Original subtitles

The 20th century was a time

of incredible change,

(Hitler speaking foreign language)

unspeakable horrors, and amazing leaps

of scientific discovery.

It was a century marked by events

that united and divided us,

from great feats to great wars

(bombs blasting)

with advancements and setbacks

that showed us the power of many,

the power of one.

I have a dream.

A century of revolutions,

evolutions, and retributions.

He's been shot!

A century made by conflicts and crimes,

inventions and entertainment,

politics, protests, discoveries, and disasters.

Oh, the humanity!

We will count down the 101 events

of the 20th century.

Their stories form the tapestry of our history

and shape the world in which we live.

(dramatic music)

In this episode:

His point was doesn't matter if this is

the premier player in the world.

She's a woman!

Any man can beat her.

So it was silently traveling all over the globe

and it was being transmitted constantly

without us even realizing it was around.

The first Gulf War entrenched American military power

in the heart of the Middle East.

(dramatic music)

In a small town in Texas,

a shootout between a breakaway religious sect

and government authorities would end in tragedy,

shaking America's trust in their government

and making headlines around the world.

(police radio chattering)

Outside of Waco, Texas, a religious group

lived on a hilltop compound.

The Branch Davidians were a break-off group

from the Seventh Day Adventists

and they have a belief that the second coming

of Jesus Christ is imminent

and as such are very concerned with interpreting

signs and symptoms of when this second coming

is actually going to occur.

Under David Koresh, they came to be more cut off

from the rest of society

and this is when a break-off religion

tends to be regarded as a cult more than a religion.

What's he gonna preach?

(congregation speaking indistinctly)

Seven Seals.

Seven Seals.

The FBI saw Koresh as a deranged individual

whose primary business was trading weapons.

On the 28th of February 1993,

agents from the US Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms

arrived with a search warrant.

Gunfire broke out, lasting for 45 minutes,

the longest shootout in US law enforcement history.

So after the ATF arrived,

it's not 100% agreed upon what actually happened

or who fired the first shot,

whether it was that the Davidians had fired

and therefore killed an agent,

which then leads to a massive response,

or whether the ATF, indeed, had fired,

which then led to the Davidians defending themselves.

At the end of the shooting,

four ATF agents and six Branch Davidians had been killed.

Our hearts go out to these brave agents (clears throat)

who died today in the line of duty.

ATF agents withdrew

and negotiated a ceasefire via telephone.

David Koresh, pick up the phone.

Negotiators are attempting to get a hold of you.

They would like to speak with you.

The FBI arrived

and took the lead on negotiations.

A stand-off stretched out over weeks.

After discovering the group had stockpiled

at least a year's worth of supplies,

the FBI decided to tear gas the compound.

US Attorney General Janet Reno agreed to the plan

on the 18th of April with the siege now in its 51st day.

Six hours after tear gassing began,

flames erupted at three separate points in the compound.

Most of the Davidians died of smoke inhalation

after the fire began.

The investigators found 75 bodies,

including 25 children.

Five of Koresh's followers were convicted

of voluntary manslaughter and firearms violations.

Branch Davidians are not anti-government (sniffles)

we're not anti-law enforcement

and I'm sorry that there are four agents that are dead,

but we lost 85 friends and family, too.

After Reno was criticized

for authorizing tear gas,

a federal investigation was launched.

The inquiry exonerated the FBI,

attributing the deaths solely to the actions of Koresh.

Despite the findings, public confidence in the

authorities was shaken.

The massive conflagration, the huge fire

that is sort of burned into everybody's memories of Waco

meant that the ATF and law enforcement more generally

is way less gung-ho about going into a siege situation

with a cult or a group of people who are

sort of gathered around a particular movement or identity.

Waco is seen as the kind of biggest tragedy

in Law Enforcement in the United States.

(upbeat music)

The early 1970s.

Women's campaign for equal pay was extending

into the sporting arena.

It was here that one female sporting legend

would turn a gimmick match into an important stand.

(upbeat music)

In 1973, an exhibition tennis match was arranged

between two pros, one male, one female.

It was touted as finally answering the question:

Who would win the battle of the sexes?

But all over the world women were saying,

you know, we want equal pay,

we want equal conditions of work

and we want equal reward for our endeavors,

particularly in sports, where the women were

shamelessly paid less than men

regardless of how good they were.

The contenders were Bobby Riggs

on the men's side and Billie Jean King for the women.

Billie Jean King,

five times Wimbledon champion,

selects a soft easy-flowing Teddy Tinling creation,

unlike her tennis, which his hard and devastating.

This was an important match for King.

She had been part of the group of women

frustrated with the wage disparity between the sexes

who were taking action by boycotting the men's tours

for symbolic one dollar contracts to play their own tour.

Bobby Riggs was now in his mid fifties.

Despite his age, Riggs still thought he could win

without training.

When you play me you'll see shots

you've never seen before.

I mean, I'll let you know that right now.

I believe that.

Riggs was a pretty decent player.

In the 1940s he'd won a Wimbledon title,

he'd won a Davis Cup,

but I mean he was way, way past his best.

I mean, he'd retired and wasn't a serious competitor

any longer and felt that things had got out of hand

as far as he was concerned.

When I say out of hand, he felt that women

made too much progress.

He liked women to be in their natural environment.

That is, the home, in the kitchen specifically.

And he was very outspoken about this.

Riggs had won a match against world number one,

Margaret Court, just six months earlier.

His point was it doesn't matter if this is

the premier player in the world.

She's a woman.

Any man can beat her.

Any guy that can hold a tennis racket

can probably beat, smash the world's best woman player.

So he threw down the gauntlet to Billie Jean King.

Bad decision.

Billie Jean was a stalwart supporter of women's rights,

had got a brilliant record,

had won three slams the year before

the actual Battle of the Sexes.

More than 30,000 fans filled the Aerodrome,

eager to see who would be victorious.

It is also estimated that 90 million people

watched from home.

(upbeat music)

(crowd applauding)

King won convincingly.

She was at the top of her game

and had not stopped training in the lead-up to the match.

I had said before the match that I was gonna win it,

that there'd be no contest and I was wrong.

And she said that they were gonna scrape me off

the floor of the Astrodome.

They didn't quite have to do that, but almost.

King received a huge spike in sponsorship

and co-founded the Women's Players Union

and a not for profit advocacy group for female athletes.

After King's win, there was a boom in women's sport.

Even though there was a freakish feel about the event,

there was a symbolic quality to it

and by putting the guy in his place

and frankly, rubbing his nose in it,

she delivered a fantastic blow

for the feminist cause in its day.

Uh, to the Queen of Tennis.

I'll bet you my head's too big. (onlookers clapping)

(gentle music)

When Franklin D. Roosevelt

was sworn in as President of the United States in 1933,

he inherited an economy in tatters

and millions of unemployed citizens.

His response would change the American political

and social landscape for generations.

Let me assert my firm belief

that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Black Tuesday had hit Wall Street

on the 29th of October 1929.

The first in a series of economic crises

that led to financial devastation

that the 20th century wouldn't see again.

By 1933 in the grip of the Great Depression,

America's GDP had fallen by almost 29%.

Banking and credit systems were paralyzed.

Soup kitchens, unemployment queues,

and desperation were the daily challenges

for millions of Americans.

Roosevelt campaigned on a ticket of economic reform.

I pledge myself to a new deal for the American people.

(crowd cheering)

Roosevelt takes office at a moment of

unprecedented economic crisis,

the banks are failing, mass unemployment, 25%.

Farm prices are going through the floor.

And Roosevelt doesn't have the answers,

so the first thing that he sets out to do is

to restore the confidence of the people in the government.

Winning by a landslide,

Roosevelt went straight to work to make good

on his reform campaign promises.

But we are on our way.

In his first 100 days as President,

he introduced major new laws.

His work projects aimed to pull millions

of unemployed Americans back to work

by building roads, bridges, libraries,

schools, and parks all around the country.

Work that conserves the soil

and replenishes the forests.

Cultural projects were supported, too.

Roosevelt famously remarked at one point,

"Well, even artists are unemployed

"and we need to help them."

Under the Works program,

musicians, artists, writers, and actors

contribute their share to the cultural development

of the community.

For Roosevelt, the most important reform

was the Social Security Act of 1935,

creating an insurance system for the aged,

unemployed, disabled, and retired workers.

The public believes, too,

that old age security should be a function of government.

Then round about 1935, when he's been in office

for two years, he switches to a bottom-up approach,

trying to build up trade union power,

give rights at the bottom of the economic pile,

improve relief work.

Despite its ambitions,

Roosevelt's New Deal didn't end the economic depression,

but it did have lasting effects.

First and foremost, it demonstrated that

the federal government's presence in the economy

and in society was essential.

Secondly, it made the presidency the central

and driving force of the American political system.

Since Roosevelt came to office in 1933,

the throne Presidency has been a central assumption

in American politics and Americans look to

their Presidents for leadership.

So Mr. Roosevelt is renominated

and will probably be reelected.

(dramatic music)

On the second of August 1990,

the international community was shaken

when Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein

ordered his army across the border into neighboring Kuwait.

(dramatic music)

Well, the initial pretext for the invasion

on second of August 1990 was two things.

Firstly, demarcation disputes over the exact border

between Kuwait and Iraq.

The second source of contention was the

slant drilling of the Kuwaitis under the border

into Iraqi oil reserves.

Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait

and in the space of about 12 hours,

the country was completely overrun

and the Kuwaiti leadership fled.

Iraq's army was well-equipped

as the US had provided military aid

during the eight year war with Iran.

Kuwait was a major supplier of oil to the US.

The Iraqi takeover also posed an immediate threat

to Saudi Arabia, another major exporter of oil.

If Saudi Arabia fell to Saddam,

Iraq would control one fifth of the world's oil supply.

US President George HW Bush took immediate action.

At my direction, elements of the 82nd Airborne Division

are arriving today to take up defensive positions

in Saudi Arabia.

The US sought multilateral support

from the United Nations Security Council.

He sends another quarter of a million US troops,

continues drumming up support for what would eventually

become a 35 member coalition that were involved in

military actions.

After months of buildup,

President Bush issued an ultimatum to Saddam Hussein.

Leave Kuwait by the 15th of January 1991

or face a full attack by the multinational force.

When the deadline passed, the operation initially called

Desert Shield became Desert Storm.

(dramatic music)

(bomb blasting)

US bombing raids were followed by a swift ground war.

(tank cannon blasting)

It took Allied ground troops only 100 hours

to declare Kuwait liberated.

America and the world drew a line in the sand

and tonight, America and the world have kept their word.

The environmental and economic damage

to the ravaged Kuwait was devastating.

It was the world's first live televised war.

Americans saw footage from cameras placed on smart bombs

as they struck their rocky targets.

The brevity of the action was a boost to US morale,

reinforcing its status as

the world's leading super power.

The first Gulf War entrenched American military power

in the heart of the Middle East.

All of that would be extremely important

in terms of the United States's capacity

to project itself militarily in the region

and protect and enhance the flow of petroleum products.

After perhaps unparalleled international

consultation, it became necessary to take this action.

The swift US victory of Operation Desert Storm

unsettled the political balance in the Middle East

in ways that remain dangerous and unresolved

into the 21st century.

(gentle music)

Humans have been modifying crops and livestock

for tens of thousands of years

to improve crop quality and make produce more resistant

to adverse events and reap more bountiful harvests.

But it was in the 20th century that crop modification

entered a completely new area.

(dramatic music)

The 1935 discovery of DNA, the building blocks of life,

was a major step towards the creation

of genetically modified crops.

The first is probably the discover of restriction enzymes

that enabled us to cut up the DNA of organisms

into gene sized pieces.

The second one would be the ability to clone those genes

up into large copies.

And the third one the ability to introduce them

using a vector into the recipient organism.

In the case of plants, through an organism

called Agrobacterium, which naturally infects the plant

and inserts its own DNA into the plant genome.

We are able to use that to carry a particular gene

into the genome.

Despite its great significance

in the agricultural sector, some of the earliest GMO patents

were not related to farming.

The Exxon Oil Company was awarded a patent in 1982

that allowed them to develop an oil-eating microorganism

to be used in oil spills.

The first agricultural GM patent was an antibiotic

resistant tobacco plant produced in 1983.

Opportunities were now opening up to create seed strains

resistant to drought, disease, and pests.

Scientists insert the genes into soybeans,

ultimately creating what would become

the most common GMO, herbicide resistant soybeans.

Throughout the 1980s and '90s, other GMO seeds followed

for potatoes, cotton, rice, sugar cane, and tomatoes.

One of the first ones would have been

the Flavr Savr tomato, which was developed by Calgene

in the United States.

There the goal was to produce a later ripening tomato

and that was done by introduction of a foreign gene.

The Flavr Savr tomato arrived

on US grocery shelves in 1994 after being approved

by the Food and Drug Administration in May of that year.

Genetic modification delayed its ripening mechanism,

giving it a longer shelf life.

It was not a commercial success.

That was in the time of very much uncertain

consumer reaction to genetically engineered products.

Almost as soon as the GMO products

became available in supermarkets and grocery stores,

public concerns were growing about their health effects,

including increased allergies and resistance to antibiotics.

We think that is very dangerous

for the environment problem,

also for the farmers all over the world

and also for the health of everybody.

So it's not so much the technology

which is the risky aspect.

In fact, many scientific communities have found

that the technology does not represent a greater risk

than a conventional breeding.

It's important to focus on what gene is introduced

into the plant and what characteristic

that confers on the plant.

Despite concerns, GMO food crops

have become widespread by the end of the 20th century.

And with the planet's growing population,

it seems that GMO food crops are

set to be the way of the future.

Farms like Gary Adam's spread

outside Fairfield, Iowa, are planted with

genetically modified crops.

Like the tractor, GM seeds are viewed by Gary Adam

and many US farmers as another technological tool

to help them get the most out of their land.

In the next 15 years we'll have another billion people

in that period.

It's just not going to be fast enough

to improve our agriculture to keep up with that demand.

So it really opens up the range of techniques

that breeders can use, the extent of variation

they can take from nature to improve

the crop plants that we use as staples for our food.

(gentle music)

[Narrator] He was an emotional artist

who explored his personal world through his painting.

His work defined a movement,

his influence defined by a painting

that shocked and inspired the art world.

(gentle music)

Spanish painter Pablo Picasso first came to Paris in 1901.

It was here that he would release

some of his most influential work.

In 1907, he produced a provocative piece

depicting prostitutes from a Paris brothel he frequented.

This was "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon,"

a groundbreaking painting and the culmination

of Picasso's emotional and artistic influences at the time.

His relationship with his longtime model and lover,

Fernande Olivier, had just ended.

His idol, the influential painter Cezanne, had died.

Picasso sought to memorialize Cezanne's techniques

and show his own artistic rivals what he could do.

One can really get the sense of where Picasso

is coming from.

Here we think we have five images of women,

but in fact what we have is one woman shown

in five different perspectives.

Picasso wants to show everything.

He's hungry for everything.

He doesn't want to show you the woman from face on,

he wants to show every single aspect of her.

The controversial work is regarded

as one of the first expressions of the movement

known as Cubism.

Cubism is a very interesting movement.

As everyone knows, Picasso can be difficult.

But people in the money want his work.

Here's "Still Life with a Candle" to take an easier example.

Picasso is trying to get to the

absolute essence of reality

and to understand how he's doing this

when it seems such an extraordinary image,

the object has melted away.

It has no substance.

The colors are reduced to grays and browns.

What's recognizable about it?

How can we see this as reality?

Picasso's legacy stretches

all the way to the present.

His signature can be found in conceptual art

and performance art, both of which aim

to give objects and people new meaning.

No longer the tradition of rendering something

in a naturalistic manner,

but in a way where there are multiple perspectives

and multiple things that can happen at once.

On the day "Les Demoiselles D'Avignon"

first exhibited, Picasso opened a new world

understood by a new way of thinking.

His work and legacy was revolutionary,

connecting art with mind and influencing artists

for generations to come.

(dramatic music)

We have been to the moon,

but the vast reaches of space still lay beyond our reach.

This changed with the launch of a telescope

that could reveal the wonders of our universe.

The moon is our nearest neighbor

and the telescope shows it to be a very mountainous body.

Space telescopes weren't a new invention in the space age

and it was really a way to solve the problems

that we have on Earth.

So the Earth's atmosphere blocks lots of colors of light,

so we are very limited what we can see with our eyes

and there's a lot more to discover.

The Hubble Telescope was launched in 1990

to see further than land based telescopes,

measure distances to far off galaxies,

and take pictures of what it saw.

Where scientists have had to rely

on sometimes ill-defined photographs of deep space,

there will now be high resolution images.

The new telescope would not be affected

by the blur of the Earth's atmosphere

and it would see all types of rays

that were normally blocked.

The Hubble Space Telescope,

powered by two huge solar panels,

will be able to detect objects so far away

that they'll be seen as they were 15 billion years ago.

Once the launch mission was completed,

the images were disappointing.

It was not until it had been installed

in an orbit around the Earth

that the engineers saw the problem.

How is this multi-billion, yes, billion dollar instrument,

having kind of terrible images?

And they realized that they actually polished the mirror

too much and so a rigorous and

a huge effort of engineers, scientists, astronomers

for a year was planned to build something

to change the mirror, what we COSTAR.

And that was a correction, a series of little lenses

to correct for the image.

The repair mission also proved

that the telescope could be fixed and modified

while in space.

Over the years there would be several other repair missions.

The telescope, named after Edwin Hubble

for his pioneering work in proving the universe is expanding

and for discovering galaxies beyond our own,

took 70 years to go from an idea to reality

and now every day it sends Earth new material.

Its time in space has given the world spectacular images.

The telescope also provided the inspiration

and information for 15,000 scientific papers

in multiple areas of research.

The knowledge gained by the use of the telescope

is astounding, dramatically increasing the possibilities

of space exploration.

The Hubble Space Telescope has changed our understanding

of every part of space and astronomy.

It's discovered the universe was accelerating.

It's measured the most accurate measurements

of how fast the universe was growing

and then did it again.

It's discovered that there's billions

and trillions of galaxies.

It found that black holes and active black holes

can actually shoot things to it.

It's discovered distant quasars and gamma ray bursts.

It literally has done everything,

every discovery that we think about

in modern day astronomy has data

from the Hubble Space Telescope.

Eventually the viewing days

of Hubble will expire and it will fall back

through the atmosphere to be replaced by a new telescope

that will continue its exploratory work,

contributing to humankind's understanding

of our own world and beyond.

(dramatic music)

In the second half of the 20th century,

a confluence of events would inflame long held differences,

sparking years of bloodshed and violence in Lebanon.

The damage is not confined

to material objects.

Lebanon's political mold has been shattered, too.

(tense music)

Lebanon, who had received its independence

from France in 1943, initially thrived

despite its religiously sensitive environment.

Lebanon's a complex, multi-religious society.

It has 18 recognized ethno-religious communities

that were recognized in the National Pact of 1943,

which established the ground rules, if you will,

for the formation of Lebanon as an independent country

and the power-sharing relationship

between those 18 recognized religious communities.

By 1975, the best attempts to combine

the groups deteriorated into an exchange of bullets.

(gun fires)

Like all civil wars, they don't just start.

The antecedent conditions were there

for the Lebanese Civil War in the lead up to 1975,

when it formally started.

The common spark that's often identified

was a massacre of a busload of Palestinians

by Phalangist militiamen.

But of course, the Phalangists would argue

that it was retribution for the shooting

of two prominent members of the Christian community

coming outside from the church.

We are ready for a long war.

If the war will take one year, two years,

three years, we are ready to fight.

15 years fighting followed the two attacks.

Religious conflict boiling over between

the many Christian and Muslim sects.

There the Christians began the present round

of fighting last April.

Their war is basically a defensive one.

It was hard for the Maronite Christians,

Shia Muslims, and Sunni Muslims of the previous

French-held country to reconcile

despite each religious group holding one of

three main parliamentary roles:

Prime Minister, President, and Parliamentary Speaker.

The policy would have to make room for change, however,

as masses of Christians fled the country,

leaving them without a president for a full year.

Both Syrian and Israeli armies became involved in the war

and stayed for the duration,

holding their positions until the early 2000s.

Peace attempts failed and wars continued,

religious factions fighting within themselves.

The Civil War was not a single conflict,

but many clashes of larger groups dividing into small ones

that turned on each other.

Finally, the Syrian Army stormed the Presidential Palace

at Baabda late in 1990, ending the fighting,

but not the issue that led to it.

Unrest had lessened, but not disappeared.

The years of strife and the time that followed it

remained an impediment to religious cooperation.

Even if the present crisis is overcome,

the prospects for a united and peaceful Lebanon

appear bleak.

The long lasting effects on Lebanon,

not least 150,000 dead and more than 70,000 disappeared

and then about a fifth or a million people emigrated

from the country.

So yes, a mass emigration.

And this, of course, also changed the demographics

of the country.

(dramatic music)

For centuries traders sought a faster way

to move goods and people between

the east and west coasts of America.

(explosion blasts)

A problem solved by an unparalleled feat of engineering,

one that took 20th century technology to achieve.

(dramatic music)

The French tried to build a canal through

the Central American nation of Panama in the 1880s,

but they had been prevented by a lack of technology

and the spread of disease amongst the workers.

A few decades later, the United States

took up the challenge.

The United States was starting to see itself

for the first time, really, as a global power.

From the point of view of commerce,

they wanted to actually get a faster way

to get goods from the east of America

to the east of the world.

(train chugging)

In 1904, construction resumes

with the builders facing the same challenges

that had defeated the French.

They had a very difficult environment to work in

and, in a sense, the difficulty was about really

a swelling river that they'd have to deal with.

Because once they started to cut,

the river, as it would actually swell with the rains,

it would actually start to remove most of the soil.

So they were getting a lot of landslides

they had to deal with.

A year passed following the same route

until a new chief engineer took over.

Under railroad specialist John Stevens,

the design was changed from a sea level canal

to a lock system to improve progress

and make the plan more viable.

However, the scale of the task remained daunting.

Well, if you could imagine about an eight mile long gap

that had to actually be excavated to about a hundred meters,

that was some challenge.

You then actually have up to 40,000 people

trying to actually house them to create

these almost instant villages and that gives you

some of the scale in terms of maybe what had to be done.

The project took 10 years to complete

and has become one of the seven wonders of the modern world.

Uncle Sam moves his fleet

from the Pacific to the Atlantic,

the greatest peacetime movement in naval history.

It cuts thousands of miles

from the trip around South America,

significantly improving communications between countries

on either side of the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean.

The structure is also a feat of political

and international cooperation.

It was done often against huge political odds

with a lot of political interference.

It was a multinational operation under quite sharp

military discipline.

Strategically, the canal

still has importance.

The Defense Department says it's needed

for quick transfer and resupply of US forces.

For America this at the at time was like

sending a man to the moon.

It was an immense achievement.

Today the canal is used

by at least 25 countries,

a feat of human determination and ingenuity

that continues to play an important role in globalization,

shortening sea voyages, and expanding global trade routes

that link countries and continents.

(dramatic music)

By the 1970s, the developed world,

especially the United States,

was increasingly dependent on oil.

American production could not keep pace

with American consumption,

a disparity that would soon be used against them.

(dramatic music)

Many oil producing countries were members

of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries,

or OPEC, founded in 1960.

When the Yom Kippur War began on the 6th of October 1973,

Arab members of OPEC sought to punish countries

that supported Israel in the conflict.

So the 1973 oil crisis was initiated by the Arab states

in OPEC to voice their collective displeasure

at support for Israel during the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

So they were very specific in their embargo,

it was against the United States, the UK,

Netherlands, and Japan.

And they also implemented a price raise

for the rest of the world.

When the Israelis accept to withdraw

from the occupied territories and the US government

guarantees their decision, then immediately we can

lift the embargo.

Though Arab-Israeli hostilities ended

on October 22nd, the embargo continued.

Prices rose quickly from $3 to $12 per barrel

within three months of the embargo

and prices at the pump doubled,

causing outrage and protests from truck drivers

and nationwide restrictions in the US

and across Europe and elsewhere.

America's energy demands have grown so rapidly

that they now outstrip our energy supplies.

As a result, we face the possibility of

temporary fuel shortages and some increases

in fuel prices in America.

Fuel was rationed.

In some cases, petrol stations closed on Sundays

and in others, cars could only fuel up on certain days.

The US had never conceived of oil as a weapon.

It was always a commodity, the basis of the global economy,

everyone needed affordable oil

to keep everyone's economy going.

So this was quite a shock.

In Britain, the public was encouraged

to heat only one room in their house.

In the States, Oregon banned Christmas lights.

The national speed limit was reduced to 55 miles per hour

to avoid excess fuel consumption.

And Daylight Saving came into effect year round.

The impact of surging oil prices forced a major downturn

in the US economy.

The US dollar dropped and that meant overseas producers,

who had set their price in US dollars

were faced with diminishing returns.

America's automobile industry,

which had been making big cars that relied on a lot of fuel,

suffered as Japan's smaller, more oil efficient vehicles

gained in favor.

The oil crisis established a new power center

for fuel pricing and control of supply.

Its immediate effect was to drive up prices,

its longer term effects being far more diverse.

So it really drove investments into renewables,

into wind, into solar.

This is the first time that you see in the US

the environmental conservation movement in sync

with national security requirements,

so it was quite interesting at the time

to have these two camps on the same side.

Although much of the world had been

caught by surprise and had realized their vulnerability,

the 1973 oil crisis opened pathways

that were previously thought uneconomical

and paved the way for renewable energy,

energy efficiency, and exploration of new oil reserves.

(gentle music)

A transfer of sovereignty that was 15 years in the making,

ending 156 years of colonial rule

and signaling the rise of a new economic superpower.

(gentle music)

Known as the Pearl of the Orient,

Hong Kong Island was first ceded by China

after the First Opium War in 1842.

What the British did was that they took over

what was known as an island,

which not many people living there,

mostly a fishing village.

Even the British saw it as this barren rock,

but they took over and claimed it

and in 1842 when the peace treaty is signed,

the Treaty of Nanking, among other things,

declared that Hong Kong was now part

of the British Empire.

Political upheavals in mainland China,

first in 1911 and then in 1950, contributed to its

increasing population and growing economy.

Talks between Britain and China began in 1982

and Beijing insisted that ownership of Hong Kong

was non-negotiable, demanding its return

along with the new territories.

Perhaps naively, Margaret Thatcher, who of course,

was no fan of the Chinese Communist Party

suggested that perhaps a lease could be renewed,

that perhaps it was in the interest of China

that Hong Kong should remain under the rule of the British

to continue its thriving economic development.

That of course laid bare a very naive understanding

of the British of what Hong Kong really meant for China.

For the Chinese, Hong Kong was a symbol of humiliation.

Not only was it a symbol of humiliation,

it was part of that unfinished mission

that China had to be unified under the rule

of the Chinese Communist Party.

China has put out an information film

about Hong Kong emphasizing the overcrowding

and the hectic pace of life there.

But China has agreed that the Western lifestyle of Hong Kong

will remain unchanged for 50 years

after its return to the mainland.

Deng Xiaoping's one country, two systems policy

allowed Hong Kong's capitalist economy

to sit alongside China's communist state.

An agreement was reached for Hong Kong to be

formally returned to China on the first of July 1997.

The British Prime Minister,

Margaret Thatcher, exchanged the final documents

in December with the Chinese Prime Minister, Zhao Ziyang.

Despite the pledges of the Chinese government,

concerns grew after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre

in Beijing.

Regardless, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

remained committed to the joint declaration.

So the fact that we still had a British colony

in Hong Kong up until 1997,

is a good example of how colonialism still exists in Asia

up until that period.

And again, a stark reminder of how

something that we would have thought was

very much part of the past

was still part of everyday life in China

or at least in Hong Kong up until

the end of the 20th century.

The 30th of June 1997 marked

the last day of British rule.

The handover officially began at 11:30 p.m.

Britain is part of Hong Kong's history

and Hong Kong is part of Britain's history.

We are also part of each other's future.

We are confident that the ties between us

will not only endure, but will continue to develop.

Minutes before midnight,

the British national flag and the Hong Kong colonial flag

were lowered, officially ending British colonial rule

in the city of nearly 6.5 million people.

(gentle music)

A kidnapping that dominated the headlines,

a baby taken from his celebrity parents' mansion,

a tragedy that fame and fortune could not prevent.

(dramatic music)

In 1927, Charles Lindburgh shot to international stardom

as the first man to fly nonstop across the Atlantic.

First solo transatlantic flight.

It took him 33 hours.

(crowd cheering)

Back home once more, he received a hero's welcome

in New York.

It was crowds and cheering all the way.

(crowd cheering)

In the late 1920s, early '30s,

Charles Lindburgh was as big a global celebrity

as you can imagine.

But fame was no protection

when his first child, Charles Junior, the Eaglet,

disappeared from his New Jersey estate.

It was from this house at Hopewell,

New Jersey, Colonel Lindburgh's home,

that the kidnapping of his baby son

that shocked the world in March of 1932 took place.

A crudely written ransom note

demanding $50,000 was found on the window ledge

of the baby's room with a folding ladder propped outside.

New Jersey state police assumed charge

of the investigation, which was severely hampered

by Lindburgh's determination to negotiate

with the kidnappers and by the surrounding media storm.

The 1930s was the era when the mass media

had really come into its own.

The Lindburgh case was very serious news.

I mean, it dominated the headlines

all over the United States and later across the world.

It was a long drawn out event,

this whole kidnapping saga.

H.L. Mencken, who was a famous journalist of the day,

said that the kidnapping trial

was a bigger story than the resurrection.

A ransom of $50,000 was paid

by an intermediary, but the baby wasn't returned.

The hunt continued until May,

where a truck driver discovered partially buried remains

in a wood only a few miles from the Lindburgh mansion.

I am the guy that found Lindburgh's baby.

A medical examination revealed

the baby had died from a blow to the head

two months earlier at the time of his disappearance.

With the baby's death, the only course remaining

was to find the culprit.

A breakthrough came after a gold certificate,

which had made up part of the ransom,

was traced back to a gas station

where a suspicious attendant took note

of the customer's license plate number.

Police followed the lead to Bruno Richard Hauptmann,

who was arrested and the subsequent trial of the century

began on the second of January 1935.

It lasted for five weeks.

The jury found Hauptmann guilty of first degree murder

and sentenced him to death.

As a direct consequence of the case,

in June 1932, the US Congress passed the Lindburgh Law,

making kidnapping across state lines a federal felony.

Interest in the case lasted for decades.

In the broader sweep of the 20th century,

I think probably it's best seen as a media event,

as an early form of celebrity politics,

celebrity justice, and media politics

fed by radio, which of course, created exactly the same

sort of event concentration and publicity

and hysteria that later celebrity trials

such as OJ Simpson generated 50 years later.

(gavel banging)

Decades later, questions remain

and one family's tragedy has been enshrined in history

as the crime of the 20th century.

(dramatic music)

(gentle music)

Medical discoveries of the 20th century

had eradicated some of humanity's worst diseases

until a newly discovered virus exploded

into the world's population, devastating lives

and communities.

He was 37 years old in 1986.

Tens of thousands of families around the world.

(dramatic music)

In the 1980s unusual disease symptoms

were being reported in the United States and Africa.

It'll probably never be known for sure

when, how, and where HIV was transmitted into humans,

but the most plausible and reasonable theory

is called the natural selection theory

or the bushmeat theory and that's that in Central Africa

people who were hunting monkeys and chimpanzees for food

were out searching for their food

and they came across a monkey that had SIV.

So that's Simian Immunodeficiency Virus.

And somewhere within that hunting,

that virus jumped from simian version into a human.

By the early '80s,

Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, or AIDS,

had become a known infection in the United States.

The conditions stemmed from the HIV virus,

which attacked a person's immune system.

So what HIV does is killing us softly.

So it makes the human body and our immune system

unable to battle things that normally

we would be able to flick off at a moment's notice.

It was not until 1985,

when technology advanced, that screening was available

for the disease.

The National Cancer Institute of America

announced that they had isolated the

Human Immunodeficiency Virus.

They had been working with the Parisian Pasteur Institute

to put a name to the frightening epidemic

that was effecting the world

and would hopefully bring a cure.

It was silently traveling all over the globe

and it was being transmitted constantly,

without us even realizing it was around.

Estimates are that about 300,000 people had HIV

somewhere all over the globe at the start of the '80s.

The original at-risk categories

included drug users, homosexual men, hemophiliacs,

and people of Haitian origin.

When it was first described in the US

in the start of the '80s, it was said to be a new

infection of gay men, which it wasn't.

So it not only was discrimination about this

terrifying new deadly virus,

that is coupled with the discrimination that comes

of homophobia that was rife

and you bring them together and that meant

that there was this really delayed response to HIV research.

I am deathly afraid of AIDS disease.

Anybody that says they're not afraid of AIDS

is a fool or a liar.

The modern plague continued to spread.

By 1995, it had become the leading cause of death

for ages 25 to 44 in America.

Death numbers were in the tens of thousands per year

and fear characterized the public response.

Because of the fear and ignorance

about AIDS, the boys have become outcasts,

shunned in their own hometown.

They see us go back their church when they was out here

and it's just like they just turn their head

like we never exist.

In 1996, a cocktail of drug therapies

reached the market which slowed the disease

and halved the annual death rate.

So in the mid-90s, they changed the way

that we were treating HIV and started doing

multi-drug approaches and that can really help knock out

all different mutations and strains of the HIV virus,

to really keep it at bay, keep your immune system healthy

so that it doesn't then develop into AIDS.

With increased knowledge and collaboration

to fight against AIDS, prevention of it spread,

and work towards eradication of the deadly virus

now occupies researchers around the world.

(dramatic music)

(upbeat music)