21 episodes · 23rd January 1991
Historians and archaeologists have started to reassess some of the ingrained myths of American history. American Indians lived in sophisticated societies, and many more died as a result of the European settlement of North America than has so far been imagined. Andrew Sachs narrates the story of how Puritan prejudices helped to generate false views of Indians.
Every year the Sioux nation of South Dakota pays homage to more than 300 unarmed Indians killed by US troops on 29 December 1890. For the survivors and their descendants, it was the beginning of a deliberate and systematic process to destroy their way of life. One hundred years after those events, witnesses recall the terrible emotional scars caused by the US government's disastrous attempts to Europeanise the American Indian.
The assassination a year ago of Dr Gerald Bull prevented Saddam Hussein from acquiring a 'supergun'. Bull designed the world's best howitzers, many bought by Iraq, but the supergun remained his lifelong ambition. David Taylor chronicles how the Canadian scientist who plundered the lost secrets of Nazi terror weapons became the victim of his own obsession.
In 1934, Robert Robinson, a young black car worker from Detroit, was blacklisted by America after renewing a short-term contract from the Russians to work in the First State Ball Bearing Plant in Moscow. During his enforced 44 years inside the Soviet Union, Robinson was coerced to work alongside Stalin on the Moscow Soviet and ultimately to take citizenship. He finally succeeded in escaping while on a visit to Uganda. Now 84 and living in Washington, DC, Robert Robinson recounts his extraordinary life and observations of the Soviet Union during a crucial period in its history.
A death ray to combat the Antichrist; the effectiveness of astrology; the bizarre sexual practices of the Brahmins; and the impossibility of a society whose sole aim is money and gain. These are some of the ideas which the eccentric medieval scholar Roger Bacon wanted to transmit to the Pope when he wrote to him in 1268. It is a work which gives us a glimpse of the strange and compelling mental landscape of the Middle Ages.
For the last three years Palestinians have been involved in an Intifada against the Israeli occupation of their homeland; 50 years ago the British administration in Palestine was faced with an armed Arab rebellion which was suppressed with a brutality as severe as that employed by the Israelis today. The aftermath of the first Intifada is still seen by many Palestinians as contributing directly to the problems of the Middle East.
In 1945 Britain, America and the USSR were allies against Hitler; less than a year later Winston Churchill condemned Soviet expansionism. With east-west relations once again at a crossroads, Dr Christopher Andrew examines the origins of mutual distrust which was at the heart of the Cold War.
The story of how Britain abandoned Spain's democratically elected government during the Spanish Civil War of 1936 and gave clandestine support to the nationalists and General Franco. Remarkable new evidence discovered in Spanish archives shows that Britain used all its economic and diplomatic cunning to safeguard its political and commercial interests in Spain by ensuring victory for General Franco's forces. NEW SEASON.
Charles Darwin lived in fear of disgrace because of his views. He believed that humans were just a better sort of ape, that we evolved from worms. These were shattering ideas, especially from a man trained for the Church. Using new research, historians Adrian Desmond and James Moore see Darwin not as the far-sighted hero of the Beagle voyage, but as a privileged Victorian with everything to lose by publishing the heretical views he developed in survival-of-the-fittest London. Wracked with worry, Darwin was sick for most of the 20 years it took him to pluck up courage to tell the world his brutal theory of natural selection.
Was Columbus really the first to discover America? Five hundred years ago three ships sailed from Spain on the most famous voyage in history - west, west and always west across the unknown ocean. But now a modern Spanish ship's officer and a journalist have re-created that momentous voyage to test their astonishing theory that Columbus not only knew where he was going but also what he would find in the not-so-New World.
In the first of two programmes about the First World War, German writer Ludwig Harig makes a pilgrimage to the Somme, hoping to understand why his father was unable to speak about the war. Archive film and the moving testimony of witnesses evoke the realities of life behind the Front. And in France, he finds a generation still haunted by their memories.
The letters between military surgeon Georges Duhamel and his wife Blanche lay forgotten in a family attic for 75 years. Recently rediscovered, they reveal a poignant love story set against the backdrop of the First World War. In 1914, Blanche Duhamel moved to the frontline capital at Amiens, from where the lights of the trenches were visible, in order to be closer to her husband. Previously unseen film footage shows how business and pleasure continued alongside scenes of suffering as British and colonial troops came and went from the city.
In the 1830s a pioneering social investigation into child labour uncovered an appalling picture of deprivation, poverty and remorseless physical exploitation throughout Britain and sparked off a fierce debate between Victorian capitalists and reformers. Timewatch has drawn upon the testimonies of the children involved for this dramatised account.
During the Second World War, the Nazis took many art treasures for "care and safe-keeping", including the priceless collection of French Impressionist paintings built up by the industrialist Friedrich Carl Siemens in 1930s Berlin - among them works by Manet, Monet, Degas and Cezanne. At the end of the war, when the Americans and the Russians reached Berlin, these treasures went missing and have not been seen since. Timewatch goes in search of the missing treasures and unravels an extraordinary story of official looting.
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