This edited article about St Domingue or Haiti originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 704 published on 12 July 1975.

Haitian military officer holding a printed copy of the Constitution

In 1791, the half million slaves on the French colony of St. Domingue (now Haiti) rebelled against their masters, te plantation owners. Under their leader, the former slave Toussaint Louverture, and to the astonishment of the world, the rebels defeated the French and British armies that were sent to suppress them. By 1798, Toussaint was ruler of St. Domingue. However, when Toussaint invited the white planters back to their lands to help restore the colony’s agriculture, the former slaves could not understand this apparent collaboration with their former masters. In September 1801, Toussaint’s nephew Moise raised a revolt against him. Toussaint suppressed it, and executed Moise, but three months later, there loomed an even greater threat to his rule and to the new-found liberty in St. Domingue.

The slaves’ plan was to play a waiting game. Instead of taking on the French in a straightforward fight they harassed their enemies by laying in ambush, obstructing roads and burning and destroying anything that might help the invaders . . .

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Toussaint Louverture originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 703 published on 5 July 1975.

Toussaint Louverture and his forces fought back against the British when they invaded St Domingue, by C L Doughty

Toussaint Louverture’s dark eyes flamed with fury as he wheeled his horse around the Place d’Armes at Le Cap on a late September day in 1801. Transfixed, the rebel soldiers quailed. For several minutes, Toussaint circled the Place, a small skinny figure, his protruding jaw giving his gaunt face a look of menace. Then, he spoke, his voice tearing through the silence that pervaded the square.

“Look at me!” Toussaint shricked. “I unshackle you from slavery to the French planters here in St. Domingue. I led you to victory over our French, Spanish and English enemies. And how do you repay me? With treachery! You will be punished, as Moise, your leader, will be punished!”

Toussaint reined in his horse and fixed one of the rebel officers with a malevolent gaze. “Traitor! Brigand!” Toussaint yelled. “Draw your pistol and shoot yourself!”

As if spellbound, the officer raised his pistol to his head and pulled the trigger. As he fell lifeless to the ground, Toussaint moved on. He stopped again. “You, too!” he roared at another rebel officer. “You don’t deserve to live!” A second pistol shot rang out. A second body slumped onto the stones of the square. Minute by minute, it went on, with Toussaint screaming out the command for suicide and his victims obliging without demur. Corpses lay scattered all over the square before Toussaint was finished. Not once had any of the rebels attempted to save himself by shooting Toussaint instead.

No man can have greater power over other men than to order them to kill themselves and be obeyed. Yet Toussaint Louverture was the most unlikely of candidates for such a role. For Toussaint, an Afro-Caribbean, was born that basest, most degraded of creatures, a slave, one of the millions whom white men put to ceaseless toil on the sugar, cotton, coffee, indigo and other plantations of the New World two centuries ago.

However, unlike the great majority of slaves in St. Domingue, the French Caribbean colony now known as Haiti, Toussaint and his family were lucky. Their master did not beat, torture and starve them as other French planters did. Instead, he treated them humanely, and when he saw that Toussaint was unusually intelligent and capable, he gave him responsible work to do, as steward of his livestock.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Benjamin Franklin originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 701 published on 21 June 1975.

Benjamin Franklin and his son demonstrating that lightning is simply electricity by Peter Jackson

Ben Franklin was a kindly man, but the turkey had to be killed. Why not do the deed with electricity, he thought. So he caught the big bird and gave it an electric shock.

But something went wrong, for instead of the bird being stunned, Franklin was, knocked unconscious. When he came round, he smiled at his anxious friends and said: “I meant to kill a turkey and instead I nearly killed a goose.”

Anyone less like a silly goose than Benjamin Franklin alleged he was, would be hard to imagine. A master-printer, politician, patriot, postmaster and writer, he yet found time to be a brilliant inventor as well. But then a born inventor seems to have more ideas than the rest of us, and even though some of those ideas turn out to be failures, his mind never stops racing. Franklin’s certainly didn’t, though here we are just concerned with one of his ideas.

The turkey episode, happened in 1752 at his home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, when he was 46 years old. Less than two years earlier, he had announced in print that lightning was composed of electricity, the first time that anyone had publicly made so startling a claim. At least one man was interested, a Frenchman named Dalibard, who erected an 80-ft. iron lightning rod in his garden and saw lightning strike it on May 10, 1752, thus proving that the American was right.

It was several months before the news reached Franklin, but by then, he had proved it for himself. On July 4 of that year, during a thunderstorm, he flew a home-made kite which had an iron tip, then rubbed the wet string with a big door key. The string started crackling with electric sparks, although if a severe lightning flash had hit the kite, that would have been the end of Franklin.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Mao Tse Tung originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 693 published on 26 April 1975.

Mao escapes from his capors and the vengeance of Chiang Kai-Shek, by Andrew Howat

When Mao Tse Tung proclaimed the Communist People’s Republic of China, on 1st October, 1949, there was no one alive who could recall a time when China was not the most wretched nation on Earth. Every stratum of Chinese life bore witness to this miserable status, from the arrogant foreigners, who creamed off the best trade, through corrupt incompetent government officials, all the way down to the huge mass of poverty-stricken peasants who picked a bare living from the land.

When Mao Tse Tung was born in 1893, in Hunan Province, peasant families like his usually lived in miserable hovels at the mercy of cruel landlords who took up to half of their tenant’s crops as rent. They existed in the constant fear of marauding Chinese warlords and rapacious tax-gatherers, and of disasters by flood, famine and disease.

Most peasants mutely accepted this unjust fate. Mao, however, refused to do so, and his rebellious attitude brought him into such sharp conflict with his more conventionally-minded father that in 1918, Mao left home and went to Peking.

He took a job in the university library there and met two professors who interested him in the then new creed of Communism. Mao was not only a quick, but a zealous convert and he soon became convinced that only a Communist government could free China from poverty and oppression. Soon, Mao and other young Communists were diligently spreading this revolutionary idea among peasants throughout China.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about  the Boxer Rebellion originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 688 published on 22 March 1975.

The Boxer Rebellion in China by Andrew Howat

Lao Sheng bellowed at an assembled crowd of wide-eyed villagers.

“Spirit Soldiers,” he cried as he waved his arm in the general direction of a dozen men whose loose clothes were decorated with scarlet ribbon, “Spirit Soldiers are protected by heaven. No harm can come to them.”

At that moment a ragged volley of rifle shots echoed across the valley. Three of the scarlet ribboned Boxers slumped dead. More shots rang out but no more men fell. Then the riflemen took out their swords and charged the surviving Boxers, who fought them off with their bare hands.

Most people in Europe know of these strange Boxers as Chinese fanatics, a strange, semi-secret sect dedicated to throwing out the “foreign devils” who had for too long been sucking China’s life blood.

For two hard years, nature had been cruel to China. Two harvests had failed, causing widespread famine, the rains had not arrived and a plague of locusts appeared instead. Then the Yellow River overflowed destroying hundreds of villages. Simple Chinese peasants believed these disasters to be a sign that the gods and spirits were angry with China for allowing “foreign devils” to spread across the ancient celestial empire.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about the Grand Duchess Anastasia originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 687 published on 15 March 1975.

Anastasia spoke of two soldiers who took pity on her and smuggled her out of Russia by Ken Petts

A frail, grey-haired lady sat in a timbered hut in the depths of a forest waiting for a court to deliver its final verdict. It was a final verdict she had waited more than 40 years to hear.

A verdict which would proclaim to the world either that she really was the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, daughter of the murdered Czar and heir to a vast fortune – or just a poor peasant woman.

The strange story of this woman which has intrigued the world has its roots in the blood-thirsty morning of July 17, 1918, at Ekaterinburg, now called Sverdlovsk, in Russia. On that day the great Russian revolution was in full swing, and in a wave of blood and violence the Communists overthrew the Russian royal family and gained power.

The Czar and Czarina – the equivalent of a King and Queen – were hiding with their family in one of their country homes, the Villa Ipatyev, just outside the town.

Suddenly on that early morning in Ekaterinburg, revolutionary soldiers, under Commissar Yankel Yurovskiy, burst into their quarters and ordered the Czar and his family to the cellars below.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Trotsky originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 687 published on 15 March 1975.

The assassination of Trotsky

The door to the study burst open and Lev Davidovitch Trotsky stumbled out, blood pouring from the deep wound in his head. He collapsed on to the floor, and lay there, moaning, cradled in the arms of his wife.

“They’ve succeeded,” Trotsky muttered faintly. “At last, they’ve succeeded.”

Trotsky had been struck down by a man whom he had believed to have been his friend, but whom he now knew to be an assassin working for his hated enemy, Joseph Stalin, the dictator of Russia.

The wound had been inflicted by an axe, and from it, twenty-five hours later, at 7.25 a.m. on August 21, 1940, Trotsky died in hospital in Mexico City. A delicate operation to repair the wound in his head had failed.

What had also failed was Trotsky’s attempt to find shelter in America from a fate that had been pursuing him ever since 1928.

For very many years, America had been a sanctuary for people seeking a new and better life than they had had in Europe. Some immigrants sought freedom to worship as they chose. Others came because they were poor, and America seemed to offer a fair chance of making money. Others came because the governments of their native countries were oppressive.

Lev Trotsky came to America for this last reason. More particularly, he was trying to escape the hatred of one very powerful man: Joseph Stalin, ruler of Soviet Russia.

Once, Trotsky and Stalin had worked together helping to overthrow the rule of the Russian Czars and establish, in 1917, the world’s first Communist state. However, by 1923, the two men were no longer colleagues, but deadly enemies, criticising each other harshly and constantly.

Trotsky did not begin to realise just how intense was Stalin’s hatred of him until after he was banished from Russia in 1928. As Trotsky fled from Russia to Turkey to Norway and finally, in January, 1937, to Mexico, a trail of death seemed to follow him: several of Trotsky’s supporters died mysteriously, and so did two of his secretaries and most members of his family.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Cambridgeshire originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 685 published on 1 March 1975.

A picture history of Cambridge by C L Doughty

What connection can there be between a royal princess called Etheldreda, who lived thirteen hundred years ago, and an atomic power station? Perhaps there is no connection. But it is possible that if Etheldreda had not defied her husband, Egfrid of Northumbria, taken refuge on the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire and there founded a monastery, the world as we know it would not exist.

It was monks from Ely who established a nucleus of learning in the town of Cambridge, and in 1284 it was the Bishop of Ely, Hugh de Balsham, who founded Peterhouse, the first college of Cambridge University.

It was in Cambridge, in first floor chambers north of the great gate of Trinity College, that Sir Isaac Newton formulated his laws of motion, interpreted gravity, revolutionised scientific thought and paved the way for the modern world.

It was in Cambridge, in the Cavendish laboratories, that in 1918 a scientist from New Zealand, Lord Rutherford, the atom scientist, became the first man to transmute one element, nitrogen, into another, hydrogen.

Conceivably, Rutherford would still have ushered in the atomic age, Newton still have made his great deductions, if Cambridge university had never existed. Equally, it is possible that both would have missed the mental stimulation that Cambridge provides.

Since the alteration of the county boundaries in England and Wales last year, Cambridgeshire now embraces Huntingdonshire, and with it the story of another man of letters who also studied at Cambridge University.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Louis XVII originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 684 published on 22 February 1975.

A contemporary engraving from 1789 of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette with their family, the Dauphin next to the King

Most people are sufficiently aware of the history of France to know that during the French revolution Louis the Sixteenth, the reigning King, was guillotined. Most people know, too, that the Revolution, when the Bourbon monarchy was restored for a time, in 1814, the King who came to the throne of France was Louis the Eighteenth.

How many people have stopped to think, though, of what happened between Louis the Sixteenth and Louis the Eighteenth? In short, whatever happened to Louis the Seventeenth?

The answer to that intriguing question is one of the great mysteries of French history. For there was a Louis the Seventeenth, although he was never crowned King and was quickly forgotten by his country which, at the time he lived, had too many weighty problems on its hands to bother very much about him.

Louis the Seventeenth was the son of Louis the Sixteenth, and in January, 1793, when his father laid his warm neck on the cold guillotine, young Louis, who was popularly known as the Dauphin, was just eight years old. If you ever go to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks in London you will see a tableau of the French royal family of that time. The Dauphin stands by the knee of his mother, Marie Antoinette, who soon followed her husband to the guillotine. He is a very small lad, with his father’s fullness of face. The innocence of his expression contrasts with the brutal torture which, some people believe, was soon to smother his life.

Read the rest of this article »

This edited article about Bunker Hill originally appeared in Look and Learn issue number 683 published on 15 February 1975.

The Battle of Bunker Hill by Trumbull (after)

There is no doubt that the American war of Independence was the most famous struggle in history in which a colonial dependency defeated its mighty parent state. It was a war in which proud Britain was to learn a bitter lesson, a lesson which history has proved over and over, that soldiers fight better when they are inspired by a genuine cause.

This was proved time and time again in this war which lasted from 1775 until 1781. Perhaps more than in any other engagement it was proved at the Battle of Bunker Hill.

In the June of 1775, Major General Thomas Gage, the commander of the British troops sent a force of some 2,000 infantrymen against the rebels who were entrenched on a hill over-looking Boston. As he saw it, the opposition was not serious, as most of the rebels were raw farmers, who were clearly no match against the seasoned British redcoats.

The battle began with the colonists holding their fire until the redcoats had struggled up the slopes to within fifty yards of their defences. When they did finally open fire at this point the effect was devastating. The British faltered and then fell back. Almost immediately the redcoats reformed and charged up the hill, only to be met with a hail of bullets which thinned their ranks and sent them into retreat for the second time.

Under the urging of their officers, the survivors rallied and went up that slope of death for a third time. This time, they took the hill.

In all, the British suffered more than a 1,000 casualties, as against the rebel losses of 400 men. The importance of this battle cannot be underestimated. Simple farmers had sent the British redcoats twice into retreat. This was to become a monument in the minds of the colonists with the result that their morale was strengthened enough to fortify them for the long struggle ahead.