The Forum

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]

Educate, Agitate, Organise. This was the motto of the Indian scholar BR Ambedkar who led an extraordinary life of activism and achievement. It put him in conflict with many other political forces in his native country, such as the Indian National Congress and Mahatma Gandhi. In India itself, Ambedkar's legacy is widely respected but in other countries he is not so well known. And yet, Ambedkar was not only a leading intellectual of his day, brilliant orator, lawyer, successful politician and an unmatched champion of those suffering the harshest discrimination: he was also someone who rose from a Dalit background to being put in charge of writing the first constitution of independent India. The Dalits are the lowest of the low in the Indian social hierarchy, often considered as being below the lowest caste.To tell Ambedkar's story Rajan Datar is joined by three distinguished Ambedkar scholars: Sunil Khilnani, professor of politics and history at Ashoka University and author of Incarnations: India in Fifty Lives; Valerian Rodrigues, emeritus professor of political studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University and first Ambedkar chair at Ambedkar University, both in New Delhi, and author of The Essential Writings of B.R. Ambedkar; and Ananya Vajpeyi, associate professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi and author of Righteous Republic: The Political Foundations of Modern India.[Photo: A statue of BR Ambedkar at Rashtriya Dalit Prerna Sthal in Noida, India. Credit: Sunil Ghosh/Hindustan Times via Getty Images]

Common to many cultures across the world, swimming appears on the surface to be a benign leisure activity. But in fact it has much to tell us about such things as the development of societies, our bodies and minds, and our relationship to our ancestors and the natural world.For the Ancient Greeks and Romans, swimming was essential for instilling discipline, as a necessary skill for warriors, and to promote wellbeing. In West Africa where water had spiritual significance, communities there placed great importance on learning to swim from an early age. Their aquatic skills surprised the early colonialists, who then targeted divers to help them plunder shipwrecks when they were trafficked to the New World. Today however African American children are almost six times more likely to drown than their white counterparts as a consequence of historic racial segregation, according to research by the US Centers for Disease Control.Rajan Datar is joined Professor Kevin Dawson from the University of California Merced, author of Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Cultures in the African Diaspora; Mikael Rosén, swimmer, coach and author of Open Water: The History and Technique of Swimming; journalist Howard Means, author of Splash!: Ten Thousand Years of Swimming and writer Bonnie Tsui whose book Why we Swim was published in 2020.Produced by Fiona Clampin for the BBC World Service.[Photo: Young boys swim together at an inter-racial camp circa 1948 in New York, New York. Credit: Irving Haberman/IH Images/Getty Images]