Moral Panics and Mass Hysteria: The Dancing Plague, Salem Witch Trials, and The Tulip Market Bubble

History Unplugged Podcast

History Unplugged

Society & Culture, History

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2019

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One person's psychosis can be easily dismissed, but how do we account for collective hysteria, when an entire crowd sees the same illusion or suffer from the same illness? It's enough to make somebody believe in dark magic and pick up their pitchfork, ready to hang an accused witch.

Sadly, such paranoia has led to many witch hunts in the past. In today's episode we look at some of the most notorious historical cases of mass hysteria and moral panics. But these cases don't only extend to Puritan-era witch panics. We will also look at cases that hit closer to home—such as economic bubbles and the housing market crash of the early 2000s.

This episode includes such cases of mass hysteria as

-- Dancing mania, in which German peasants in 1374 spent weeks dancing in a fugue state, with some toppling over dead from utter exhaustion
-- The cat nuns of medieval France, where the sisters became to inexplicably meow together, leaving the surrounding community perplexed
-- The Salem Witch trials, where 19 were executed due to claims of sorcery
-- The Jersey Devil Panic, in which dozens of newspapers claimed in 1909 that a winged creature attacked a trolley car in Haddon Heights

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the History Unplugged Podcast.
0:05.4	The unscripted show that celebrates unsung heroes, Mythbust's historical lies, and rediscoveres
0:11.9	the forgotten stories that changed our world.
0:15.5	I'm your host, Scott Rank.
0:23.7	In the year 1374, a very strange event happened in dozens of medieval towns along the Ryan
0:29.2	River Valley, and it was described by dozens of physicians, chroniclers, monks, priests,
0:35.6	and even municipal orders trying to stop this event that was described by authorities.
0:41.1	Hundreds of people suddenly got the compulsion to dance.
0:45.0	They scarcely paused to eat or rest and dance for hours or even days on end.
0:51.1	Within weeks, the dancing mania engulfed large areas of northeastern France and other
0:55.5	islands, and it only stopped after several months.
0:59.6	The same event happened again in the city of Straussburg in 1518.
1:04.6	About 400 men, women and children participated, and there were dozens of people who died,
1:10.2	whether due to exhaustion or dehydration.
1:14.3	In between these two dancing events, another strange event happened in the Spanish Netherlands
1:18.9	in an unary.
1:20.7	This happened in 1491, as cases for trials of witchcraft began to increase, and several
1:26.8	nuns were declared possessed, which caused them to race around like dogs, jump out of trees,
1:32.8	pretending to be birds, or meow and claw their way up tree trunks like cats.
1:37.4	According to the records we have this period, other people behave like this, but it was
1:42.7	nuns who are disproportionately affected.
1:46.2	Over the next 200 years, in denaries all over western Europe, hundreds were plunged into
	...

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