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The History Hour
Space travel and Mary Poppins
The History Hour
Aug 30, 2024

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes. Our guest is European Space Agency astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who completed the longest uninterrupted space flight of any European.

First, we go to Australia in the 1990s when amateur radio enthusiast Maggie Iaquinto befriended Soviet cosmonauts on the Mir space station. She updated them on global news as the USSR crumbled back on Earth.

Then, the inspiring story of Waris Dirie, who walked barefoot across the Somalian desert to escape child marriage and became an international supermodel.

We hear a harrowing account of Guatemala's civil war that ended in 1996.

Then, why the author of Mary Poppins, PL Travers, hated the Disney film.

Finally, the Canadian town that welcomed aliens in 1967.

Contributors: Samantha Cristoforetti - European Space Agency astronaut. Ben Iaquinto - son of Maggie Iaquinto who befriended Soviet cosmonauts. Waris Dirie - model from Somalia. Jeremias Tecu - survivor of Guatemala's civil war. Brian Sibley and Kitty Travers - friend and daughter of PL Travers. Paul Boisvert - worked on Canada's alien landing pad.

(Photo: Mir Space Station in 1995. Credit: Space Frontiers/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

More Episodes


Aug 15, 2026
The Mau Mau uprising and man-eating lions

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes focussing on Kenya.

We hear about Muthoni Kirima, one of the last Mau Mau fighters to come out of hiding and lay down her arms.

Caroline Elkins, Professor of History at Harvard University, discusses the brutality of the conflict between Kenya’s Land and Freedom Army, the British and Kenyan loyalists.

Next, when Princess Elizabeth became queen while staying at the Treetops Hotel, a lodge in the Aberdare National Park.

In 1997, scientists travelled to Kenya, in search of a cave believed to have been the den of the man-eating lions that terrorised railway workers in 1898.

Plus, we hear how Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki and his rival Raila Odinga signed an unprecedented power-sharing deal to end a wave of violence that left more than 1,200 people dead.

And the heartwarming story of the friendship between a baby hippo and a 130-year-old giant tortoise.

Finally for our Sporting Witness story, we head to the first Ultimate Frisbee World Championship in Gothenburg, Sweden in 1983.

Contributors: Caroline Elkins - Professor of History at Harvard University, and author of Britain's Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya. Muthoni Kirima - Field Marshall in the Kenya Land and Freedom Army. Frank Gillard - BBC correspondent. Thomas Gnoske - Scientist. Alan Patterson - British Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson's grandson. Maina Kiai - Chair of the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights in 2008. Maini Schildt - Swedish Ultimate Frisbee player.

(Photo: Mau Mau suspects are rounded up by police outside the camp in Manyani, Kenya, 1955. Credit: Getty Images/Authenticated News)


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Space travel and Mary Poppins

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