Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there. This week we've got the remarkable story of a

black American soldier who decided his life might be better in

Maoist China. He knew what life was like in America. He had no promise of what life was

going to be like in China, but why would you go back to a nightmare that you know?

Plus the life and work of the great Mexican writer Octavio Paz.

Suddenly I start to try to compose, to combine words with sounds.

I was fascinated by the sounds of words.

And... We'll try to work out how Houdini pulled off one of his most famous escapes.

That's all to come. But before that, it's a sad fact that much of the history of the 20th and now 21st centuries

has been dominated by conflict and increasingly mechanized conflicts at that. Right now there are

deeply dangerous battles taking place in Syria and Iraq, frozen front lines in Ukraine and Korea.

In all of those current cases we can conjure up images of what might be happening

thanks to the work of the many reporters who brave

those dangers to tell the wider world what's going on. Predominantly in the

early part of the 20th century those reporters were men but not exclusively a handful of women carved out

careers and blazed a trail in war reporting from the 1930s onwards one of the most

noteworthy was the American photographer Dickie Chappelle.

After a gritty and groundbreaking life, she was killed on November the 4th, 1965 in Vietnam.

Louis Sidalgo has been looking at her life.

When you say combat reporter it usually brings to mind the picture of a battered unshaven

weary correspondent trudging through the mud. Now it may surprise you but this lady beside me here is a combat

...