Ice Bucket Challenge and Bulgaria's dancing bears

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A warning for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners - this programme contains the names and voices of people who have died.

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

We take a look at the Ice Bucket Challenge, the viral fundraising sensation that took over the internet in 2014.

Our guest Professor Sander van der Linden breaks down the psychology behind virality and outlines the challenges facing those who conquered the algorithm.

Plus, how one man smuggled punk rock over the Berlin Wall.

Also, we meet the man who found a retirement home for Bulgaria's dancing bears.

We hear the remarkable story of Australia's Freedom Riders who campaigned against indigenous discrimination.

Finally, we relive the mountain top escape of the Yazidi's who were fleeing Islamic State Militants.

Contributors: Nancy Frates – Pete Frates mother. Sander van der Linden - Professor of Social Psychology at Cambridge University. Mark Reeder - smuggled punk rock over the Berlin Wall. Dr Amir Khalil – founded the sanctuary for dancing bears. Darce Cassidy and Gary Williams – involved in the Freedom Rides. Mirza Dinnayi - helped evacuate the Yazidi's.

(Photo: Ice Bucket Challenge. Credit:Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	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.
0:08.0	This week we have an amazing first-hand account of the Yazidi's mountaintop escape from a
0:14.6	genocidal assault by Islamic State militants. The most challenging thing was first
0:20.4	ISIS fighters from the ground they were shooting the helicopters and the
0:25.0	helicopter was shooting back.
0:27.0	Plus as the Cold War continued to grip Europe, the man who smuggled
0:31.6	punk rock over the Berlin Wall.
0:33.6	I knew that it was not going to be an easy task to take a bunch of punks into each Berlin.
0:38.0	The punk rock was forbidden in the DDI.
0:40.0	And from 1965, Australia's Freedom Riders campaigning for the rights of Aboriginal people.
0:46.2	Whelgad had the worst past of white people you find inside the black stump.
0:50.0	They can look at me and they can talk about me as much as they they like but they won't shift me out of Logan.
0:55.0	That's all coming up later in the podcast. But first a story from the past which illustrates the extent to which new technologies and new forms of communication have changed. the when a viral online event the ice bucket challenge was taking over the algorithms of internet users.
1:17.0	Jill Kursley discovers how it all started.
1:20.0	Is the craze sweeping the US and the internet people being doused or dousing themselves
1:30.0	or dousing themselves with ice cold water.
1:35.0	As I watched my son be taken away from me, every single day,
1:41.0	I heard and saw him take this diagnosis and turn it into something about others.
1:46.0	When one day I couldn't even move, I was so paralyzed with grief.
1:50.0	He looked at me and he said, Mom, we're going to work really hard and we're going to make a dent in this, but I need you to understand something.
1:59.0	This is not going to be in time for me. This is going to be so that no other family ever has to go through this.
2:10.3	That's Nancy Freitas, whose son Pete helped to make the Ice Bucket Challenge become a worldwide phenomenon.
	...

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