10/09/2013

Available for over a year

Helen Castor is joined in the Making History studio by Rana Mitter, Professor of the History and Politics of Modern China at the University of Oxford and, from Salford, by Dr Andrew Fearnley a historian of Modern America at the University of Manchester. The programme begins with the little acknowledged role that China played in World War 2 and its war with Japan which began in 1937. We hear how a poor and divided country desperately fought off the Japanese and, in so doing, tied up troops which would otherwise have been turned on the Allies in the Pacific theatre of war. Helen asks why this history is so little known. Fifty years after Martin Luther King made his iconic "I have a dream speech" speech in front of the Lincoln memorial in Washington, we find out about the black power movement that turned its back on King and the organisation that grew out of this. We may think of the Black Panthers as an American organisation, but a new photography and oral history project in Brixton reveals the story of the British Black Panthers. Finally, Tom Holland heads off to the beautiful north Somerset coast at the village of Kilve to discover the past use of a decaying brick building. To his surprise, he hears that this might well have become home to the British oil shale industry if prospectors had been successful back in the 1920s. Contact the programme: [email protected] Produced by Nick Patrick A Pier production for BBC Radio 4.