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 raisin in the sun

a play about race that broke new ground on Broadway 60 years ago.

We hear from the black playwright Lorraine Hansbury, who was interviewed in 1959.

I was aware that on the Broadway stage that they have never seen an African who didn't have his shoes hanging around his neck, you know, and a bone through his, oh sorry, his ears or something.

Plus the first ever space tourist

remembers the moment when he became weightless.

There are pencils that are hung from strings

in the cabin, and at orbit insertion those pencils start to float.

Also we explore the origins of the organic farming movement 70 years ago and daring shocking often violent the auto-destructive art movement of the

1960s.

One young girl shouted out when I did my performance. Now I feel purified. All will be revealed later in the

podcast. But we begin this week with one of those moments from recent American

history that seems to mark a watershed. It's 20 years

since the Columbine school shooting. Now it's not as if there had been no shooting

incidents in US schools before that. In fact there are recorded incidents of firearms being discharged in American places of learning,

stretching right back to the 1800s.

But in the main, these were single shots resulting from personal feuds or just plain accidents.

What marked out Columbine was the deliberate random mass killing, 15 dead, including the two

perpetrators.

And since Columbine, other mass school shootings have followed.

Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook being the most prominent and shocking.

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