Story Archives of 'History'

We’re continuing our year-end discussion on visions of the apocalypse. Not to scare you, but to explore why so many traditions invoke the end of the world in troubled times. One growing movement points precisely to the culmination of history as we know it on December 21, 2012, or 12/21/12. That is the last date on the Mayan long-count calendar and the precise day arrived at by one computer analysis of the I Ching. The theory has spread from new age circles to mainstream astronomers and media, and is even being debated in college courses.

On January 4, The History Channel airs Nostradamus: 2012, speculating on prophesies by the 16th century French apothecary. A 2012 feature film by The Day after Tomorrow director Roland Emmerich is due out next summer, and a new documentary called 2012: Science or Superstition? features the naysayers, as well as supporters who foretell not cataclysm, but the dawn of a new era of enlightened human consciousness.

John Major Jenkins is among those featured in the film. He is author of Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 among other books, and one of the leading voices of the 2012 theory. He's known for fine-tuning the galactic alignment theory relating to 12/21/12. He explains that he doesn’t regard this as a horrific collapse of the world, though, but a time of transformation and renewal.

Watch the trailer for 2012: Science or Superstition?:

(Photo by Jim G)

New Hampshire is getting back on its feet after last weeks storm.

Five days after the storm, there are communities all across the state waiting for the power to come back on.

Many towns have set up make-shift shelters and others, like Francestown, have taken the community's welfare into their own hands.

NHPR Correspondent Sean Hurley reports.

We’ve all heard of Tom Thumb, the Elephant Man, the bearded lady and the Siamese twins. Legendary entrepreuner P.T. Barnum charged admission to catch a glimpse of them at his traveling carnivals. Audiences also flocked to theaters in 1932 for Tod Browning’s film Freaks, considered a masterpiece of the grotesque. People marvelled at the sight of an armless woman using her feet to eat with a fork, or Prince Randian using only his mouth to light a cigarette.

We’ve become a more compassionate society since then – we no longer lock people up and force them to parade around for our own amusement. Yet our fascination with nature’s flukes hasn’t diminished. Mark Blumberg says we shouldn’t look away from them – in fact, we could learn a lot about ourselves from studying these so-called freaks. Blumberg is a professor of behavioral and cognitive neuroscience and developmental science at the University of Iowa, and is editor-in-chief of the journal Behavioral Neuroscience. His new book is called Freaks of Nature: What Anomalies Tell Us About Development and Evolution.

The scientist Charles Stockard, who studied the development of bird embryos in the early part of last century, wrote that the “important matter of a few hours’ difference in egg-laying time lies between the successful class of birds and a hopelessly unfit monstrous condition.” So even extreme anomalies, like two-headed animals, can be produced with just subtle adjustments.

Blumberg writes that “the embryo’s potential to produce two heads is no less ancient, and no less fundamental, than its potential to produce just one.” So basically, if our species finds it useful to have babies with two heads, our bodies can begin to do that. Also, we try to “correct” what we see as abberations, like fitting a three-legged dog with a prosthetic leg, which is often times not the best soultion. These questions arise when babies born with both make and female genital organs. Often, doctors and parents will make a choice for the baby. But in the animal world, sexual ambiguity and plasticity are just an ordinary way of life.

And while we have made strides in preventing some developmental anomalies, new environmental conditions could make these anomalies more likely. Chemical dumping, climate change, and nuclear accidents like Chernobyl could lead to a world in which mutations are more widespread.

Also, we travel with producer Caitlyn Kim to New York’s Coney Island, where she found that the sideshow freaks of today have a little more say in how they're treated than the residents of Victorian-era freak shows. She produced this piece for B-Side radio. Click here to listen and click here to visit B-Side Radio.

The Guardian newspaper reported this weekend that a crumbling palace built by Saddam Hussein may be restored as a museum in Basra, Iraq. The port city’s original museum was looted in the 1991 Gulf War. Some of its antiquities stretched back some 5,000 years, including pieces from the ancient site of Eridu, thought to be the first city in the world.

Many of the treasures ended up in the British and Baghdad museums - some damaged, some stolen, some dubiously recovered. Unfortunately, war and plunder go hand-in-hand with the antiquities trade. Its history is a long and shady one, involving colonial-era pillaging, rampant tomb-robbing, Nazi looting, crooked dealing, and national identity. Debates rage over where these treasures belong – in the world’s most-visited museums like the Met or the Louvre, or in their countries of origin, where conservation and security may be lax.

Sharon Waxman is former culture reporter for The New York Times, and she's the author of Loot: The Battle Over the Stolen Treasures of the Ancient World. The new book digs into the dark history and current controversies in the contentious world of humanity’s ancient treasures. Sharon Waxman joins Word of Mouth on the line from her home in southern California.

Sharon will be appearing at the Cambridge Forum in Cambridge, MA tomorrow evening, Dec. 3. There's more information here.

Shape-note singing may be fading, but can still be heard inside of the white churches of the American South. The style, also called sacred harp singing after an influential songbook published more than 100 years ago, has elements that stretch back at least to Elizabethan England, maybe even to Medieval chants. It flourished in colonial New England and in its present form took deep root in the rural South, where it is still sung today in four-part harmony in full, loud voices.

Sacred harp practitioners, whose grandparents and great-grandparents sang on worn church pews, are documented in the film Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp. A new, two-CD set draws music from the film, along with interpretations by contemporary musicians, giving us a fine reason to revisit the film, co-directed by Erica Hinton and Matt Hinton.

Matt Hinton joins us from Georgia Public Broadcasting in Atlanta to explore one of the country’s earliest indigenous musical traditions.

Watch the trailer for Awake, My Soul: The Story of the Sacred Harp:

(Photo by squashpicker)