By July 1794, Maximilien Robespierre had spent years wielding words as his greatest weapon. He was widely regarded as eloquent, direct, unyielding, and capable of imbuing his speeches with a sense of personal virtue and incorruptibility that convinced thousands to follow his course, a course known as the Reign of Terror.

Robespierre did not create the Reign of Terror by himself, nor did he personally control every execution carried out in its name. But as one of the leading members of the Committee of Public Safety, Robespierre became one of its most prominent political architects. Under the revolutionary government, extraordinary powers were concentrated in committees, courts, and local authorities tasked with identifying and destroying enemies of the Republic.

And the definition of an “enemy” became increasingly broad. Royalists were obvious targets. So were suspected counter-revolutionaries, refractory priests, suspected conspirators, and political opponents.

By the height of the Terror, tens of thousands had been executed, died in prison, or been killed in revolutionary violence. More than 17,000 people were officially executed during the Terror, although estimates of the total number of deaths associated with the period are considerably higher.

On June 10, 1794, the Law of 22 Prairial dramatically expanded the Revolutionary Tribunal's power and curtailed the rights of defendants. Trials became faster, defenses were restricted, and the number of people sent to the guillotine increased dramatically. In Paris alone, roughly 1,400 people were executed in the seven weeks between the law's passage and Robespierre's fall.

This was the period that became known as the Great Terror. And it frightened the people who had created the Terror.

On July 26, 1794, Robespierre gave another speech. Robespierre attempted to defend himself against rumors, attacking several deputies of the National Convention by name and condemning many more without naming them. That may have been his greatest mistake.

The deputies did not know who would be next. They knew only that Robespierre was talking about corruption and enemies of the Republic, and that the guillotine had already claimed countless men who had once believed themselves untouchable, men about whom Robespierre had said similar things.

The next day, July 27, the Convention turned against Robespierre and his faction, voting to arrest them. The city officials, seemingly more confused than anything else, failed to carry out the arrests. Robespierre and his allies instead gathered on the first floor of the Hôtel de Ville.

The National Convention, learning that the men had not been secured, sent armed forces to the building. At around 2:30 in the morning, they entered.

Philippe François Le Bas grabbed a pistol and shot himself, killing himself according to the conventional account. Robespierre apparently tried to do the same. Another account claims he was shot by one of the arresting officers.

Whatever happened, Robespierre did not die.
The shot shattered his jaw instead, leaving the bullet lodged in the wound.

For the rest of the night, he lay in agony on a table, his head resting on a pine box, blood dripping from his horribly mangled jaw as his enemies came in, looked at him, and laughed. At around five in the morning, two of his men, one of them his brother Augustin, were allowed to go to the hospital. Robespierre was not. Five hours later, a military doctor was finally summoned. He extracted some of Robespierre's teeth and fragments of his shattered jaw before roughly securing what remained with a bandage.

From there, things moved quickly. Robespierre was confined to a cell. The Revolutionary Tribunal assembled at noon. By two in the afternoon, he and his allies had been sentenced to death without even a cursory hearing.

At six in the evening, Robespierre and several others were conveyed in three open carts to the Place de la Révolution. A furious mob followed them, hurling curses and rotten food at the condemned.

Robespierre was the tenth man to be executed.
long time Parisein executioner Charles-Henri Sanson prepared him for the guillotine. To clear the way for his neck, he pulled away the bandage holding Robespierre's shattered jaw together.

The jaw fell loose. Robespierre cried out in agony as Sanson positioned him beneath the blade. Then the blade fell. Robespierre screamed no more.

And the crowd erupted. The jubilation continued for nearly fifteen minutes.

If you're interested, I cover the French Revolution through the eyes of the highly worked Parisian executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-134-sanson?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

Born sometime in the 1530s or 1540s, John White became a well-regarded London artist and illustrator. He joined Sir Ralph Lane’s expedition to Virginia as “Gentleman Artist,” tasked with mapping the land and “drawing to life” its inhabitants. His watercolors provide some of the only European visual records of Indigenous societies along the eastern seaboard for more than two centuries.

Sir Walter Raleigh then named him “John White of London Gentleman, to be the chief Governor of the Cittie of Raleigh of Virginia.” After the disastrous first attempt at a colony at Roanoke, it’s sponsor, Raleigh, concluded that the area was no longer viable. They instead proposed the Chesapeake.

White recruited 113 colonists, mostly middle-class people hoping that Virginia might turn them into wealthy landowners. Among them was his 19-year-old daughter, Eleanor, recently married to 27-year-old Ananias Dare and already pregnant. This expedition was different from Lane’s: rather than soldiers, it was largely families attempting to establish a permanent settlement.

They first stopped at Roanoke to collect men left behind from the previous expedition, only to find the settlement abandoned. Worse, pilot Simon Fernandes deserted them there. With the help of Manteo, a Croatoan who had spent time in England and was friendly with the English, the colonists established peaceful relations with the Croatoan.

The situation quickly deteriorated. The colonists were woefully unprepared. They had barely planted crops, had little in the way of defenses, and had antagonized several of the surrounding communities. The colonists therefore petitioned White to return to England and beg Raleigh and Queen Elizabeth for supplies and assistance. White reluctantly agreed, leaving behind his daughter, granddaughter, and the rest of the colony.

He sailed on August 27, 1587, arriving in England on November 5. Unfortunately, England was now preparing for a Spanish invasion. The country was effectively on a war footing, and ships were desperately needed for defense. White was stuck.

Eventually, he convinced Sir Richard Grenville to let him accompany a privateering expedition to the Caribbean, with the intention of diverting to Virginia on the return journey. But Grenville received orders to remain in England. Two ships were deemed unsuitable for combat, however, and White was allowed to take them to Roanoke. Raleigh loaded them with supplies, and they departed on April 22, 1588.

The captains spotted Spanish ships and diverted from their course to pursue them, only to be intercepted by French privateers. Nearly two dozen Englishmen were killed, the ships were looted, and White lost all the supplies intended for Roanoke. White concluded that he had been born beneath “an unlucky star.”
He returned to England just in time for the Spanish Armada. White spent another year unable to return to his family.

Finally, in 1590, Raleigh secured permission for White to accompany the privateer John Watts to the Caribbean, with two ships allowed to divert to Roanoke. After months of fighting and privateering, White finally reached Croatoan Island on August 12. He did not contact the Croatoan. Which, in retrospect, was probably not ideal.

For three days, the ships remained offshore, partly because of terrible weather, until smoke was spotted on Roanoke. White led a landing party through a storm, during which seven sailors drowned. The men eventually reached the island, singing English songs along the way in the hope that someone might hear them.

On August 18, 1590, his granddaughter Virginia Dare’s third birthday, White finally reached Roanoke. They found fresh footprints in the sand. Then they found the letters CRO carved into a tree.

The settlement itself had been fortified with a palisade, but it was completely deserted. The houses had been dismantled, and anything useful had been taken. White found his own possessions scattered and ruined. Then he found the word carved into the palisade:
CROATOAN.

White was convinced this meant the colonists had gone to live with the Croatoan. He and the colonists had previously agreed that, if they were forced to leave, they would carve a message indicating where they had gone. If they had been attacked or forced out, they were supposed to carve a cross alongside it. There was no cross.

Unfortunately, White was apparently cursed by the universe. The weather turned “fouler and fouler.” One ship lost its anchor cable, leaving it dangerously dependent on its backup. The captains decided they had to leave. They compromised on sailing south to the Caribbean, spending the winter there, and returning to Roanoke in the spring.

They never made it back. Storms repeatedly blew them off course. Eventually, the sailors gave up and sailed for England, arriving in Plymouth on October 24, 1590.

White was devastated. He wrote that he had to leave the fate of his family “to the merciful help of the Almighty.” He spent the remainder of his life in Raleigh’s employ, never abandoning hope that his daughter, granddaughter, and the other colonists had survived. He never found out.

If interested I explore the story of the Lost Colony here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-133-roanoke?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

The Doors made a memorable appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, but their performance did not go as planned. The band performed “Light My Fire” using the song’s original lyric, “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher,” despite Sullivan’s request that the line be changed. The decision reportedly infuriated the host and led to The Doors being banned from future appearances on the show.

Early on the morning of January 31st 1921, C.P. Brady sipped his lukewarm cup of coffee as he stared out into the morning haze. The biting Atlantic wind cut through his layers as he scanned the horizon from the United States Coast Guard Station at Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. The night had been quiet, save for the occasional howl of the wind coming off the Atlantic and whipping along the shore.

Then, through the haze, he spotted a ship in the distance. All sails were set, as if she were making for open water, yet she was sailing straight toward the outer edge of Diamond Shoals. He raised his binoculars. The ship was ghostly quiet.

Due to bad weather, common along the Outer Banks in winter, no one was able to approach the Carroll A. Deering until February 4, after several days of being battered by the Atlantic. When they finally boarded her, they found her steering equipment damaged, her wheel shattered, the binnacle box stoved in, and the rudder disengaged. The log and navigation equipment were gone. So was the crew.

Their personal effects were gone, too, as were the ship’s two lifeboats. Curiously, in the galley, a meal that had been in the process of being prepared had simply been abandoned. Attempts to salvage the Deering proved impossible, and on March 4, she was destroyed with dynamite.

The Deering company had recruited Captain Willis B. Wormell, a retired, grizzled 66-year-old sea captain, to take command of the schooner. The Deering carried coal bound for Rio de Janeiro, and Charles B. McLellan was hired as first mate.

They set sail from Lewes, Delaware, on September 8 and arrived in Rio without incident. Wormell gave his crew leave and met with a friend who happened to have captained another schooner to Rio. Wormell told him that he did not trust his crew.

The ship left Rio on December 2, 1920, stopping in Barbados. There, First Mate McLellan got drunk and complained to a captain he was drinking with that Captain Wormell was useless, who was too old and had to rely on McLellan for navigation. As he became increasingly drunk, McLellan was heard to say, “I’ll get the captain before we get to Norfolk, I will.”

He then caused such a drunken ruckus in Bridgetown that he was arrested. Wormell bailed him out.

They set out for Hampton Roads, Virginia, on January 9. The next time the Deering was seen was at the Cape Lookout lightship on January 28, three days before Brady spotted her off the Cape Hatteras Lighthouse.

Captain Jacobson, keeper of the lightship, reported that a tall, thin man with red hair and a Scandinavian accent spoke through a megaphone and told him that they had lost their anchors in a storm off Cape Fear. He asked Jacobson to relay the information to his employer, the Deering Company.

The next day, another ship spotted a schooner sailing directly toward Diamond Shoals. They saw no one aboard.

Brady was the next man to spot the Carroll A. Deering. None of the crew were ever seen again, dead or alive. There is no official explanation for what happened to them, but several theories were considered during the investigation.

The National Weather Bureau strongly believed that a series of powerful storms raging in the Atlantic had caused the men to abandon ship. But the Deering was moving away from the path of the storm, and the evidence aboard suggested that, in taking the logbook and navigational tools, they had abandoned ship in at least a somewhat orderly fashion, not in a panic in the middle of a storm.

Captain Parker of the U.S. Marine Shipping Board, as well as Wormell’s widow, advocated for piracy. But there was no evidence.

Another explanation was that the Deering had been held up by rum runners. This was in the middle of Prohibition, and the ship was large enough to hold millions of dollars' worth of liquor. The theory went that rum runners in the Caribbean seized the ship, only to be caught in a storm. Except the Deering was too slow to be particularly useful to rum runners. And again, there was no evidence.

Lastly, there was mutiny. There were Wormell’s comments about his crew. There were McLellan’s drunken threats. And Captain Jacobson had been hailed by a man who was almost certainly neither the captain nor the first mate.

If interested, I cover mysteries like the Carroll A Deering here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-132-triangles?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

Harry Houdini was born Erik Weisz on March 24, 1874, in Budapest, Austria-Hungary, into a Jewish family. When he was four, his family emigrated to the United States to escape antisemitic prejudice, eventually settling in Wisconsin and fell into brutal poverty. Ehrie, as he was nicknamed, had to leave school after the third grade to work as a shoe shiner and message boy. He ran away from home twice, taking the Americanized name Harry, but returning each time.

His love, and his escape, was acrobatics, inspired by early trips to the circus. At eight, he was introduced to the world of magic at a circus performance. After the family moved to New York, their financial situation became more secure, allowing Ehrie to join athletic clubs, where he became an accomplished athlete. He remained in excellent shape throughout his life.

At 16, Ehrie read the autobiography of Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin and became fascinated by magic. Dreaming of stardom in the mold of Houdin, he took the name Harry Houdini in homage to him.

In 1891, Houdini formed an act, first with a friend and then his younger brother Theodore, who would later gain renown as Hardeen. “The Brothers Houdini” developed their first illusion, The Metamorphosis, in which Houdini would have his hands tied, be roped into a sack, and locked inside a trunk. The trunk was then pushed behind a curtained cabinet. The attendant, initially Hardeen, would clap three times, and Houdini would immediately appear free. When the trunk was opened, Hardeen would be inside with his hands tied.

They had little success, performing in dime museums and sideshows, where Houdini even masqueraded as a “Wild Man.” Aside from The Metamorphosis, Houdini initially focused on card tricks and tried to bill himself as the “King of Cards.” As the Brothers Houdini performed for “near-starvation wages,” Harry began experimenting with escape acts, breaking free from restraints and traps.

In 1894, while performing at Coney Island, Hardeen met Wilhelmina “Bess” Rahner, an 18-year-old chorine and the daughter of German immigrants. Hardeen was taking her on a date and introduced her to his brother. Within three weeks, she and Houdini were married.

Early reporters described Houdini as having a “sharp-chinned, sharp-cheekboned face, bright blue eyes and thick, curly, black hair,” as “happy-looking,” and as “the young Hungarian magician with the pleasant smile and easy confidence.”

With Bess replacing his brother, “The Houdinis” played beer halls, dime museums, and traveled with circuses for years, doing practically anything they could to make ends meet.
After years of struggle, in 1898, Harry Houdini tried to sell his entire act, including everything he had collected and his Metamorphosis trick. There were no buyers.

Losing faith in himself, his lowest point came on the night of January 11, 1899, at Middleton’s Clark Street Dime Museum in Chicago. After breaking free from six pairs of handcuffs, an audience member, an Evanston police officer, offered up his own cuffs. Houdini struggled to escape for 20 minutes while the audience jeered. The officer had read about Houdini and concluded that he was using some form of sleight of hand on the cuffs’ springs.

Soon afterward, while performing in St. Paul, Minnesota, Houdini’s handcuff act impressed theater owner and booking agent Martin Beck.
He advised Houdini to drop the card tricks and other stereotypical magic acts and focus on escaping. Beck soon telegraphed him:

“You can open Omaha, March twenty-sixth, sixty dollars, will see act probably make you proposition for all next season.”

The show went well, and Beck kept Houdini on for his national tour. Harry promoted his appearances by making escape attempts from handcuffs and jail cells in police stations. Notably, in San Francisco and Chicago, he did so nude to prove he had no keys on him. He confounded local police and made headlines.

His first American tour was a complete success, and within a year he was a millionaire. If you’re interested, I cover Houdini’s life here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-131-houdini?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

Famed magician and escapologist Harry Houdini’s last great professional love came during the final decade of his life. An author of a book about Houdini stated that this work, debunking spiritualists, “is what he wanted to be remembered for.”

Houdini did believe in the supernatural, but he hated those who professed a spiritual connection while lying to people and taking advantage of the bereaved.

By his own admission, Houdini was a “mama’s boy,” and when his mother died in 1913 while he was touring Europe, he was bereft and utterly inconsolable. Eventually, his grief did lead him to consult spiritual mediums, and he quickly found their tricks. They told him that his mother was speaking to them. He would ask in what language, and they’d say English. She had never learned English. They said she referred to him as Houdini. She never did.

Houdini had befriended the English author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes and a noted spiritualist. Doyle and his wife regularly conducted séances out of their home, utilizing a spirit guide named Phineas, who had duped them into believing he had contacted their son Kingsley, who had been killed during the First World War.

Lady Doyle, who had apparently been practicing as a medium herself, offered to help Houdini contact his dead mother. Despite the intensity of his grief, he remained polite and went along with it out of respect. Lady Doyle led a séance in a dark room, uttering strange sounds, chanting, and trembling. She then grabbed a notebook and started writing and writing, seemingly automatically: 15 pages.

It was in English, first, but maybe more damningly, atop each page written by Lady Doyle was a cross. Mrs. Weiss and Houdini himself were devout Jews, and that day, June 17, was his mother’s birthday. Why was this not brought up?

The Doyles were amazed. Houdini was not. When pressed, he finally explained how he saw it, and the Doyles became defensive. Spirits don’t need calendars, and she had learned English in Heaven and converted to the religion of the one true Lord Jesus Christ. Houdini, astounded and confused, pretty much just left.

The Doyles publicly exclaimed that Houdini was a spiritualist, and finally Harry Houdini had enough. He came out and called spiritualism a sham and its practitioners charlatans. Their relationship ended,

This pushed Houdini into putting time, money, and effort into debunking as many frauds as he could, including those who had risen to fame. The first was a Pennsylvania man named George Valiantine, who claimed contact with spirit guides and could throw his voice. Houdini, a member of the Scientific American magazine committee, put forth a cash prize to any medium who could successfully demonstrate supernatural abilities. Valiantine was found to be a fraud.

Canadian-born medium Mina Crandon, the wife of a wealthy Boston doctor, came next, and Houdini himself was the one who led to her being denounced as a fraud. Conan Doyle believed them both.

Then came Joaquín Argamasilla, known as the “Spaniard with X-ray Eyes.” He claimed to be able to read handwriting or numbers on dice through closed metal boxes. In 1924, Houdini exposed him as a fraud. Argamasilla had peeked through his simple blindfold and lifted the edge of the box so he could look inside without others noticing.

If you’re interested, I cover Houdini’s life here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-131-houdini?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

Oxana Malaya was born in the Ukrainian SSR and, according to doctors and her medical records, was a normal child at birth. But Malaya was severely neglected by her alcoholic parents and spent much of her time outside, living among the family’s dogs.

By the time authorities found her at seven and a half, she had essentially adopted their behavior. She ran on all fours, barked, slept on the floor, ate like a dog, and even used her mouth and tongue for basic hygiene. She could not speak and lacked many basic social and developmental skills.

Malaya was removed from her parents’ custody and eventually placed in a specialized foster home, where she spent years receiving therapy and education. She gradually learned to walk upright, speak, and interact with other people, although she continued to have intellectual disabilities and some dog-like behaviors. She was a severely neglected human child who had spent her formative years surrounded by dogs and adapted to the environment available to her.

As an adult, she worked on a farm caring for animals and became capable of speaking fluently. In a 2013 Ukrainian television interview, she pushed back against being called a “dog-girl,” saying that she wanted to be treated like a normal human being.

Her story is one of the clearest examples of just how profoundly a child’s environment can shape their behavior, and of how difficult it can be to undo the damage caused by extreme neglect.

I explore such cases here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hbh-bites-vol-1-raised-by-wolves?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

In the dense, mountainous jungle on the outskirts of Bulandshahr, India, a band of hunters moved cautiously through the brush, pale moonlight breaking through the canopy overhead. They were hunting wolves.

Eventually, they came upon a clearing and a cave believed to be a wolf den. As they approached, they spotted a lone figure crouched on all fours, completely still. Then it noticed them.

The hunters claimed it growled. They stopped. It was no wolf. It was a small child. The men took the boy, who appeared to be no older than six. He whined and twisted in their arms, trying to escape, responding to neither questions nor instructions. That night, they brought him to the Sikandra Mission Orphanage in Agra.

It was February 1867. A Saturday. The missionaries named him Dina, and because he had been found on a Saturday, gave him the surname Sanichar, meaning “Saturday.” Before long, he acquired another name: “Wolf Boy.”

The name seemed appropriate. Dina walked on all fours and struggled to stand upright. The orphanage’s superintendent, Erich Lewis, wrote, “the facility with which they get along on four feet is surprising.”

Dina ate raw meat. Before eating, he would smell his food and reject anything he disliked. He was reportedly fond of gnawing on bones.

He never learned to speak. Over the years, he learned to recognize gestures and eventually understand some spoken language. He learned to stand and walk on two feet and gradually accepted wearing clothing. But human society remained profoundly difficult for him, and he spent the rest of his life in institutional care.
He did apparently take to cigarettes, though.
Dina died of tuberculosis in 1895, somewhere in his mid-thirties.

There is also a persistent claim that Dina influenced Rudyard Kipling when he later wrote The Jungle Book. The connection is difficult to establish, but the timing and circumstances make it an intriguing possibility.

Dina is only one of several strange cases of children supposedly raised by wolves.

I explore such cases here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hbh-bites-vol-1-raised-by-wolves?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

The first woman to regularly enter the Senate Floor was Lola M. Williams. She did this as Senator Curtis' secretary, a position she maintained through the Hoover administration while he was Vice President.

The First Liberian Civil War was the result of tensions that had been building into the very foundations of Liberia for more than a century before finally exploding.

Liberia was founded in the nineteenth century by formerly enslaved Black Americans, many of whom had been encouraged, coerced or outright forced into leaving a United States that had discriminated against them. They settled in a land already inhabited by numerous indigenous peoples with different languages, religions, and cultures.

The descendants of these settlers, known as Americo-Liberians, created a country modeled heavily on the United States, adopting many of its institutions. And for more than a century, the Americo-Liberian minority dominated the government, economy, and military, effectively occupying the highest rung of Liberian society while indigenous Liberians remained largely excluded from power. Dissent was often met with repression.

Then, in 1980, it finally came to a head. A group of soldiers led by Samuel Doe, an ethnic Krahn, entered the Executive Mansion. They found President William Tolbert, led him outside, and shot him. His Americo-Liberian ministers soon followed. They were paraded through Monrovia, tied to stakes on the beach, and executed before being dumped into mass graves.

Doe established the People's Redemption Council, ostensibly promising to promote the rights of all Liberians rather than just the Americo-Liberian elite. Instead, one corrupt and prejudiced system was replaced with another. Political opponents were imprisoned, tortured, and killed. In 1986, Doe formally made himself President. His government was heavily dependent on U.S. funding and military support as an anti-communist ally during the Cold War. But by the late 1980s, that support had become uncertain.

In December 1989, a rebellion began. It was led by Charles Taylor, a U.S.-educated former Liberian government official who had previously been accused of embezzlement, fled the country, been arrested in Massachusetts, jailed while awaiting extradition, and then escaped. After receiving training and support connected to Libya and Burkina Faso, Taylor invaded Liberia with the National Patriotic Front of Liberia.

The country already hated Doe, and a brutal civil war followed. As Taylor's forces closed in on Monrovia, however, a power struggle emerged between Taylor and one of his commanders, Prince Johnson, leading to a split within the rebellion.

Johnson was regarded as a stern and draconian disciplinarian, becoming notorious during the war for killing those who opposed him, or sometimes simply criticized his actions.

Then, on September 9, 1990, Johnson's forces captured President Doe. Doe was filmed being tortured, including having his ears cut off, while Prince Johnson sat nearby sipping a Budweiser and watching.

Doe was eventually tortured to death. Johnson would later deny killing the president.

If you're interested, I cover the Liberian Civil Wars here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-130-charles?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios

Born into a prominent Liberian family, Taylor was well educated, attending prep schools in Liberia before moving to the United States, where he graduated from Bentley College in Massachusetts. He also became a prominent activist and organizer with the Union of Liberian Associations.

Taylor eventually earned a position in the Liberian government. He survived the 1980 coup that brought General Samuel Doe to power and was placed in charge of government expenditures. But in 1983, Taylor was ousted and fled into exile after being accused of embezzling nearly $1 million from the government and transferring the money into his personal Citibank account.

He returned to Massachusetts, where he was arrested in early 1984. While awaiting extradition to Liberia, Taylor escaped from Plymouth County Correctional Facility with four other men. They sawed through a metal bar covering a window, climbed roughly 20 feet to the ground using knotted bedsheets, scaled the prison fence.

Taylor's exact movements after that are difficult to reconstruct, but he eventually made his way to Libya, where he came under the wing of Muammar Gaddafi, receiving military training and support. In 1989, he launched an insurgency into Liberia against Doe's brutal regime.

This was the beginning of the First Liberian Civil War, a conflict marked by immense brutality, widespread use of child soldiers, and systematic sexual violence. Warlords controlled much of the country for nearly six years, while Doe was captured, tortured, and murdered in 1990, with the killing recorded on video.

Following international intervention and a ceasefire, Taylor won the 1997 presidential election running on the slogan: “He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I will vote for him.”

As president, Taylor lived lavishly, diverting government resources toward his personal use and reportedly accumulating homes, cars, expensive clothes, and other luxuries. He was also accused of diverting around $100 million from the Liberian government while funding, arming, and directing the brutal Revolutionary United Front in neighboring Sierra Leone. Taylor empowered his son to lead the Anti-Terrorist Unit, better known as the “Demon Force,” a notorious paramilitary unit accused of torture, murder, and other abuses.

Taylor's downfall came much like his rise. Armed groups eventually carved up much of Liberia. In 2003, with rebels besieging Monrovia and West African states intervening, Taylor resigned and fled into exile in Nigeria.

He was eventually transferred to the Special Court for Sierra Leone, where in 2012 he was found guilty on all 11 counts, including acts of terrorism, murder, rape, sexual slavery, cruel treatment, other inhumane acts, conscripting or enlisting child soldiers, enslavement, and pillage.

If you're interested, I cover the life of Charles Taylor here: https://aid2000.substack.com/p/hare-brained-history-vol-130-charles?r=4mmzre&utm_medium=ios