Alice Pemberton: In nineteen ninety-six, a crowd crush at Guatemala City’s Estadio Mateo Flores cancels a World Cup qualifier against Costa Rica. Alice Pemberton: In seventeen eighty, raiders from British Canada burn Royalton, Vermont, in one of the American Revolution’s last major attacks on New England. Alice Pemberton: And in nineteen sixty-eight, Tommie Smith and John Carlos are thrown off the American Olympic team for the Black Power salute. Alice Pemberton: This is The Long Echo for the sixteenth of October. I'm Alice Pemberton. History doesn't repeat itself — but it echoes. Alice Pemberton: In this edition: Edmund Cavendish on the concubine who made herself emperor of China; Arthur Nightingale on Prince Potemkin's last journey across the steppe; Doc Sullivan on a cartoon empire begun beside a tuberculosis ward; and Judge Marion Calloway on a prince, two bodies, and a court that found no crime. Let's begin. Alice Pemberton: Wu Zetian began as an imperial concubine, and on this day in six ninety she stopped ruling through her sons and took China's throne herself. For the front page — our professor of history, Edmund Cavendish. Edmund? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Took it, and renamed it. Wu Zetian proclaimed a new dynasty, the Zhou, in place of the Tang, and an era called Tianshou — heaven-granted. Her son Ruizong stepped down to crown prince. Alice Pemberton: How does a junior consort get there? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Patiently. A concubine to one emperor, she married his son and ran the empire after his stroke. As empress dowager she kept her own sons off the throne. And first came petitions, waves of them, begun by a minor official called Fu Youyi — a seizure dressed as popular demand. Alice Pemberton: Reformer or tyrant? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Both. She ran informants and purged the Tang royal house; she also promoted officials on merit, in a peak age of Chinese power. Her enemies joked that Wu sounds like parrot, and the royal name, Li, like a kind of cat — so court gossip had a cat eating a parrot. Alice Pemberton: And did the cat? Professor Edmund Cavendish: Eventually. A coup restored the Tang, and she died months later. She remains the only undisputed female sovereign in China's history — and even the name Wu Zetian was given to her only once she was safely dead. Alice Pemberton: Catherine the Great's lover and favourite statesman died beside a dirt track in the open steppe on this day in seventeen ninety-one — Prince Grigory Potemkin. For the biographical sketch — our storyteller, Arthur Nightingale. Arthur? Arthur Nightingale: A desolate hillside, around midday, on the road out of Iași. Potemkin had ordered his men to carry him to Nikolayev, a town he had founded himself. He never reached it. Alice Pemberton: Where did he start? Arthur Nightingale: Near Smolensk, the only son of minor gentry — devout and brilliant, with a gold medal at Moscow University in Greek and theology. Then Grigory Potemkin backed Catherine's coup, fought well against the Turks, and became her lover, possibly her consort. Alice Pemberton: And when the passion cooled? Arthur Nightingale: He stayed. Lifelong friend, Grand Admiral, head of her armies. Given the wild southern steppe, Potemkin annexed the Crimea without a war, founded Kherson and Sevastopol, and built a Black Sea Fleet. Alice Pemberton: And the end? Arthur Nightingale: Appetite — for women, gambling, wealth, food. Sick with fever for weeks in Iași, where he was overseeing the peace, Potemkin rallied, refused his medicine, and ate a ham, a salted goose and three or four chickens. Then he dictated a last note to Catherine: “Matushka Most Merciful Lady, I have no energy left to suffer my torments. The only escape is to leave this town and I have ordered them to carry me to Nikolaev. I do not know what will become of me.” Alice Pemberton: And what's left of Potemkin? Arthur Nightingale: Sevastopol and Kherson, still standing. And a phrase: a Potemkin village, a painted façade to fool the visitors — which historians think was probably a myth. The man who built real towns is remembered for fake ones. Alice Pemberton: Walt Disney founded his studio on this day in nineteen twenty-three — and his partner, his brother Roy, was recovering from tuberculosis in a veterans' hospital. For the laboratory — our man for science and medicine, Doc Sullivan. Doc? Doc Sullivan: The veterans' hospital at Sawtelle — that's where Walt went to fetch his business manager. Walt Disney had come to Los Angeles broke; his Kansas City studio, Laugh-O-Gram, had gone bankrupt. What he still had was one pilot reel, Alice's Wonderland. Alice Pemberton: What was on it? Doc Sullivan: The experiment that sold him: a real little girl, the actress Virginia Davis, playing inside a drawn cartoon world. A New York distributor, Margaret Winkler, wired an offer for a series of Alice Comedies, and the contract was signed in Uncle Robert Disney's house. Alice Pemberton: On what kind of money? Doc Sullivan: Fifteen hundred dollars a reel to start. The Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio set up in the back of a real estate office, at ten dollars a month. Walt drew and directed; Roy, fresh from his sickbed, kept the books. Alice Pemberton: So where's the mouse? Doc Sullivan: Five years away. Everyone thinks Disney began with Mickey. It began with a girl called Alice, a camera bought on borrowed money, and a tuberculosis patient doing the sums. Alice Pemberton: Carlo Gesualdo, Neapolitan nobleman and composer, killed his wife and her lover on this day in fifteen ninety — and the court that investigated found no crime. For the chamber — our jurist, Judge Marion Calloway. Marion? Judge Marion Calloway: No crime — and they looked closely. Gesualdo found his wife, Donna Maria d'Avalos, with Fabrizio Carafa, Duke of Andria, in his apartments at the Palazzo San Severo, and killed them both on the spot. Officials of the high court, the Gran Corte della Vicaria, inspected the room and took depositions. Alice Pemberton: From whom? Judge Marion Calloway: Servants, mostly. Maria's wardrobe maid, Silvia Albana; Gesualdo's own man, Pietro, called Bardotto. The report spares nothing — the mutilated bodies, and the witnesses' account of the prince going back into the bedroom a second time, “because he wasn't certain yet they were dead.” Alice Pemberton: And still no crime? Judge Marion Calloway: Still none. With the bodies and that second visit on the record, the court found Carlo Gesualdo had committed no crime. Alice Pemberton: And he simply carried on? Judge Marion Calloway: He carried on composing — madrigals in a chromatic language nobody would hear again until the late nineteenth century. The court disposed of him in a sentence. The music has been pleading his case ever since, and Maria d'Avalos never got a hearing at all. Alice Pemberton: Around the table: our narrative historian, biographer of conquerors and statesmen, Hugo Carr; our arts and culture critic, Margaux Delacroix; and the old newspaperman, our man for print and letters, Bradford Winslow. Hugo, start us in Italy. Hugo Carr: In four fifty-six, at Piacenza, the general Ricimer beat the Western emperor Avitus — and spared him. The chronicler Victor of Tunnuna says, “sparing his innocence, he made him bishop of the city of Placentia.” Then Ricimer ruled the West through puppet emperors. Margaux Delacroix: Deposed emperor, reissued as clergy. A retirement that comes with a mitre. Bradford Winslow: Better still — in eighteen forty-three William Rowan Hamilton cracked quaternions walking along Dublin's Royal Canal, and confessed: “Nor could I resist the impulse — unphilosophical as it may have been — to cut with a knife on a stone of Brougham Bridge” the formula. Margaux Delacroix: With his wife beside him, who, he wrote, “talked with me now and then.” Now and then, Bradford! Alice Pemberton: Margaux — a flyer in Brooklyn. Margaux Delacroix: In nineteen sixteen Margaret Sanger opened America's first birth control clinic on Amboy Street, and papered the neighbourhood in English, Yiddish and Italian: “Mothers, do not kill, do not take life, but prevent.” Bradford Winslow: Ten cents bought a lecture and her pamphlet, What Every Girl Should Know. Though Sanger was a eugenicist too — both convictions in one woman. Alice Pemberton: Hugo — Harpers Ferry. Hugo Carr: In eighteen fifty-nine John Brown's raiders seized the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, aiming, said the official report, at “the liberation of the slaves of Virginia, and of the whole South.” The man who wrote that report was Colonel Robert E. Lee. Margaux Delacroix: And Brown in court, unrepentant: “I deny everything but what I have all along admitted: of a design on my part to free slaves.” Alice Pemberton: Bradford — Oslo. Bradford Winslow: In nineteen seventy-three the Nobel Peace Prize went jointly to Henry Kissinger and Lê Đức Thọ for a Vietnam ceasefire. Thọ turned it down: “it is impossible for me to accept the nineteen seventy-three Nobel Prize for Peace.” Hugo Carr: Even the committee admitted the ceasefire hadn't yet brought peace. A peace prize, declined for want of a peace. Alice Pemberton: A bishop made by force, a bridge, a flyer, a raid and a refusal — the day kept arguing with itself. Thank you, all three. Alice Pemberton: Well, that was the day that was — the sixteenth of October — where in nineteen sixty-four China joined the nuclear club, the fifth nation ever to do so; where in thirteen sixty-seven Pope Urban the Fifth entered Rome, the first pope to do so since the papacy moved to Avignon more than half a century before; and, more recently, where in nineteen ninety-five more than eight hundred thousand people gathered in Washington for the Million Man March. The echo never stops. Neither do we. See you tomorrow. Humphrey Thwaite: What they didn't tell you: in nineteen fifty C. S. Lewis published The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, dedicated to his goddaughter Lucy Barfield — “I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books.” Mortimer Finch: So he hands the child a fairy tale and tells her she's already too old for it. Charming. Humphrey Thwaite: He promised she'd grow old enough for fairy tales again. Which explains you checking the back of every wardrobe, Mortimer.