Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week a 200 year old Antarctic mystery.

And as I headed along the beach, I noticed there was one very white stone.

When I got closer, I saw that on the surface there were a series of lines that looked a lot

like a human skull.

Also the struggle to eradicate smallpox in 1970s, India.

I saw an older man his hand reaching out to buy a ticket and his hand was covered with smallpox and he was about to get on a train

suddenly it was clear that this was a place that was exporting smallpox everywhere.

Plus the father of the mobile phone.

We believe that people were fundamentally mobile,

that people wanted to be connected wherever they were.

And we had to create this device,

one that had never been made before, and we did it in three months.

And Rebel Nuns in 1960s, California.

We had nothing. I got hired in a public school.

I didn't feel I lost anything because they weren't

calling me sister. That's all coming up later in the podcast. But before that a

look at another of those incidents which lie behind the long-standing difficult relationship between Iran and the US.

Since the overthrow of the Shah and the return of Ayatollah Khomei in 1979,

there have been various fluctuations in the degree of tension between Washington and the Islamic

republic. Things are at a pretty low ebb right now, but even in the bad times there have been

...