Original subtitles

The 20th century was a time

of incredible change.

(speaking in 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.

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,

We've been trapped.

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 story's form the tapestry of our history

and shape the world in which we live.

(dramatic music)

In this episode.

For Jews, it was the first time in over 2,000 years

that they had known sovereignty

as their own people living in their own land.

It was inevitable with these large numbers

of Japanese troops being stationed

and garrisoned around Beijing,

there was going to be some kind of a clash.

People's habits were changing.

We didn't go out so much.

We stayed at home

because we like the entertainment delivered to us.

(gentle music)

Introduced to the world as a shy 18-year old

about to marry the heir to the British throne,

she was loved by the people

and hounded by the media in life and in death.

The press first noticed Diana during a visit

to the royal family's Balmoral estate,

a shy kindergarten teacher's assistant.

Catching the eye of the world's, most eligible bachelor

seemed to be a fairy tale come true.

The marriage service is planned

for St. Paul's Cathedral on the29th of July, 1981.

When Her Majesty's subjects everywhere will join

in wishing Lady Diana and the Prince of Wales

every happiness in the years ahead.

Taking up royal duties, Diana became famous

for her charity work with AIDs victims,

children with leukemia and for the removal of landmines.

I think she was undoubtedly somebody who was charismatic.

But she also had a very considerable ability

to make you feel that she was genuinely interested

in you and she caught people's imagination.

But while Diana was beloved

by the general public,

her marriage to Charles was increasingly strained.

After their separation, each tried to win public favor,

intermediaries, giving competing accounts to newspapers.

A paparazzi pursuit turned into tragedy as Diana

and her companion, Dodi Fayed,

attempted to evade the photographers,

on the night of the 31st of August 1997.

(dramatic music)

Just after midnight, the car carrying the peer

into the tunnel near the River Seine at high speed,

crashing into a pillar.

Dodi Fayed, and the car's driver died at the scene.

Diana died a few hours later at a nearby hospital.

She was 36.

When Britain awoke to the news,

the nation's outpouring of grief was unprecedented.

It was felt to be so unnecessary, so easily avoidable

and because she was so young, so beautiful,

her death seemed the more tragic because it was felt

that she had so many years more to go.

In the days and weeks that followed,

hundreds of thousands of mourners signed a book

of condolence and lay flowers outside Kensington Palace.

The queen and other members of the royal family were

heavily criticized for remaining in Balmoral

and not joining the nation in shared grief.

We have all been trying in our different ways to cope.

It is not easy to express the sense of loss,

since the initial shock is often succeeded

by a mixture of other feelings.

I don't think she understood initially

just how huge that death was in terms of public impact,

and for her, her priority was her two dearly loved grandsons

who just lost they're equally dearly loved mother.

And I think she was very clearly distraught for them

and focused on that.

Diana's funeral, held at Westminster Abbey

on the 6th of September, was attended by 2,000 people,

with an estimated 2 1/2 billion people

worldwide watching on television.

20 years after her death, Diana's image is still one

of the most recognized in the world.

And her memory, one of the most cherished.

(gentle music)

A grand new ship on its maiden voyage.

A fateful night at sea,

with conditions that were ripe for disaster,

a tragedy that would shock the world.

In its day,

Titanic was the world's, largest man-made object,

dubbed unsinkable by the international press.

And on this her maiden voyage,

she was unsurpassed and unsinkable.

I'm absolutely certain that the designers

and builders of Titanic would never, ever have described

her as unsinkable.

No ship is unsinkable even today.

Titanic was ready for her maiden voyage

on the 10th of April.

She carried 2,223 people.

It was a very wide range of passengers onboard Titanic

on her maiden voyage.

In first class of course there were many multi millionaires

and rich people, people connected with the White Star Line.

Second class were the more ordinary transatlantic passengers

and in third class or steerage of course

they were migrant passengers traveling

from Europe to start a new life in America.

Four days into the voyage,

Captain Edward Smith received reports of icebergs

but maintained speed at around 21 knots,

just under top speed.

It was an unusual night on the North Atlantic.

It was perfectly still and calm.

It was so calm that the seas were even reflecting starlight

and that made it very hard to see icebergs or ice sheets

ahead of the ship.

At 11:40 p.m. on the 14th of April,

a crewman stationed on the lookout,

spotted an object directly ahead.

The first officer ordered the ships helm

to be turned hard to avoid a collision.

But a submerged iceberg spar punctured her side,

letting in water.

Titanic might have survived

if only the first four compartments

of the ship had been breached

but six compartments had been breached

and it was inevitable therefore,

from the very moment of that collision,

the Titanic would sink.

Within an hour, lifeboats were launched,

but almost half of the available seats were empty.

The seas were calm.

It was the most perfect conditions

apart from the intense cold for the evacuation of the ship.

Titanic carried 3,500 life belts

and 48 life rings.

But given the extreme cold of the water,

the majority of those in the sea froze to death

before rescue arrived.

Titanic's distress signal was picked up by the Carpathia,

which arrived two hours after the ship sunk.

Survivors were taken to New York.

Only 703 people survived.

News of the disaster was transmitted around the world.

Titanic was the biggest passenger ship in the world.

Size meant everything to people's perception of safety.

People's faith in large ships was diminished greatly

by that particular event.

And it's never been forgotten.

It was in many ways, a pivotal event in the design,

of passenger ships and the systems

which governed safety of life at sea.

Titanic's final resting place

remained a mystery, until September 1985.

The joint French-American expedition located the wreck.

And for the first time in 73 years,

the world saw the final resting place

of the mighty but tragic Titanic.

(gentle music)

(men shouting)

By 1931, Japan had successfully expanded

their empire into Korea, Taiwan

and the northeastern Chinese region of Manchuria.

Then, in 1937, Japan would turn their sights

to the rest of China.

It's worse than frayed tempers

in China, it's war.

The Lugouqiao Bridge, southwest of Beijing,

was described in his journals by Marco Polo.

History knows it as the Marco Polo bridge.

An incident there brought the two countries into conflict.

The pretext was basically

that the Japanese had already established

with their right to rule over the northeast of China.

They had been making moves into Wanping

and the area around Beijing for many months,

and been putting more, more restrictions

on the nationalist government.

Chinese nationals was rising, so it was inevitable

with these large numbers

of Japanese troops being stationed

and garrisoned around Beijing,

there was going to be some kind of a clash.

Japanese forces demanded entry into the nearby town

of Wanping to search for one of their own was missing.

They were refused, and shots were fired,

beginning a conflict that lasted eight years.

(engines droning)

China, you could argue, needed another 10 years

before they were ready to fight

this highly mechanized Japanese army.

Don't forget also that there was a Japanese Navy

which they had to go toe to toe with

and the Japanese Air Force.

So ultimately it was too much pressure for them.

They never totally buckled, of course,

they never surrendered

and they put up an extremely hard fight.

Amazing that to the Japanese,

the Chinese show not only prolonged fires of resistance

but the ability to fight.

The unexpected difficulty,

sucked more and more Japanese resources and manpower

into what became a brutal war.

And it's not simply Japanese soldiers coming in

and butchering civilians who are engaging in rape

as an act of war or a weapon of war, I mean, it gets,

it's much worse than that in the sense of scale and scope

because there were large numbers of population

that had to move.

The Chinese Nationalist Army blew up a series

of dams and dykes on the Yellow River

which forced people to move, to die of starvation, disease.

War still falls hardest on women and children.

The youngsters suffer and wonder what it's all about.

(dramatic music)

The Japanese advance despite the obstacles

but eventually the Chinese managed to draw together

against the foreign invader.

To suffer, to endure and at last to conquer.

That must surely is China's destiny.

As a frustrated Japan enlarged the war,

the Sino-Japanese War became part of the Second World War

and would end as did the global conflict

with Japan's unconditional surrender.

(gentle music)

With peace in 1945 came a resumption of civil war in China,

which ended, when in 1949,

Mao Zedong declared The People's Republic.

There are very palpable remnants of the impact in our day.

But in terms of the kind

of the following 10 years after the war,

I mean the geopolitical structure changes, doesn't it?

You saw how the war of resistance,

the war against Japan ultimately, on the one hand,

strengthen the Nationalist Party and Chiang Kai Shek.

He became this avatar of the Chinese nation,

but the war went on for so long,

they became so dependent on American aid

that it ultimately hollowed out their capacity to govern.

To the invaders,

this was a failed attempt at an empire, but to the Chinese,

this was the foundation story of new China.

(gentle music)

The 20th century began with a love affair

with the incredible magic of moving pictures.

But this revolutionary technology will be changed forever,

with the addition

of one very special ingredient, the human voice.

All right, action.

Bless my soul, there's a lot of talk just now

about the old films of 40 years ago.

And those are days I remember well.

Ever since the inception of cinema,

people had kind of experimented with sounds

and the early sound films were kind of envisaged

not to have that kind of synchronized sound

in terms of human voices.

It was more about the idea of having a musical soundtrack

and sound effects.

In the mid-20s,

Warner Brothers bought a new sound technology

but at the time they had no idea of its capability.

They didn't have their own theaters at the time.

So they want it's experiment with something new

that might give them an edge over the other studios

which is when they signed the contract with Western Electric

and christened the Vitaphone sound system.

Why Mutie, I am a new man.

Haven't you heard

about the wonderful thing Dr. Weston did for me.

He kept up my post, gave me several vocal cords.

In 1927, the new film "The Jazz Singer,"

experimented with music and with dialogue

between songs heralding the first talkie

and the end of the silent film era.

"The Jazz Singer" was incredibly successful.

I don't even think we can gauge these days

as to how revolutionary "The Jazz Singer" was.

But the dialogue amounted

to 354 words in total, it delighted its audience.

But it was Al Jolson

who would first crack things wide open

for the new sound movies

when he starred in "The Jazz Singer."

I hope I can make you wait.

Mamie, I'm comin', oh God, I hope I'm not late.

Now that movies had sound, things changed.

From the way they were produced

and shown to the people who appeared in them.

It would cause massive issues in terms of the actors,

because they needed to, you know, train actors

in terms of speaking and learning dialogue.

"The Jazz Singer's" influence has reached

far and wide.

In 1996, the original film was recognized

by the American National Film Registry

as a cultural, historical

and aesthetically significant motion picture.

The biggest name on the marquees was sound,

and it sold tickets as never before.

The public loved it.

If "The Jazz Singer" hadn't been popular,

and if it hadn't worked,

and if people hadn't loved it,

none of the rest of it would've happened.

Technology wouldn't have propelled forward,

and it wouldn't have developed to accommodate

all the wonderful films that we've seen since the 1920s.

♪ I'd walk a million miles for one of your smiles ♪

♪ For my Mamie ♪

(dramatic music)

A fight for independence and the instability

that followed would leave a country in southeast Asia

at the front line of the Cold War.

A battleground for an America,

that feared the spread of communism through Asia.

In 1954, Vietnamese nationalists drove French colonialists

out of northern Vietnam leaving behind a country divided.

Their departure left Northern Vietnam

in Communist control.

As it were a number of decisions that lead up

to the final commitment of ground troops in 1965.

The Americans had aided the French colonialists in Vietnam

and then when the French left they gave aid and some advice

to the government in South Vietnam.

However nothing seemed to do very much good.

And by 1964, 1965 the administration

of Lyndon Johnson was really confronting a fork in the road.

Do you give up or do you go in still further

with ground troops and that's the decision

that Lyndon Johnson ended up making.

Arriving in Vietnam,

American troops were not ready for guerrilla warfare.

Tens of thousands died and after the war

many became addicted to drugs and many suffered

from post traumatic stress disorder.

In the United States,

the public was watching the war on television.

Images that swayed public opinion.

There's already a strong pacifist movement

in the United States that had emerged

out of concerns about nuclear weapons

and we certainly see in the spring of 1965,

you see very early on, forms of protests and dissent,

organized dissent, organized protests.

Tragically our nation's leadership,

while striving for peace has adopted a course

that makes real peace unlikely.

Johnson, many think

because of the burden of war,

refused to run for a second term.

I wish I could have brought you to some sign

that the struggle that you're in will soon be over.

The new president, Richard Nixon,

began to withdraw troops from Vietnam,

in monthly increments during 1969.

Training south Vietnamese troops

to continue to fight without them.

The length of the war and the television coverage,

contributed to uneasiness in America

as they began to question whether they should be involved

in a foreign conflict.

Roger that, four, five.

Directly, the war in Vietnam, in the sense,

derives from the fact that Americans couldn't agree

about how it should be fought in the first place.

There are people who believe

that the war is a terrible mistake

and should never have been fought.

And there were people who believed that it was justified

and that had implications, subsequently,

for American foreign policy.

Did you take the view that Vietnam was an indication

that America had become too interventionist in the world

and should, as it were, dial back

on it's military engagements?

Or did you take the view

that the United States should continue

to act against communism,

where it saw it as a threat in the world?

And in a way, the gap between those two parties was

very much widened as a result of the Vietnam War.

It was difficult after Vietnam

to find a kind of consensus point between those two.

(dramatic music)

(gentle music)

After the First World War,

the League of Nations was established

to prevent another world war.

When they failed in this task,

they would be dissolved to make way

for a new international body, The United Nations.

(dramatic music)

The draft U.N. charter have been prepared

by a 44 nation committee of jurists meeting in Washington

in April 19, 1945.

In the Opera House, Lord Halifax called

for a standing vote on the completed charter.

China, as the first victim of aggression

by an Axis power, was given the honor of being the first

to sign the charter.

In January 1946,

the First General Assembly of the United Nations,

comprising 51 nations gathered at Westminster Central Hall

in London, England.

The U.N. was set up to prevent a third world war.

The powers in Europe were getting frustrated

with being unable to get drawn into entanglement

into major conflicts, which the costs were higher

than the benefits.

So no power really wanted to avoid using force

to advance their own interests

but none of them really wanted the other powers

to be able to do the same.

And so the idea behind international peace was becoming

increasingly important, valuable and appreciated.

An administrative compromise

that the organization has often faced is the veto power

that was granted to the five permanent members

of the security council, the United States of America,

China, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union.

Rivalry between the great powers

often prevented the effective conduct of affairs.

The Security Council of the United Nations is

now facing its greatest test.

The question of the Berlin dispute

between Russia and the western parts.

But although the U.N. has fallen short

of many of its objectives,

it has contributed to real change.

At least 90 million young lives

have been saved through UNICEF,

the U.N.'s International Children's Emergency Fund.

Through the World Health Organization,

the U.N. eradicated smallpox,

an infection that killed three in every 10

and left many blind.

Last year, in October,

the Samaria Smallpox Eradication Program recorded

the last known case of smallpox in the world.

(dramatic music)

The U.N. was also responsible

for the Montreal Protocol, which pledged to reduce chemicals

that were destroying the ozone layer,

ultimately protecting it from further deterioration.

The organization continues to create a link

between nations providing a basis

for cooperative response to world issues.

Throughout the 20th century,

we experienced seismic shifts like, for example,

the Cold War that necessitated great flexibility

on the part of the U.N.

and sometimes the U.N. was successful.

Other times it wasn't.

But the main, maybe characteristic, of the U.N. work

during the 20th century was that it was mostly reactive.

Instead of being preemptive or preventative,

it was following events rather than going ahead of them.

Despite its shortcomings,

the U.N. continues its work into the new millennium,

fighting the spread of AIDs, poverty,

civil war and refugee numbers.

The 20th century was by far the most violent century,

but towards the end you could see some progress,

some improvement in certain areas.

And I think that peace was not only preventing war

but also required dealing with the underlying causes

of violence and creating the conditions

that would allow a more sustainable peace,

which is often also a more just peace.

By the end of the 20th century,

U.N. membership had grown to almost four times the number

of those founding members who gathered.

(dramatic music)

On an extremely cold morning in 1996,

the world watched in horror

as dreams of civilian travel into space ended in disaster.

(people chattering)

After decades of blasting into space

with one use only rockets, NASA's Space Shuttle Program was

an important step towards greater space travel.

A reusable space vehicle

known as a space shuttle.

A cross between an airplane and a spaceship.

They were certainly an innovative technology.

However compared with the Apollo missions to the moon,

the shuttles were really just a taxi into low earth orbit.

Challenger, part of this new generation

of space travel, was launched in 1983.

This is the 25th shuttle mission

and in many ways many Americans have got very used

to watching shuttle launches

and indeed the major networks were not showing the launch

of this mission live.

However there was some public interest,

partly because NASA had embarked on a competition

to find a teacher in space.

The teacher who will be going into space,

Christa McAuliffe, where is she?

Is that you?

She was going to fly on this mission

and once she got up into space

she was going to be delivering two classes.

Which would be broadcast live to school children.

And so that was the point of real interest

for a lot of people.

The fact that this was the first sort

of private citizen in space.

The crew put on their suits

and prepared for launch on the 28th of January 1996.

There were two main concerns on the morning of the launch.

The first was the question of ice.

There was a lot of ice hanging down from places

in the launch pad and there was concern

that the ice might break off

and damage the thermal protection shield around Challenger.

The second concern was,

we have what are called the O ring seals,

which are around the solid rocket boosters.

The concern was that these O ring seals would not work

properly at low temperatures.

At 11:00 a.m.,

NASA's engineers gave the all clear.

NASA allowed the launch to go ahead

in regard to the dangers of a ice strike and leakages

from the O ring seals as being acceptable flight risk.

Countdown commenced and at 11:39 a.m.,

Challenger was in the air and gaining speed.

Lift off of the 25th space shuttle mission,

and it has cleared the tower.

73 seconds after launch,

there's a sudden bloom

and the shuttle disintegrated as a result

of the abnormal aerodynamic forces acting upon it.

(shuttle booming)

(somber music)

It's not at that moment we think that the crew died.

The crew cabin continued to kind of arc up, then down

and it's the impact with the ocean

that led to the crew being killed.

Experts believe the crew was alive

until the wreckage hit the Atlantic Ocean

at more than 321 kilometers an hour.

A three year investigation found structural flaws

and weaknesses in the shuttle had been ignored

by NASA leaders.

The program was suspended during the investigation

and was not resumed until 1999.

We will never forget them,

nor the last time we saw them this morning

as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye

and slipped the surly bonds of earth

to touch the face of God.

(somber music)

When a man

who had never held political office was appointed chancellor

of Germany, it would set the country

on a path of war and devastation,

the likes of which had never been seen before.

(footsteps stomping) (dramatic music)

(somber music)

Once made chancellor,

Adolph Hitler and the party he led, had control.

National socialism became

the only permitted political movement.

(speaking in foreign language)

Though Germany been through terrible trials

since her defeat in the First World War,

the worst seemed to be over.

The economy was showing signs of improvement

and the difficult experiment with democracy,

a form of government that Germany had never known,

seemed to be working.

Of course a working democracy had never been

on Hitler's agenda.

Hitler's intention in the early 1920s was

to take power by force and he was very much led

by the belief that actually a march on Berlin

by right wing elements determined

to overturn the injustices of the Versailles settlement,

would very likely lead to the chance

of the Nazi party getting into power.

The 1923 Beer Hall Putsch,

a power grab that landed Hitler in jail,

convinced him that power in Germany had

to be taken politically and not by armed coup.

10 years after the humiliation of the Putsch,

he was invited to become chancellor.

Hitler had campaigned energetically,

pioneered the use of air travel

to crisscross the country,

delivering thousands of speeches.

(speaking in foreign language)

And had reached the position

where he seemed, to the powerful elite,

a solution to their problem.

The elite was headed by an aged President Hindenburg

who had taken to ruling by executive decree

and his appointees.

Hindenburg agreed to make Hitler chancellor

because he'd been convinced

by one of his former chancellors, von Papen,

that this was the best way to handle Hitler.

If you bring him into government, you contain him,

and you can control him.

So that was the plan, of course,

the plan doesn't work out like that.

The Nazi leader poses with his cabinet,

which includes von Papen, seated on his left.

One month after being sworn in as chancellor,

a young communist burnt down the Reichstag.

Here was the reason for demanding emergency powers

in the parliament to match those

so the storm troopers could seize in the streets.

Hitler consolidates power after becoming chancellor

by using his usual methods,

which was the carrot and the stick.

The stick was the threat of force.

He still had a lot of storm troopers on the streets,

creating a kind of aggressive movement,

a feeling that if people didn't kowtow to the Nazis,

they were gonna use force.

But he directly convinced people within parliament

to vote him enabling powers which ultimately allowed

him to operate as a dictator.

From across the way,

Hitler appeared at his window.

And another milestone is marked

in Germany's political history.

The powers are in place

and as chancellor, Adolf Hitler, was in place.

So when President Hindenburg died in 1934,

Hitler maneuvered with these to combine the powers

of chancellor and president in a single role, Fuhrer.

All opposition was banned.

Opponents were imprisoned or murdered

or transported to camps.

The impact of Hitler becoming chancellor

in the short term was that he consolidated power in Germany

and really then was in a position

to set foreign policy on his own.

And that ultimately led to the outbreak

of the Second World War and ultimately,

the death of 50 million people.

(artillery booming)

(dramatic music)

It has been described as the idiot box,

the opiate of the masses.

Or, alternatively, as the greatest communication revolution,

the world has known, an invention that brought a world

of moving pictures into our living room.

Metal fingers beckoning to the invisible,

calling to sound the ear cannot hear

and sight beyond the range of the unaided eye.

Our era, the era of television.

(bright music)

First thought off as radio with pictures,

television wasn't an invention dreamed up

by only one person.

In the 1920s and up through the 1930s

there were basically two types of televisions systems

that were living side by side in co-existence

and in competition.

On the one hand you had largely mechanical models.

These were using a spinning nipkow disc system

of spiral holes in a disk to scan an image.

21-year-old Philo Farnsworth made

a technological leap from the early televisions

when he developed the dissector tube

on the 7th of September, 1927.

The base for all electronic televisions to come.

These two systems lived side by side,

right up until the end of the '30s

when the last of the mechanical television broadcast

in the United States ended.

RCA discarded the mechanical spinning disc

and soon doubled, tripled, then tripled again

the scanning lines.

At the end of the 1950s,

nine out of 10 people had at least one television set.

People's habits were changing.

As a result we were changing,

as a result of television.

We didn't go out so much, we stayed at home

because we liked the entertainment delivered to us.

What started out as appearing to be something

that would just fizzle out within 10 years,

turned out to be arguably the most important invention,

this side of the internal combustion engine of the century.

By 1946, around 8,000 U.S. homes had TV sets.

That skyrocketed to 45.7 million by 1960,

as costs dropped and programming became more sophisticated.

(bright music)

The golden age of broadcast television in the U.S.,

created a cultural juggernaut spreading American influence

to the farthest corners of the world,

making television one of the country's

most lucrative exports.

Television for the first time

really created a world system in which a far off events,

somewhere else, far away from you, was something

that you could experience and live

in a kind of a visceral way.

That's one small step for man.

Scripted programming, sport, news

and current affairs broadcasting flooded the airwaves.

War was brought into people's living rooms

via the television in the Vietnam war

for the first time, for example.

Disasters, droughts, famines could be experienced by people

that had never seen anything like that

because it wasn't part of their first-hand experience.

And I think that sort of creation

of a worldwide lived experience mediated

through the television is probably the largest influence

that television has had.

And all this has been just the beginning.

One of the important aspects of television

that's often overlooked is that it started

our love affair with screens.

Now people are going to argue, hang on,

we had movie screens before that.

Yes, of course we did.

But the idea of having the screen right there

in the corner of the room that you could switch on,

pretty much after you got up in the morning,

and watch as you were having breakfast,

and all day if you wished

and certainly throughout the evenings

before you went to bed,

we love screens in other words.

And that's to say, the love affair started with TV.

(gentle music)

The dream of the re-establishment

of a Jewish nation in the biblical Holy Land,

a political movement that began late

in the 19th century but would take

until halfway through the 20th to be realized.

With the collapse of the Ottoman Empire,

following the First World War, Jewish and Arab communities

who had live side by side

for centuries were now in opposition

over who would form the government of Palestine.

After World War I, the British Empire,

as part of the mandate system took control

of Palestine under their own mandate.

In 1917, Arthur Balfour,

the British foreign secretary,

had written to Lord Rothschild.

The letter, known to history as the Balfour Declaration,

said that Britain viewed, with favor,

a national home for the Jewish people.

At the time of the declaration,

less than 10% of the region's population was Jewish.

But a steady trickle of immigration,

many escaping the antisemitism of Russia and Eastern Europe,

boosted this number over the coming decades.

As a result Arab communities began to see Jewish migration

as European cultural colonialism

and the two groups clashed violently

throughout the '20s and '30s.

The holocaust changed everything.

Hundreds of thousands of displaced Jews were in camps

and, as the world, discovered millions had been murdered.

Sentiment and sympathy was on the side of the Zionist cause

as thousands of Jews tried to reach Palestine by ship.

After being intercepted by the navy,

the illegal immigrant ship Exodus 1947

entered Haifa harbor under escort.

But now she had on board some 5,000 Jews

who'd hoped to enter Palestine illegally.

Obviously the need for a decision

on the Palestine problem grows more urgent

with every fresh incident.

Certainly the war was a complicating factor

for both Palestinian and Jewish community's relationship

with the British regime who were both trying

to throw off what they perceived

as the colonial shackles of the mandate.

But the war was also a very tenuous time in the Middle East.

And many feared for the future of their national project

and really their own safety during this period.

As the refugee crisis grew worse,

Britain turned the problem over to the United Nations

which in November 1947 voted to split the land

into two countries, Israel and Palestine.

Palestine's case is

before the world parliament

as Arab delegates look on stonily.

Partition had been a plan that had been pursued many times

in the very early history of the emerging conflict

between what would then be the Israelis and Palestinians

in the region.

They did return to, at the end of the Second World War,

when Britain had decided that it was going to abandon

its mandate in Palestine.

It was no longer of strategic or political interest

to the British government and there needed

to be a kind of political plan put in place

to reconcile or at least what they had hoped that the time

would reconcile these two populations

that were locked in a nationalist struggle.

The Jewish leadership accepted

the U.N. resolution but the Arabs rejected it.

The British mandate over Palestine officially ended

at midnight, May 14, 1948.

For Jews it was the first time in over 2,000 years

that they had known sovereignty

as their own people, living in their own land.

It was certainly a pivotal moment in Jewish history.

For the Palestinians it was certainly a moment

that has had a profound impact on the pursuit

of Palestinian national identity.

With the relinquishing

of the British mandate, Palestine is rocked

by a full scale war and both sides mobilized.

I think the long term effects of the creation

of state of Israel has been an ensuing conflict

between Israelis and Palestinians

that doesn't seem to look to be resolved anytime soon.

This was not a preordained outcome

of the founding of the State of Israel

and certainly does not remain one today.

How this conflict will be resolved,

if it is resolved in the future will certainly, you know,

affect the history and politics

in the region for many decades to come.

(dramatic music)

(upbeat music)

Product of the swinging '60s

tool of free love, liberator of women.

No matter which way you look at it,

this was one of the most significant medical advances

of the century,

giving half of the world's population control

over their bodies.

American activist Margaret Sanger coined the term,

birth control in 1914.

Advocating for sex education

and safe contraceptive options.

Going back to the 1910s, 1920,

Sanger was a really prominent figure

in both educating the public

on contraceptive methods that were available

but also trying to make these methods become widely used

and more widely accepted

and seen as almost a moral imperative

rather than something

that was a little bit seedy and immoral.

She believed that women needed birth control

to manage their lives.

They needed it to control their health.

They needed it to be able to work.

They needed it to be able

to properly look after their families.

She was appalled by the fatality rates

of the illegal abortions that were going on

because women had no choice

and she felt that the way

to overcome that was through birth control.

And she fought adamantly for that.

At a chance meeting

with endocrinologist, Gregory Pincus, in 1951,

Sanger now in her 80s convinced him

to work on a birth control pill.

Initial tests on 15 Massachusetts women

in 1954 were followed by large scale clinical trials

conducted in Puerto Rico.

In 1957, the U.S. Federal Drug Authority approved

the first oral pill but only

for severe menstrual conditions, not as a contraceptive.

By 1960 it has been approved for contraceptive use

and within two years was being used

by 1.2 million American women.

What you have there in terms of Western societies is

a total revolution in how women viewed themselves.

When first introduced

into the United Kingdom in 1961,

the pill was only available to married women.

That changed in 1967 when it became available

to any woman who wanted it.

Instead of using condoms or something,

birth control pills just something so steady, so sure,

gives pretty much the woman control over the situation.

It's meant that women haven't had

to interrupt their sexual romantic relationships

if they want to be successful in their careers.

However, the thing I think it's important

to remember is that none of these changes

really could have happened if it hadn't been

for the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Social changes to do with women's status in society.

Cultural norms surrounding sexuality had already started

to change before the pill became available.

So essentially it was these changes that allowed women

to use the pill as a means for liberation.

Surveys that show that countries

where there is effective birth control,

that women are more highly educated,

they're more involved in wider range of employment.

So I think it gave women a chance to determine

their own destiny, and they took it.

(gentle music)

In 1999 for the murder of two people would lead

to the arrest and a trial that will play out

in headlines across the globe.

Has the client stated

he pleads guilty or not guilty.

Not guilty.

Orenthal James or O.J. Simpson's

sporting prowess had earned him wealth, fame and entry

into a new social circle.

A trajectory that brought him to an ill fated marriage

to Nicole Brown Simpson that ended in 1992.

Then on the 13th of June 1994,

for Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman were found murdered

at Nicole's home in Los Angeles.

The bodies were found at Nicole's home

and there was blood in evidence and O.J. was arrested

because he had been there.

But then released without charge.

And then three days later, the story goes,

that he was alerted to the fact that he would be arrested

by one of his lawyers.

The information that O.J. may be arrested

for murder made him panic.

He fled his mansion with a disguise and a gun.

Longtime friend Al Cowlings was behind the wheel,

Simpson was in the back seat.

At some point rationality kicked in

and he realized that the only reasonable thing to do was

to return home and turn himself in

which is exactly what he did.

The case divided the nation.

On the one hand O.J.'s blood and gloves were

at the scene of his wife's murder.

On the other it had been investigated

by the police who had a reputation for racism.

I mean, you had a black man accused

of murdering a white woman in America

at a very delicate stage in history.

And don't forget the afterglow of the earlier riots

of 1991 were still there.

And the race issue was still fresh in people's minds.

(people chattering)

Pray for O.J., this is day number two.

O.J.'s defense team questioned

every move the prosecution made.

So we are now embarked upon this search for justice.

This search for truth, this search for the facts.

The prosecution focused on the DNA evidence.

And when you see the evidence,

and when you hear the witnesses

and when you put it all together

and considered the totality of circumstances

in this case the evidence will show

that the answer to the question is,

yes, O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman.

What happened during the trial itself was

extremely interesting but unfortunate for the prosecution

because they had what potentially was

the most damning piece of evidence

in the blood stained gloves

and Christopher Darden, one of the district attorneys,

who's prosecuting insisted that O.J. tried on the gloves.

And that was a fateful error because they didn't fit.

The day Mr. Darden asked Mr. Simpson

to try on those gloves and the gloves didn't fit.

Remember these words, if it doesn't fit you must acquit.

O.J. Simpson was found not guilty

on October 3, 1995.

We the jury in the above entitled action

find the defendant Orenthal James Simpson not guilty

of the crime of murder.

150 million people watched the televised trial,

anxious to see the evidence for themselves.

In the aftermath of the criminal trial,

the family of the second victim, Ron Goldman,

launched civil proceedings against Simpson,

charging him with wrongful death.

The jury at this trial found O.J. Simpson personally liable

for the two deaths.

Although O.J. was acquitted of murder,

public interest and views

on the case continue to the present day.

(dramatic music)

December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy.

The United States of America was suddenly

and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces

of the Empire of Japan.

(somber music)

War was raging across Europe and in China

but the U.S. had avoided direct involvement.

In July 1941, President Franklin Roosevelt decided

to stop all American oil and still shipments to Japan,

an order to halt her military expansion into East Asia.

Japan was dependent on these imports

as she lacked natural resources in her islands

and decided to take action.

It was intending to launch an invasion

of British and Dutch colonial possessions in Southeast Asia

and it felt that if it didn't knock out

the U.S. Pacific Fleet that Pacific Fleet would intervene.

It also felt that it was very likely

that the U.S. would declare war

and therefore why not attack them before

there's a state of war because they would be

in a position to guard against a sudden attack like this.

At 7:55 a.m. on the 7th of December 1941,

183 aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy

attack the American Naval Base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii.

Not in a million years were they expecting a sudden attack

on U.S. territory on the islands at Hawaii

and on their Pacific Fleet which was in the harbor there

and of course if they had been expecting an attack,

the defensive would very much be in on the alert

which they were not.

Within two hours,

18 U.S.warships had been sunk or damaged.

188 aircraft destroyed

and 2,403 American servicemen and women were killed.

Our world knows now

how Japan assaulted the American Naval Base without warning,

without a declaration of war and while

her envoys were actually negotiating in Washington.

The Japanese achieve some of their objectives

at Pearl Harbor, in the sense that

they pretty much knocked out the battleship fleet

of the U.S. Navy.

The problem for the Japanese is that

none of the U.S. aircraft carriers were at Pearl Harbor

and what nobody realized at the time,

but they would soon discover,

was that aircraft carriers were actually the key

to ocean fighting to naval fighting

from this point onward.

The day after the attack,

President Roosevelt delivered a speech to Congress,

condemning the attack and committing the U.S.

to war with Japan.

No matter how long it may take us

to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people

in their righteous might will win through

to absolute victory.

(audience applauding)

Well the direct impact of the U.S. entry

into the war was interesting because, of course,

they're immediate reaction was to declare war on Japan,

but not on Germany and Italy.

What happened next is that Germany and Italy declared war

on the U.S., and there's this great what if,

in the minds of historians, if they hadn't,

would the United States have done the same?

In other words,

would the United States have simply been fighting

a war against Japan and therefore, arguably,

no ultimate Allied success against Germany?

(dramatic music)

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