Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 20 i BBC World Histories Magazine

ACCOMPANIES THE BBC WORLD SERVICE DOCUMENTARY THE REMARKABLE RESISTANCE OF LILO, DUE TO AIR ON 25 JANUARY 2020, THEN AVAILABLE ON BBC SOUNDS After the failed assassination attempt on Hitler in July 1944, the Reich had become gripped with paranoia One day in late November 1944, a cell door clanked open in a Berlin prison. Inside, a prematurely gaunt, 40-year-old woman steeled herself for yet more questions from her Nazi interrogators. She knew, though, that these would be the last she would be called to answer. Elizabeth Charlotte Gloeden, known as Liselotte or ‘Lilo’ was on her way to the ‘House of the Dead’ – the name given by prisoners to Haus III, the cell block in Plötzensee prison in which the condemned were held. Ahead lay a last journey…

Pharaoh of Egypt c1390–1352 BC During his long reign, Amenhotep III presided over a golden age during the 18th dynasty when Egypt was the most powerful nation on Earth. And, although his grandson Tutankhamun is far more widely known today, it is Amenhotep III who was taken as the ultimate role model by subsequent monarchs. Drawing inspiration from the earlier Pyramid Age, when solar worship had dominated religious life, Amenhotep declared himself the living sun god, to outmanoeuvre and transcend the political ambitions of the Egyptian clergy. The ‘Sun King’ further augmented his power through his control of the gold mines of Nubia (modern Sudan), then part of Egypt’s vast empire, which stretched as far north as Syria and with its influence felt as far away as Mycenae in Greece.…

Emperor of China 690–705 “In the thousands of years of recorded Chinese history, no other woman has wielded the same level of direct control over so many people as Wu Zetian did” What does greatness mean? Sometimes it is something inherent within a person. Sometimes it’s the nature of their achievements. For example, regardless of their own records, Barack Obama and Margaret Thatcher are transformative figures in national and global terms because they represented important ‘firsts’. So, whatever what you may think of her personal record – and I’ll say more about a record that was both benevolent and bloody – Wu Zetian (also known as Wu Zhao) recorded one incontestable achievement: in the history of China, a country containing a huge proportion of humankind, she is the single most…

Queen of England and Ireland 1558–1603 Upon Elizabeth’s accession, firebrand Reformation leader and minister John Knox declared that: “It is more than a monster in nature that a Woman shall reign and have empire above a Man.” But the new queen, born to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in 1533, confounded all expectations. Rather than fight against the misogyny of her male advisers, she pretended to share their regret that she had been born “a weak and feeble woman” – but used her feminine wiles to devastating effect. A master of pragmatism, she settled the vexed question of religion and established much-needed peace and stability after one of the most turbulent half-centuries in England’s history. During her long reign, England emerged as a world power, defeating the Spanish Armada and…

Pope 1198–1216 The medieval popes wielded vast spiritual and political power, and Innocent III was arguably the most influential of them all. Born Lotario di Segni near Rome, he was elected pope at the age of just 37 or 38. He reformed church law and spiritual life, tightening the laws on marriage, prescribing annual confession and helping launch the Franciscan order. He banned the involvement of churchmen in trial by ordeal, on the basis that it was superstitious and unjust (because it was not the duty of the accused to prove their innocence) – a decision with huge ramifications for the development of European legal systems. He redrew the political map of Europe, making England and Aragon vassal states of the papacy and launching an expedition against heresy in southern…

King of Wessex 871–99 “Alfred wanted practical men who could read and carry out instructions to unify the nation” King Alfred – he was not widely referred to as ‘the Great’ until the 16th century – was remarkable for taking the kingdom of Wessex in southern England from a nation of warring ealdormen, the leaders of the shires, to a unified kingdom of the English. With its dependent kingdoms, it incorporated all of southern England including the old Wessex, Kent, the West Country and the western Midlands. Unifying territories into a political whole is not unusual; it was the reorganisation of defence, the law and, especially, education carried out by Alfred that makes him a memorable example of a true leader. Beginning in the later eighth century, the British Isles…

It was Margaret Mead who gave perhaps the earliest ethnographic account of what is now known as ‘mansplaining’. In the late summer of 1925 she arrived on the South Pacific island of Tutuila, in American Samoa, after a transcontinental and transoceanic journey from her home in New York City. She was only 23 years old, and had little to show for her life so far except for a rickety marriage to an ex-seminarian and a partly completed doctorate in anthropology. She hoped that some time away – from departmental gossip at Columbia University, from her husband, and from the cloying embrace of yet another man with whom she was having a tempestuous affair – might usher her toward the next phase of her life and career. During her first night…

A black liberation leader stands holding out his hand, staring into an as-yet-unrealised future, as a formerly enslaved woman rises. The Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow (1935–2016) created Toussaint Louverture et la vieille esclave (Toussaint Louverture and the elderly enslaved woman, shown right) in 1989 as part of a series of sculptures commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution. Unlike the other sculptures, however, Sow’s depicts a figure who actually struggled against the French state, taking on the mantle of the original revolutionary principles (Egalité, Fraternité and, above all, Liberté). Louverture (1743–1803), military leader of the Haitian Revolution, successfully channelled an uprising of free people of colour and, later, enslaved people into an armed movement that, by 1800, had ended both slavery and French rule on the island of Hispaniola. Louverture…

Kathleen Burk What makes a leader truly great? That’s the challenge tackled by our panel of experts on page 42. Burk, emeritus professor of modern and contemporary history at University College London, cites Alfred the Great’s focus on education: “The most revolutionary change was his insistence on general literacy”. Simon Parkin In the first of two Second World War features this issue, the writer reveals how a small group of Wrens tamed Germany’s fearsome U-boats. “Armed with little more than balls of string, sticks of chalk and a scroll of canvas, they designed a game that could closely approximate chaotic sea battles,” he explains from page 62. Serhii Plokhy During the Second World War, US air bases were set up in Ukraine – a rare US-Soviet collaboration described by Harvard…

Alev Scott is a journalist and author. Her new book, co-written with Andronike Makris, is Power & the People: Five Lessons from the Birthplace of Democracy (Riverrun, 2019) In 427 BC, the Athenian demagogue Cleon declared that “democracy is incapable of empire” – a surprisingly modern view recorded for us by the historian Thucydides in his account of the Peloponnesian War fought between democratic Athens and oligarchic Sparta in the years 431–405 BC. Nearly 2,500 years ago, the tension between superpower status and democratic ideals had already become obvious to political leaders and voters alike. The Athenians, early pioneers of democracy and masters of naval supremacy, understood that maintaining an empire requires some heavy handling of both subject states and allies. Cleon was advocating a less democratic, more decisive foreign…

Queen of Castile 1474–1504 When Isabella took the throne of Castile in 1474, she did so largely by her own efforts, in the teeth of a rival faction. Even her marriage to Ferdinand of Aragon, who provided the military expertise for her endeavour, had been of her own making. Together they completed the Reconquest from the Moors of the Iberian peninsula, laid the foundations of the Spanish and, indeed, Habsburg empires, and reshaped the western world. Isabella’s career illustrates the dark side of power as well as the light. She is remembered for the expulsion of the Jews from the reorganised Spain, and for the introduction of the Inquisition. Even her sponsorship of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 expedition to the New World had (contrary to Isabella’s own wishes) dreadful consequences for…

20th-century African independence fighter Greatness is an attribute best judged by circumstances. In every era, humans have had many apparently insuperable problems to overcome. Those who are great are those who can find solutions to these problems, or who can inspire others to solve them. In the 20th century, most of Africa was faced with the task of liberating itself from foreign colonial rule. In many countries, a form of independence was achieved by the early 1960s. However, the dictatorial government of Portugal refused to acknowledge the rights of Africans to govern themselves in its colonies, which included Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde and Portuguese Guinea (which became Guinea-Bissau after independence). The struggle for independence in Guinea was led by the great Amílcar Cabral (1924–73), who also played a leading role…

US president 1861–65 As a teenager in County Durham in the late 1980s, during the last gloaming of the coal industry, I first encountered Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) in an unexpected place. Browsing in a second-hand bookshop, I found him in the autobiography of John Wilson, the founder of the Durham Miners’ Association. Wilson recounted how, blacklisted for union organising in north-east England in the 1860s, he had been forced to emigrate to western Pennsylvania, where he found himself in the midst of a bloody civil war. Though some of his fellow miners openly cheered when Lincoln was assassinated, Wilson became so enamoured with the Union cause and its martyred leader that, when he wrote his memoirs half a century later, there was to him no greater leader in any time…

“The story of Soviet-US bases in Ukraine started on a high note. Unfortunately, it didn’t end on one” “One part of the vision was becoming real allies, not just in terms of coordination but also fighting together” Matt Elton: What’s the story at the heart of your book? Serhii Plokhy: It’s about the collapse of the Grand Alliance between the so-called ‘Big Three’ (the UK, the US, and the Soviet Union), and the transition from the Second World War to the Cold War. It looks at a number of personalities and very particular places that will be unfamiliar to most people. The characters involved lived for about a year, or a little longer, at three air bases – Poltava, Myrhorod and Pyryatyn in Ukraine (then within the territory of the…

Japanese feudal lord, 16th century “In battle after battle, Oda showed himself to be a first-class tactician. He defeated far larger forces than his own by using surprise attacks” Oda Nobunaga was born in 1534 into a country at war with itself. Once ruled by emperors and later by shoguns, Japan was by then split into fiefdoms whose samurai fought endless battles with one another. Inheriting a fief in central Japan, Oda spent 30 years trying to put the situation right. He was not an altruist, a pacifist or a diplomat. There was only one way of unifying Japan, he thought, and he made of it a motto: “Rule the realm by force.” In battle after battle, Oda proved to be a first-class tactician. He defeated far larger forces than…

King of England, Scotland and Ireland 1689–1702 “William was a world figure, above many of the national and religious prejudices of his time” The prince of Orange, a small principality in southern France, became Stadholder (governor) and commander-in-chief of the Netherlands in 1672 at the age of just 21 in circumstances that would have daunted most other leaders. William (1650–1702) was descended from earlier Dutch leaders and, through his mother, Mary Henrietta (daughter of Charles I), from the kings of England, but faced a hostile ruling class and an Anglo-French invasion by land and sea. Rather than surrender, he resolved to “die in the last ditch”, a phrase that he invented. Through a combination of acumen, persistence and courage, by 1689 he transformed himself into the political master of the…

French military leader, 15th century On 29 April 1429, dressed as a soldier in full armour at the head of an army, ‘La Pucelle’ (‘The Maiden’) reached Orléans, coming to save the French city besieged by the English. Within a week, the invaders from across the channel had been defeated and forced into retreat – the major turning point of the Hundred Years’ War. Joan (1412–31) had declared to the English that she was “sent here by God, the king of heaven, to drive you all out of France” and, though she did not live to see it, she was the inspiration who turned the tide. Joan, a woman from a peasant family, could not lead an army by any normal means. But her sheer force of will and belief…

UK prime minister 1940–45 & 1951–55 “It was Churchill’s decision and sharp political manoeuvring that kept Britain in the war. Through his inspiring leadership and indomitable moral and physical courage, he saved the world from the most evil regime in history” On Saturday 25 May 1940, as the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) was being flung back towards Dunkirk before being expelled from the continent by the Wehrmacht, the British foreign secretary, Lord Halifax, suggested to the five-man War Cabinet in London that peace negotiations be initiated with Adolf Hitler via the (then neutral) Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Over the next three days, while the BEF started to be evacuated from the beaches of Dunkirk, the Cabinet discussed the pros and cons of ending a war Britain seemed to have comprehensively…

Empress of Russia 1762–96 “Catherine found herself yoked to a stupid and drunken husband. She had to navigate the murky, brutal politics of the Russian court. Where others would have floundered, she triumphed” Let me start in a disobliging way by saying that there is no greatest figure in history. The past is not an Olympic race: it doesn’t have rules to decide winners or losers. And what is ‘greatness’? Making the biggest impact on politics or science or values? Perpetrating the worst crimes? I can guarantee that whatever name each of us comes up with will be met with cheers, boos or caveats. Yet it is quite a fun game to play, and gets us thinking about who has made a difference. So what do you say to Catherine…