Uncle John's Bathroom Reader Plunges into History Read online

  Lev Bronstein stole his jailer’s passport and was thereafter known as Leon Trotsky.

  LADY KILLER

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  While American kids are learning about that nice Betsy Ross and her pretty flag, English schoolchildren are thrilling to the blood-and-guts saga of Queen Boudicca, one of Britain’s most revered heroines—despite the fact that she slaughtered tens of thousands of her countrymen.

  BACK IN THE SIXTIES

  In the first century A.D., when the Romans pretty much ruled the world, they regarded their subjects as barbarians. This included the people of Britain, which of course is much the way, later in history, that the British Empire felt about many of its subjects in nations they tried to colonize. But that’s another story.

  THE KING IS DEAD

  During the Roman occupation of Britain, a Celtic tribe, the Iceni, was ruled by King Prasutagus and Queen Boudicca. When the king was dying, he wrote a will that he hoped would placate the Romans. In it, he divided his possessions between his daughters and the Roman emperor Nero. When the king died in A.D. 61, the local Roman authorities swooped in and started gathering up everything that belonged to the royal family. Boudicca protested, so they flogged her and, as they say in English textbooks, “ravished” her daughters.

  LONG LIVE THE QUEEN

  Boudicca was determined to have her revenge. She pow-wowed with some of the neighboring tribes, who hadn’t been treated any better by the Romans. She incited rebellion; the tribes greeted the idea with enthusiasm. They prepared for war.

  The man they’d have to go up against was Suetonius, the commander-in-chief of the Roman troops in Britain. At the moment, he was otherwise engaged, leading an attack on the island of Mona, where other British rebels had sought refuge among the Druids, priests of the Celtic religion. When news reached the mainland that the Romans had slaughtered the Druids and destroyed all the sacred shrines and altars, the rest of Britain gladly fell into step behind Boudicca.

  Before he reunited Italy, Garibaldi lived briefly on Staten Island, working as a candle maker.

  WITH A VENGEANCE

  The queen climbed into her chariot—yes, she really rode a chariot—and stormed through the province, leading tens of thousands of warriors. Her first stop was the local Roman fortress. Boudicca’s troops burned it to the ground and sacrificed the Roman prisoners to Andrasta, the Iceni’s warrior goddess. The Romans sent the Ninth Legion against her, but her army mopped up the floor with their infantry. Only the cavalry escaped.

  Figuring that Boudicca would make London her next target, Suetonius finished his job at Druid headquarters and made his way to the city. But instead of making a stand there, he abandoned London, leaving behind only the Britons who couldn’t or wouldn’t fight on the Roman side. When Boudicca and her army got there, they burned London to the ground and took no prisoners.

  THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

  Suetonius had only 10,000 men to Boudicca’s 100,000, but he knew an unruly mob when he saw one. He laid a trap outside the city and waited for them to follow him. By now, the Britons were confident they could wipe out their Roman oppressors. So confident, in fact, that they brought their families to watch them do it. They threw themselves at the Roman troops again and again. When they realized they were outmatched and outsmarted, the British warriors turned and ran. Their families watched from the hillsides as the Romans mercilessly cut them down.

  Boudicca and her daughters managed to escape. They knew very well that if they were captured, they’d be brought to Rome and marched through the city as defeated warriors. Rather than suffer that indignity, they poisoned themselves. The queen’s loyal guards took her body and buried it where the Romans wouldn’t find it. And where no one else has been able to either. But. . .

  QUAINT BRITISH POSTSCRIPT

  There is a rumor that Boudicca’s final resting place lies beneath Platform 10 at King’s Cross Station. It’s built on the former village of Battle Bridge, which is said to be the site of Boudicca’s last battle with Suetonius. Others say that “Battle Bridge” is a corruption of “Broad Ford Bridge” and insist she’s buried on Parliament Hill, Hampstead, or in Suffolk.

  No only child has ever been elected president of the United States.

  A POX ON YOUR HOUSE

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  After the bubonic plague had come and gone, the Europeans who were left alive had to rethink a lot of things, and they came up with some good ideas.

  As the middle of the 14th century approached, Europeans heard rumors of widespread death and disease on the Asian continent. But it all seemed very far away.

  GERM WARFARE

  Some Asians thought that Genoese sailors who traded along the coast of the Black Sea had brought the disease. They (either the Mongols or the Tatars, depending on who you talk to) laid siege to Kaffa, a Crimean city inhabited by Genoese, and used catapults to lob the decaying corpses of plague victims over the city walls. This early form of germ warfare killed just about everyone inside (but nobody at the time could figure out why). A few Genoese merchants escaped and sailed for home. They took the plague along.

  SHIP OF DEATH

  In 1347, a ship from Kaffa docked at Messina, Sicily. Most of the crew was dead; the rest were dying. The men had strange black egg-sized swellings called “buboes” (hence “bubonic”) in their armpits and groins. Soon, boils and dark blotches spread over their bodies. Next thing you know, the locals had the same symptoms. Their deaths were painful and quick, usually in a matter of days.

  A PLAGUE IN EVERY PORT

  Messina started to turn away ships from the East, so those ships went to Genoa or other European ports instead, bringing the plague with them. Off the Italian coast, entire ships full of dead men floated by.

  NOT A VERY GOOD YEAR

  In 1348, the plague killed between 45,000 and 65,000 people in Florence, Italy alone. The plague raged through France that same year. When it reached Germany, thousands of Jews were accused of poisoning wells and were killed. In London, the plague killed half the population. By the spring of 1349, it moved on to Ireland.

  The last country in the Americas to abolish slavery was not the U.S. but Brazil.

  THE TOLL

  The Black Death wiped out one-fourth to one-half of Europe’s population, from 20 million to 75 million people. Survivors might have gained immunity by genetic chance, or by a lucky exposure to a milder form of the disease. No one knew what brought on such a horror or what would make it go away. People blamed earthquakes, stagnant lakes, the stars, the devil, but mostly the wrath of God. Many believed this was the end of the world.

  YOU DIRTY RATS!

  The bubonic plague had been around for a long time and had killed people before (but not as many in one swell foop). The bacteria was carried by rats, but it didn’t bother them. The fleas that fed on rats preferred the blood of small mammals to humans. As the world’s population grew, rats and their fleas came into more frequent contact with humans. Now, a fleabite could mean death.

  AIRBORNE GERMS

  After the disease reached an infected person’s lungs, it took on a form that could be transmitted through the air, propelled by coughs and sneezes. It could also be passed from person to person by direct contact. The various forms caused symptoms, ranging from rashes to buboes to vomiting blood to an overpowering stench that emanated from every breath and drop of sweat. Believe it or not, the bubonic plague still turns up occasionally. Now we can treat it with antibiotics, which work well if used early. It’s even been suggested that the plague gave future generations an important gift—those who are immune to the human immuno-deficiency virus (HIV) might have inherited a genetic mutation from ancestors who survived the Black Death.

  ABSOLUTE CHAOS

  The Black Death was a nightmare, and the world that awoke from it was changed forever. By 1350, the worst was over. At first, chaos reigned. Law and order was a thing of the past. Schools and universities closed. Churches lacked priests to hear confessions. Debtors died, so
creditors had no one to collect from. Construction projects stopped, and few craftsmen were available to make or repair anything. Morality? A thing of the past—people who weren’t dead had good reason to think they soon might be, so they decided to have a good time before the plague got them.

  Drafts of the Declaration of Independence were written on hemp paper.

  THE PERKS: THERE WERE QUITE A FEW

  Survivors had a lot to think about. Everything was different now.

  • Landlords tried to get the peasants back to work, but there weren’t as many peasants around. For the first time, workers could demand better treatment and lighter work. There were rebellions in the countryside, unheard of in more stable times. A lot of peasants moved into towns to find better jobs.

  • There weren’t a lot of working people in the cities, either. Wages rose. There were lots of goods to go around, so prices dropped. As a result, the standard of living improved. For the first time, working people began to think of themselves as individuals who mattered.

  • Land values dropped because there was so much property available. People who couldn’t have dreamed about becoming landowners now had a chance to buy property.

  • Five years after the plague, England created three new colleges at Cambridge. Universities sprang up all over Europe. Many teachers had died, so new ones had to be found. A lot of them brought fresh ideas, and they taught classes in whatever the local language was, not Latin or Greek. For the first time, common people could get an education (probably the major contributing factor to bringing on the Renaissance).

  • People started asking new questions. Most survivors couldn’t imagine the plague being God’s work. But if it wasn’t, then who or what was responsible? Questions like these hadn’t even been thought of before the plague.

  THE PLAGUE RETURNS

  The Black Death wasn’t the end of the bubonic plague. It came back, but was limited to smaller areas. The last big outbreak in England was in London in 1665. By then, people knew enough to get out of town when the plague struck—if they had any place to go. One of them, a young professor named Isaac Newton, had not had time to develop some ideas he’d been mulling over. When the plague returned, Newton fled London to his country estate, where he worked out the math for his theory of gravity.

  Josef Stalin was studying to become a Russian Orthodox priest when he found Communism.

  CANADA’S RED BARON

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  Billy Bishop was more than an ordinary guy in an extraordinary time; he was a true Canadian hero.

  World War I’s daring young men in their flying machines have mostly slipped into the yellowed pages of military histories (or their own unread memoirs). Take Baron Manfred Von Richthofen, the Red Baron, for example. He’s more often recognized as Snoopy’s arch foe than as Germany’s leading flying ace of his day.

  SNOOPY’S FOREBEARS

  During the war years, the “bloody Red Baron” had lots more to think about than Charlie Brown’s family dog. In early 1917, just across the trenches from the Red Baron, was a Royal Flying Corps pilot who was to become the British Empire’s top ace before the war ended 18 months later. The pilot was a Canadian named Billy Bishop, a most improbable hero.

  BORN TO FLY

  Lucky for the Baron, this was Billy’s first assignment since he got his wings. His flight training had amounted to only four hours of solo flying time, but it sounds as if he didn’t need much more than that. In that war, promotions came faster than planes could fly. Nice for Billy, but not so nice for the luckless German pilots who got caught in his gunsight. By the end of the war, Billy was credited with 72 kills, 11 more than the next best ace, another Canadian, Raymond Collishaw.

  LIFE WITH FATHER

  Billy Bishop grew up in the shadow of his father’s great expectations: that he would marry well, and settle down to a conservative law practice and a proper, conformist family. From early on Billy was a bit of a maverick.

  All the same, Billy showed a flair for enterprise. He dated his sister’s girlfriends—as long as his sister paid him to do it. The story goes that he charged $5 to date a young lady named Margaret Burden. It was only later that he succumbed to her charms and married her. It turned out that she was the granddaughter of Timothy Eaton, whose department stores were as famous in Canada as Macy’s or Sears are in the United States. Eaton’s annual mail order catalog could be found in more Canadian outhouses than every other catalog put together.

  Ho Chi Minh literally means “one who enlightens.”

  SAVED BY THE KAISER

  So before he went to war, Billy managed to satisfy the “marry well” expectation. The “law” expectation didn’t go as well, so his father enrolled him in Canada’s Royal Military College. Billy failed his first year, managed to get his act together the second year, and was successfully grinding it out the third year until he (uh-oh) inadvertently handed in his “crib sheets” with his final exam. Luckily, that was in 1914, and the Kaiser came along to save him from being expelled. Off to war went Billy.

  FROM COWBOY TO FLYBOY

  By 1915 Billy was in England as part of a Canadian cavalry unit. Even before he saw action he tumbled to the fact that charging around on horses wasn’t all that sensible in a trench war involving machine guns, tanks, and other monstrous devices. Our hero harkened to the freedom of the skies and the daring individuality of piloting a flying fighting machine. The only problem was that Canada didn’t have an air force.

  Billy used social connections to get into Britain’s Royal Flying Corps as an observer and artillery spotter. The planes were slow and seriously outgunned. A truck accident, an abscessed tooth, a banged-up knee, and a piece of a plane falling on his head kept him on the ground and out of harm’s way. He was sent back to Canada for a year to recover his health. He returned to England in late 1916, and started his pilot training. In February 1917 he shipped to France, and within five weeks of landing there he had gunned down 17 German aircraft.

  BILLY’S BEST

  In June 1917, Billy carried out his most audacious raid—single-handed, he attacked the Germans’ Estourmel Aerodrome. He shot two planes from the air, a third crashed into a tree in its haste to attack him, and he destroyed a fourth on the ground. This foray earned him Britain’s highest military honor, the Victoria Cross. It also earned him the disdain of some colleagues who thought him overly ambitious. The British citizenry lionized Billy Bishop, but it took more than that to make Canadian officials notice him. In May 1918—wanting to keep their hero alive—Canada ordered him home. On the last day of his war, Billy celebrated by shooting down three planes and causing two others to collide.

  Russia’s February Revolution was in March; the October Revolution was in November.

  Back home, Billy made some lecture tours, but eventually found it boring. After all, this had been the war to end all wars; prosperity and peace were no longer just around the corner, they were front and center. Goldfish swallowing, dance marathons, and high-wire walking over Niagara Falls were the news of the day. But Billy Bishop wanted to fly again.

  BILLY LAYS A BOMB

  Billy went into business with a fellow wartime ace: a charter air service, that ferried well-to-do people from Toronto to their summer lodges about 200 miles north, but the business bombed. It would have to wait for development of the executive jet. Billy and his partner thought stunt flying might be fun, so booked themselves into the air show at the Canadian National Exhibition, Canada’s premier summer fair. Their daredevil routine, which included diving at the crowds and buzzing the stands, thrilled the audience all right, it caused a panic, and supposedly caused a pregnant woman spectator to miscarry. The partners moved on. Along the way, Billy discovered he was as much a born salesman as a pilot. And a good thing it was, because the market crash of 1929 wiped out the value of his wife’s stock portfolio.

  BILLY GETS HIMSELF ANOTHER WAR

  His now-proven salesmanship and his cachet as a much-decorated flying ace made him a natural for
the job of Canada’s Air Marshall in Charge of Recruitment. He even got a role as a recruiting officer in the James Cagney movie, Captains of the Clouds (1942).

  BILLY UP TO THE BAR

  Make no mistake, Billy Bishop is a true Canadian hero. His hometown of Owen Sound, Ontario, has a Billy Bishop museum. He’s such a legend that an Ottawa bartender recently created a shooter, the Billy Bishop Bullet, to be served only to veterans and served only on Canada’s Remembrance Day, November 11. Its ingredients? For the English and French components, half gin and half cointreau respectively, for the Canadians a splash of rye whiskey on top, and for the Americans (who came on board later in the war), orange juice to taste.