The History Hour

In 2010 the Haitian capital and surrounding areas were hit by a catastrophic earthquake. Much of Port Au Prince was flattened and more than a hundred thousand people were killed. Amid the destruction and death people's first instinct was to pull together and help one another. A survivor describes what happened after his family home collapsed around him. Plus, a prisoner who took part in the dramatic Attica prison uprising of 1971, the professor who used DNA to unravel a 200-year-old royal mystery from France, and one of the first settlers of Copenhagen's famous hippy commune, Christiania.Photo: Men gather to try to reach those still buried in the rubble beneath the Haitian Department of Justice building in January 2010.(Photo by Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

In a special edition on the terrorist attacks on America, we hear from the White House official who broke the news to the President and a Muslim first-responder who worked at Ground Zero. Plus, personal memories of the US intelligence failures in the run-up to 9/11 and the bombing of Afghanistan which followed. We also get a dramatic first-hand account of the death of Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Afghan resistance against the Taleban, who was killed by an al-Qaeda suicide bomber on the eve of the attacks on New York and Washington. And former BBC diplomatic correspondent Jonathan Marcus joins us to analyse the war on terror and the gains made - or not made - in the twenty years since a day which changed the world. Photo: Smoke pours from the World Trade Centre after it was hit by two passenger planes on September 11, 2001 in New York City. (Credit: Robert Giroux/Getty Images)

When South Vietnam fell in 1975, most could not escape. In the last days, the US airlifted its remaining personnel and some high ranking Vietnamese officials - but millions were left behind to await their fate. Hear the account of one South Vietnamese veteran who remained in Saigon as North Vietnamese forces took the city. Also on the programme: the 1990s electric car that was taken out of production, we go up close with North Korea's Kim Il Sung, the Gdansk shipyard strike in Poland, and the Sicilian businessman who tried to defy the Mafia.Photo: A South Vietnamese soldier helps his wounded friend during fighting with communist forces in Saigon, 28th April 1975 (Bettmann/Getty Images)

Fang Lang was one of six Chinese men who survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912. The six faced racism and a hostile immigration system when they reached America. Unlike other survivors, their stories remained untold for decades. We hear from Fang Lang's son Tom and Arthur Jones whose documentary called The Six tells the story of those six Chinese survivors. Also John Maynard Keynes, the economist who transformed the world, changing attitudes in Mexico towards disabled women plus Nigeria’s war against indiscipline in the 1980s and the contested legacy of one of the most revered Arab poets of the twentieth century.Photo: Tom’s father, Fang Lang. Credit: LP Films.

The desperate scramble to evacuate the US embassy at the end of the Vietnam war in 1975, also the 1940s Indian radio station calling for independence. We'll look at life as a 'human shield' in Iraq under Saddam, the man who invented the term 'genocide' and why, and the messy diplomatic embarrassment of Nicolae Ceaușescu's visit to The Queen in 1978.(Photo: A CIA employee helps Vietnamese evacuees onto an Air America helicopter from the top of 22 Gia Long Street, a half mile from the U.S. Embassy. April 1975. Getty Images.)

In August 1961, communist East Germany began building the Berlin Wall, which divided the city for nearly three decades and became a symbol of the Cold War. We hear the memories of Germans from both sides of the Wall and tales of daring escapes. Plus, what life was like in the East - from nudism and folk music to the grim reality of facing the notorious Stasi secret police.PHOTO: Soldiers at the Berlin Wall in the early 1960s (Getty Images)

The story of the famed 1970s Indian conservation movement. Plus we speak to Professor Vinita Damodaran about the history of Indian environmentalism. Also Patti Boulaye on escaping the Biafran war, we hear from Dorothy Butler Gilliam - an African American news pioneer, why Afghanistan's first private radio station helped change a generation, and memories of a taboo-breaking gay support group in 1990s India.(Photo by Bhawan Singh/The The India Today Group via Getty Images)

We hear about the start of the war in Darfur, through the eyes of a teenage boy whose life was changed when the Sudanese military allied to a local militia, the Janjaweed, laid waste to villages across the region, killing and raping as they went. We hear from a survivor of Norway's worst day of terror, when a far-right extremist, Anders Breivik, launched a bomb attack on government offices and attacked a summer camp. Plus a story from our archives from a British army officer during World War Two who witnessed the end of Italy's colonial rule in East Africa during a final battle in the Ethiopian town of Gondar. From Brazil, the women's rights activist whose story of abuse inflicted by her husband inspired the country's first legislation recognising different forms of domestic violence in 2006. Lastly, the story of how the family of the artist Vincent Van Gogh worked to get him recognised as a great painter after he died penniless in 1890. Photo: A young Darfurian refugee walks past a Sudan Liberation Army Land Rover filled with teenage rebel fighters on October 14 2004 in the violent North Darfur region of Sudan. (Photo by Benjamin Lowy/Getty Images)

Afghans remember life under the Taliban in 1990s Kabul, and we ask Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network about the fall and rise of the Taliban. Plus, Jane Goodall on her ground-breaking study of chimpanzees, why race riots swept northern England in 2001, the remarkable story of a boy trapped in China's Cultural Revolution, and the invention of the jet engine. Photo: Taliban gunners outside Kabul in November 1996.(Credit: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images)

When the USSR collapsed it could no longer support North Korea, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths due to starvation and malnutrition. We hear from one survivor and Prof Hazel Smith who explains some of the contributing factors behind the 'long, slow famine'. Also on the programme, the bombing of the Rainbow Warrior, why the UK sent all its gold to Canada during World War Two, battling for Roma rights and the mystery behind Cuba's blindness epidemic. All told by the people at the heart of the stories.Photo: North Korean boys at a kindergarten in Pyongyang pose for a World Food Programme Emergency Food Assistance photographer in 1997. Their thin arms and legs, knobby knees and distended abdomens show that they are seriously malnourished. (Credit: Susan North/AFP/Getty Images)