The Forum

The motor car is a feature of contemporary life the world over but when and where did motor vehicles begin? How did we get from the slow, noisy, dangerous, early vehicles of the 19th century to the swish, sleek, practical cars of today? Why did the early electric vehicle – so popular early on and the first car to go faster than a hundred kilometres an hour - suddenly fall out of favour? And who were the early engineers whose major contributions to car design deserve to be better known? These are some of the questions that Bridget Kendall asks three automotive experts: writer and broadcaster Giles Chapman is the award-winning author of 55 books on car history, culture and design; Larry Edsall also has many automotive books to his name; he has written about cars for many American newspapers and is founding editor at ClassicCars.com; and Gundula Tutt is a leading German restorer of historic vehicles whose work graces many public and private museums. She has a particular interest in the science and technology of car paint and other finishes and is the founding member of the Institute for Automobile Forensics.[Photo: A restored 1907 veteran car. Credit: RapidEye/Getty Images]

Throughout its 130-year-old history, the ukulele has often been underrated – for many, this tiny four stringed instrument is a musical joke, a plastic toy or a cheap airport souvenir, but in fact, some of the world’s greatest musicians have played and admired it, and it has enduring associations with the struggle for Hawaiian independence since its arrival on the islands from Madeira in the late 19th century. The ukulele is also surprisingly versatile and musicians are forever involved in the challenge of expanding its repertoire, from Bach to ukulele concertos to jazz.Joining Bridget Kendall to find out more about this deceptively humble instrument is the award-winning musician Brittni Paiva, who’s been described as Hawaii’s pre-eminent ukulele artist; Jim Beloff, the co-founder of Flea Market Music, publishers of some of the first ukulele song books which played a key part in the modern ukulele revival, his forthcoming memoir is UKEtopia: Adventures in the Ukulele World; and Samantha Muir, a classical ukulele musician and composer, who’s doing a PHD at the University of Surrey in the UK to create new works for the classical ukulele repertoire. Produced by Anne Khazam for the BBC World Service. [Image: A ukulele sitting on its side on a Hawaiian beach. Credit: McCaig via Getty Images]

The American president Thomas Jefferson called Tadeusz Kosciuszko "as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known". Kosciuszko was born in what is today Belarus, trained as an engineer in Poland and France and went on to become one of the important military players in the American War of Independence. This was when he wasn’t pursuing his dream of a free Polish republic against the might of a conservative aristocracy and neighbouring Russian and Prussian armies. Or campaigning against slavery and feudalism. Testimonials like that of Jefferson’s lauding his humility, energy and high moral principles flowed from around the world. He was toasted as a celebrity in London by the likes of Keats and Coleridge. In the USA and Europe there are bridges, statues and monuments in his name. And yet today Kosciuszko is relatively unknown outside of Poland. Rajan Datar aims to change that with the aid of three Kosciuszko experts: Dr. Betsey Blakeslee, President of the Friends of the American Revolution at West Point, an organisation that works to preserve the fortifications Kosciuszko designed and built at West Point. She earned her PhD in American Studies at the University of Maryland; Kamil Ruszala, Assistant Professor of History at Jagiellonian University in Kraków whose research focuses on the modern history of Central Europe; and writer and Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Alex Storozynski, Chairman of the Board of the Kosciuszko Foundation and author of Kosciuszko's biographies both in a book and film form.[Image: A portrait of Tadeusz Kosciuszko. Credit: Bettmann / Getty Images]

Anyone who has ever researched their family tree will have most likely come across the census, the process by which every citizen or subject of a country is counted and classified. Data collected by the census, often carried out every ten years, has been invaluable to genealogists, both amateur and professional. And the census has also developed into an essential tool for governments and organisations to plan how and where they focus their investment in public services such as health care and schools. Inventories of people are known to stretch back to antiquity in places such as Egypt and China, and asked for very basic information for the purposes of tax collection or military service. The modern-day census, however, focuses on questions that touch far more on an individual’s identity and has often been controversial. Now that modern technology makes population data easily accessible in a variety of forms, some are questioning whether there is a need for censuses at all.Bridget Kendall is joined by Dr Kathrin Levitan, Associate Professor at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia and the author of A Cultural History of the British Census: Envisioning the Multitude in the Nineteenth Century; sociologist Dr Tukufu Zuberi, the Lasry Family Professor of Race Relations at the University of Pennsylvania and head of the African Census Analysis Project; and data scientist and economist Andrew Whitby, author of The Sum of the People: How the Census Has Shaped Nations from the Ancient World to the Modern Age.Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service.(Photo: Campaigners protest outside the US Supreme Court in 2019 over the inclusion of a citizenship question in the 2020 US Census. Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Like many traditional domestic crafts, knitting has experienced a huge surge in popularity in the 21st century, making it fashionable and even radical. But the history of hand knitting is still relatively obscure. The oldest knitted artefacts are Coptic socks found in Egypt dating from the fourth century AD, but although they look like modern-day knitting, they’re actually made using a technique called nalebinding or needle-binding. So what then are the real origins of knitting? How did it develop into so many different regional patterns, from the famous Fair Isle of Scotland to distinctive Nordic and South American variations?Joining Bridget Kendall to discuss the global history of knitting are Professor Sandy Black of the University of the Arts London, Norwegian textile designer, Annemor Sundbo, and an expert on South American knitting, Cynthia LeCount Samaké.Produced by Jo Impey for the BBC World Service.Image: Knitting on Taquile Island, Peru Image credit: Hadynyah / Getty Images

Considered to be one of literature’s supreme achievements, One Hundred Years of Solitude by the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez is reported to be the most popular work of Spanish-language fiction since Don Quixote in the 17th century. Written in 1967, it tells the story of seven generations of the Buendía family, whose patriarch is the founder of a fictional Colombian village called Macondo. But why is it said this novel – which fuses the fantastical and the real – tells the story of Latin America and has given an entire continent its voice? Joining Bridget Kendall are Ilan Stavans, Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College in Massachusetts, in the United States, and the biographer of Gabriel García Márquez; María del Pilar Blanco, Associate Professor in Spanish American literature at Oxford University, and Parvati Nair, Professor of Hispanic, Cultural and Migration studies at Queen Mary, University of London.Produced: Anne Khazam (Photo: Partial view of a mural painting by Oscar Gonzalez and Andrew Pisacane representing passages from One Hundred Years of Solitude at the National Library in Bogota. Credit: Raul Arboleda/AFP via Getty Images)

So prodigious was the polymath Rabindranath Tagore, there’s a saying in Bengal that one lifetime is not enough to consume all of his work. Poet, playwright, thinker, activist, educator, social reformer, composer, artist… the list of his talents is long. Today his name is known all over India and Bangladesh; children recite his poetry at school and his legacy lives on in many different ways. When he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, Tagore was feted for a time by American and European literary figures who saw in him someone who embodied Western preconceptions of a mystic Oriental sage. As a result of his newfound fame outside India, Tagore travelled widely and exchanged ideas with many celebrated world leaders and thinkers from Einstein to Gandhi. Today Tagore’s thoughts on education and his stance vis-à-vis the natural world and our relationship to the environment are seen as remarkably forward-looking.Rajan Datar is joined by Kathleen O’Connell, retired lecturer in South Asian Studies from the University of Toronto and the author of Rabindranath Tagore: the Poet as Educator; the writer Aseem Shrivastava who lectures on Tagore and his ecological thought at Ashoka University in Delhi; and Chandrika Kaul, Reader in Modern History at the University of St Andrews, who’s published widely on imperial and modern India.Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service.[Photo: Rabindranath Tagore. Credit: Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images]

While the name of Pauline Viardot may be unfamiliar to many, in her lifetime she was one of the most celebrated performers in Europe. Her interpretation of Orpheus in a revival of Gluck’s opera made the writer Charles Dickens weep, and the novelist George Sand said that whenever she heard Pauline Viardot sing, nothing else mattered. In addition to her vocal talents, Pauline Viardot dazzled in high society. She knew almost everybody who came to define 19th Century European culture, thanks to the regular salon she held with her husband in their Parisian townhouse. Acclaimed poets, musicians, composers, artists and even royalty would come to take tea, listen to music, network, perform and share ideas.Alas there are no recordings of her magnificent voice, even though her later years coincided with the beginning of the recording industry. But today Pauline Viardot’s legacy is being rediscovered as a composer, with works that were performed at her salons reaching new audiences.Bridget Kendall is joined by Hilary Poriss, associate professor of music history at Northeastern University in Boston who is writing a monograph on Pauline Viardot to be published by the University of Chicago Press; Patrick Barbier, emeritus professor at the West Catholic University in Angers, and author of a biography of Pauline Viardot and her sister; and Richard Langham Smith, who has published widely on 19th and early 20th Century French music and is currently research professor at the Royal College of Music in London. Producer: Fiona Clampin

The One Thousand and One Nights are a collection of fantastical stories of flying carpets, magic and genies whose ancient origins go back to the 7th century or earlier. The tales are told by Scheherazade who uses the power of storytelling night after night to stop her Sultan husband from beheading her. These highly influential stories were brought to the West in the 18th century, when more tales like Aladdin and Ali Baba were said to have been added by the French translator, and it has continued to evolve over the centuries. Rajan Datar and guests explore why these stories became so popular around the world and what they mean to us today.Joining Rajan is Wen Chin Ouyang, Professor of Arabic at SOAS in London; Dr Sandra Naddaff, senior lecturer in Comparative Literature at Harvard University; and the Iranian TV producer Shabnam Rezaei.[Photo: Sand Sculpture depicting 1001 Nights of Sheherazade. Credit: Getty Images]

Until the eighteenth century there were no professional dentists. The only way to deal with a serious case of toothache was to call on the services of blacksmiths, travelling showmen or so-called barber-surgeons, all of whom had a sideline in tooth extraction. But in 1728, French physician Pierre Fauchard published the first complete scientific description of dentistry and he is credited as being “the father of modern dentistry”. His book, Le Chirurgien Dentiste or The Surgeon Dentist, was translated into several languages.Joining Rajan Datar to discuss the painful and sometimes gruesome history of humans and their teeth are Dr. Scott Swank of the National Museum of Dentistry in Baltimore, US; Rachel Bairsto, Head of Museum Services at the British Dental Association and Professor Dominik Gross of RWTH Aachen University in Germany.[Image: Detail from Tearer of Teeth or The Tooth Puller by David Ryjckaert III (1612-1661). Credit: David Dyjckaert III / Buyenlarge / Getty Images]