Wartime surrenders and the birth of Barbie

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 21 July 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Max Pearson presents a compilation of stories from this week’s Witness History episodes.

In the autumn of 1945, World War II surrender ceremonies took place across the Japanese Empire. Thousands of people watched the incredible moment Japanese generals handed over their swords in China's Forbidden City in Beijing.

Historian James Holland, talks about the ritual and significance of a surrender.

Also, the first Barbie doll was sold in 1959. It took Ruth Handler, who created it, years to convince her male colleagues that it would sell.

The plastic creation sold 350,000 in the first year and went on to take the world by storm selling millions. It’s now even been turned into a live action film starring Margot Robbie.

Contributors: John Stanfield, signed surrender declaration documents on behalf of the British at the end of World War II James Holland, historian, writer, and broadcaster Ramona Reed on her father Dean Reed who became known as ‘Red Elvis’ Vents Krauklis, a demonstrator in the Latvian capital, Riga in 1991 Professor V. Craig Jordan, who helped bring the drug tamoxifen to the world’s attention Ruth and Elliot Handler from a BBC documentary broadcast in the 1990s

(Photo: Barbie in her various incarnations. Credit: Ian Waldie/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Whether you call it football or soccer in your part of the world,
0:03.0	Match of the Day Africa Top Ten is the podcast from the BBC World Service
0:06.7	ranking the best African players.
0:08.3	This guys recognize as the best in the world, teams,
0:10.8	the coming turn, boom, and the biggest moments in African football. The bull coming turn, boom!
0:12.7	And the biggest moments in African football.
0:14.5	The whole world remembers that year.
0:16.5	It's not just African fan.
0:18.0	Match of the day Africa top 10.
0:19.9	Find it wherever you get your BBC podcast.
0:22.3	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson,
0:28.0	the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:30.0	This week, the Red Elvis, an American rock and roll star in the Soviet Union during the
0:35.6	height of the Cold War.
0:37.2	He was an all-American boy coming from a farm.
0:41.0	He rode horses and was playing cowboys out in the Colorado Mountains.
0:47.0	Plus how Tomoxofen changed treatment for breast cancer, the birth of the Barbie doll, and the Latvians who rebelled against Soviet domination in
0:55.7	1991. I was a musician. I'm playing in many popular music group and thousands and
1:02.8	people came to our concert.
1:04.8	It was a part of our singing revolution.
1:08.4	That's all coming up later in the podcast, but first we're going back to a seminal
1:12.4	moment from the 20th century.
	...

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