The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Four years before the bloody American civil war, Dr David Livingstone proposed a peaceful way to rid the world of slavery.
In 1861-65, America went to bloody civil war over (among other things) the issue of slavery in the South’s cotton and sugar plantations, and upwards of a million people died. A few years earlier, Scotsman David Livingstone proposed a far less destructive answer: establish cotton and sugar farms in Africa, employ local labourers on good wages, and strangle slavery by the cords of the free market.
David Balfour hopes his crusty uncle Ebenezer is beginning to soften towards him.
David Balfour’s father has died, leaving him only a letter of introduction to take to his uncle Ebenezer in the grand-sounding House of Shaws in Scotland. Uncle Ebenezer proves to be miserly, and his house cold comfort, but David is willing to make himself useful, and after an unpromising start the old man seems to be coming round.
Three highly decorated officers in the Roman Army fall victim to a campaign to discredit them.
From 331, the Praetorian Prefect of the East was Ablabius, making him the most important man in the eastern Roman Empire after the Emperor himself. Originally a pagan from Crete, he became a Christian and was a close confidant of Emperor Constantine. Later, under Constantius, he lost his place and his life for supporting the Orthodox party in the Arian crisis.
Just as Richard Hannay was steeling himself to report failure in the hunt for a German agent, a stranger’s eye caught his own.
On the eve of the Great War, Richard Hannay has gone to Sir Walter Bullivant’s house in Queen Anne’s Gate to report failure in the search for the ‘Black Stone’ — a German spy and master of disguise whom Hannay alone can identify. Sir Walter, however, is closeted with Lord Alloa, head of the Navy.
Trouble comes to the town of Myra when Imperial soldiers are despatched to put down a revolt.
In February 313 the new Roman Emperor, Constantine, and Licinius his junior in the Balkans, decreed religious liberty across the Empire. With astonishing speed, formerly persecuted Christian bishops gained public respect, and if this tale is anything to judge by, deservedly so.
Welsh journalist Henry Stanley is despatched by head office in New York to find a missing British explorer.
In 1865 explorer David Livingstone went in search of the sources of the Nile. Three years passed with no word of his fate, so Welsh journalist Henry Stanley of the New York Herald was despatched to track him down. By the Autumn of 1871 the errand seemed hopeless, but then word came of a white man in Ujiji, on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika.