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Abolishing the army

Costa Rica dissolved its Armed Forces after a brief civil war in 1948

• 9 mins

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Maya Angelou's iconic memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, was published in 1969

• 9 mins

The man who made Marilyn Monroe dance

Choreographer Jack Cole had a huge influence on musical theatre and Hollywood films

• 9 mins

The Amritsar Massacre of 1919

In April 1919 British Indian troops opened fire on protestors in the city of Amritsar

• 9 mins

The man who invented wingsuits

The wingsuit is the ultimate in extreme sports clothing, for BASE jumpers and skydivers

• 9 mins

The rise of Hindu nationalism

The consolidation of the BJP as one of the major powers in Indian politics.

• 9 mins

Chinese restaurant syndrome

In the 1960's American diners began to worry that Chinese food was making them ill.

• 9 mins

Dennis Tito - the first space tourist

In April 2001 an American multi-millionaire paid Russia to send him into space

• 9 mins

The first play on Broadway written by a black woman

'A Raisin in the Sun' by Lorraine Hansberry had an almost exclusively black cast too.

• 9 mins

Auto-destructive art

Gustav Metzger and the birth of the radical new art form in the 1960s

• 9 mins

How organic farming started

Worries about the industrialisation of farming post-WW2 led some farmers to go organic.

• 8 mins

The Columbine massacre

13 people were killed and more than 20 injured in the school shooting on April 20th 1999

• 8 mins

Nato bombs Serbian TV

A survivor from the April 1999 bombing in Belgrade that killed 16 people.

• 9 mins

Britain's first vegans

The Vegan Society was established in 1944 by British 'non-dairy vegetarians'

• 9 mins

South Africa's first free elections

After Apartheid all South Africans regardless of race finally won the right to vote.

• 10 mins

Sri Lanka: A journalist's editorial from the grave

The assassination of newspaper editor, Lasantha Wickramatunga, in 2009 shocked the world

• 10 mins

The al-Yamamah arms deals

A record series of arms sales by the UK to Saudi Arabia began in the 1980s

• 9 mins

Ellen comes out

Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian on primetime American television in April 1997.

• 9 mins

Rupert Brooke

The English poet whose death at the start of World War One was mourned by millions

• 9 mins

The Arctic African

Why a boy ran away from West Africa to live in the Arctic in the 1960s.

• 9 mins

The sinking of the Belgrano

The Argentine ship was sunk by a British submarine during the Falklands war

• 9 mins

The Malayan Emergency

The struggle against a Communist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950s

• 9 mins

Jack Ma: The founder of Alibaba

The Chinese billionaire set up his online shopping site in 1999

• 9 mins

The siege of Dien Bien Phu

The French surrender at the siege of Dien Bien Phu ended their colonial rule of Vietnam

• 9 mins

The Bauhaus

The groundbreaking school of art and design was founded in 1919

• 9 mins

The war on drugs

The first 'war on drugs' was launched by US President Richard Nixon in 1971.

• 9 mins

Strictly Come Dancing

One of the most successful TV formats in the world started back in May 2004

• 9 mins

The Karakoram highway

The road between Pakistan and China took 20 years to complete

• 9 mins

Predicting the financial crash

The economists who predicted the 2008 financial crash but whose warnings were ignored

• 9 mins

The final days of Sri Lanka's civil war

How the army finally crushed Tamil Tiger rebels after 25 years of bloody civil war

• 9 mins