South Korea store collapse and Lady Gaga's meat dress

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 30 June 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of this week’s Witness History stories.

In 1995, the collapse of the Sampoong Department Store in the South Korean capital, Seoul, killed and injured hundreds of people. Explaining the impact it had on urban planning is Dr Youngmi Kim, senior lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Edinburgh.

Also, the speech President John F Kennedy made at the height of the Cold War on 26 June 1963. It galvanised the world in support of West Berliners who had been isolated by the construction of the Berlin Wall.

From the archive, Dr Jean Jacques Mueyembe and Dr David Heymann worked to bring the first documented outbreak of Ebola under control in 1976.

Plus, Budapest's communist statue 'graveyard' which opened in 1993.

Finally, when Lady Gaga accepted an MTV Video Music Award in a dress made entirely out of beef.

Contributors:

Sun Minh Lee on the Sampoong Department Store disaster Dr Youngmi Kim, senior lecturer in Korean Studies at the University of Edinburgh Gisela Morel-Tiemann on the Ich Bin Ein Berliner speech Dr Jean Jacques Mueyembe and Dr David Heymann on Ebola Judit Holp on Memento Park Franc Fernandez on Lady Gaga's meat dress

(Photo: US military troops and South Korean army soldiers look for survivors in the rubble of the collapsed Sampoong Department Store. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	The Happy Pod is a special weekly episode from the Global News Podcast bringing new positive stories and uplifting interviews from around the world.
0:08.0	I've got some good news for you.
0:11.0	It's a beautiful place to be.
0:12.0	A really good vibe, you know?
0:13.6	It's the audio equivalent of rose-tinted spectacles.
0:16.5	The world's happiest stories. Your story is absolutely inspirational.
0:20.0	Uplifting. Remarkable.
0:21.4	Listen now by searching for the Global News Podcast from the BBC World Service wherever you get your
0:26.7	podcasts. Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson
0:39.2	the past brought to life by those who were there. This week I've been a Berliner JFK in
0:45.2	Berlin 1963 and the other speech he delivered that day. I think it was the first
0:51.0	speech of a mighty politician to talk of coexistence, peaceful coexistence.
0:59.0	Plus the graveyard for communist era statues in Hungary from what was then Zaire in the 1970s the first recorded outbreak of Ebola, and dressing to shock in the early 2000s, the designer behind Lady Gaga's famous meat frog.
1:14.0	I think she wore about like 60 pounds.
1:16.0	Like you can't kind of have that hang off the shoulders.
1:18.0	So I wanted her to be comfortable, but still look like a giant slab of meat.
1:24.0	That's all coming up later in the podcast, but first we're going to the South Korean capital
1:28.0	Seoul, where in 1995 the Sam-Pung department store collapsed. The disaster killed and injured hundreds of people.
1:36.0	It provoked national outrage because it emerged that the history of the building's construction was riddled with corruption and malpractice.
1:43.0	Sunmin Lee was working at the store that day and she's been speaking to Ben Henderson.
1:48.0	Hundreds of people are believed to have been killed or injured when a department store collapsed in South Korea.
1:56.0	According to some reports, there was an explosion before the collapse.
	...

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