Cixi: China's most powerful woman

She was the power behind the Chinese throne for decades

• 9 mins

Jane: The underground abortion network

How feminists ended up performing abortions for women in 1960s America

• 9 mins

The woman who asked Britain to return the Parthenon marbles

Melina Mercouri, actress turned politician, requested the marbles be returned to Greece

• 9 mins

The first Indian to win Miss World

Reita Faria was the first Indian to win the Miss World beauty competition in 1966

• 9 mins

Paris is Burning

The groundbreaking film about drag queens and LGBTQ+ people in New York

• 9 mins

Jamaica’s ‘drug lord’

The hunt for the Jamaican drug lord which left dozens of civilians dead

• 9 mins

Alva Myrdal - the woman who made modern Sweden

The story of Swedish social reformer, Alva Myrdal, who won the Nobel peace prize in 1982

• 9 mins

Mars-500 isolation experiment

Why six men were locked inside a spacecraft on earth for 520 days

• 9 mins

The dirtiest chess match in history

How the 1978 World Chess Championship was overshadowed by allegations of dirty tricks

• 9 mins

The Ulster Workers' Strike

Protestant workers went on strike in Northern Ireland in 1974

• 9 mins

Banksy’s first street art mural

It’s difficult to pinpoint the first major piece of Banksy street art, could this be it?

• 9 mins

The woman who got America talking about sex

Dr Ruth Westheimer first became popular on a radio show in New York in the early 1980s

• 9 mins

South Africa takes on big pharma

The fight between Big Pharma and South Africa over the right to import cheap drugs.

• 9 mins

The fight against slavery in Mauritania

Brahim Bilal Ramdhane was born into slavery in the 1960s, now he fights against it.

• 9 mins

Anorexia nervosa

The death of the singer, Karen Carpenter, showed how devastating the illness could be.

• 9 mins

When the prisoners ran the prison

Prisoners at Walpole maximum security prison were in charge for three months in 1973

• 9 mins

Mrs Thatcher’s ground-breaking Soviet TV interview

How Mrs Thatcher shook up the Soviet media with a landmark interview in Moscow.

• 9 mins

Kidnapped on an orchid hunt

How two Englishmen were seized by Colombian rebels while crossing the lawless Darien Gap

• 9 mins

Black Jesus

In 1967 an African American church minister began preaching that Jesus was black.

• 9 mins

The women who reclaimed the night

How women in England took to the streets to protest against a serial killer

• 9 mins

Mexico's female serial killer

Juana Barraza was found guilty of murdering at least eleven elderly women in Mexico city

• 9 mins

David Attenborough's first expedition

The BBC programme that launched the career of the famous nature broadcaster

• 9 mins

From Leningrad to St Petersburg

How the people of Russia's second city dropped the great communist leader's name

• 9 mins

Discovering the Jet Stream

Air raids and balloon bombs - the strange story behind the discovery of the Jet Stream

• 9 mins

The US Supreme Court's first woman justice

In 1981 Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman judge at America's top court

• 9 mins

How a worm helped explain human development

The nematode worm c. elegans has enabled all sorts of discoveries about human biology

• 9 mins

Fighting for Castro at the Bay of Pigs

Hear from a Cuban who fought against the US-backed exiles that invaded Cuba in April 1961

• 9 mins

The vultures saved from extinction

South Asian vultures started dying in huge numbers in the 1990s but no one knew why.

• 9 mins

China's 'Kingdom of women'

An ancient matrilineal society which doesn't believe in marriage and where the women rule

• 9 mins

The Eichmann trial

In April 1961 the Nazi official who ran holocaust death camps was put on trial in Israel

• 9 mins