliner was blown out of the sky above Scotland. A bomb had been planted in its luggag... Read more