Historically Speaking: Here Comes the Rain Again

Storms have long shaped human destiny, as Californians know all too well.

The Wall Street Journal

February 15, 2024

Given that much of California was suffering a severe drought just two years ago, it might seem ungrateful to complain about too much rain. Yet Californians have already managed two record-breaking storms this year, and more are expected. The increase in the frequency and strength of these weather events spells trouble for the state. Some worry it is a sign that the “Big One”—a massive once-in-a-millennium storm—is nigh.

A man walks his dog on the edge of the Los Angeles River, Feb. 4.

Scientists think that these storms are growing more severe as a result of climate change, but mythical stories about destructive floods have haunted humans for eons, from the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh in 2000 B.C. to the biblical story of Noah and his ark.

Thousands of years of accumulated climate records combined with modern computing methods have led to new insights for the role rain has played in shaping human destiny. For example, excessive rain can now be added to the list of reasons behind the collapse of the Roman Empire. Apparently the final decades of the fifth century were unusually wet. Harvests failed and granaries rotted, setting off a cataclysmic chain of famines, wars and mass migration that hastened the empire’s demise.

Abnormal rainfall needn’t spell human disaster. In the early 13th century, 15 consecutive years of unprecedented rainfall turned the barren Mongolian steppe into fertile grassland. The region could finally feed the massive armies that allowed Genghis Khan to pursue his dream of a Mongol empire. But the intensely wet spring of 1242 may have pushed his descendants to abruptly leave Central Europe. The Mongol cavalry could seemingly defeat any foe except the bottomless mud of the Hungarian plain.

A series of engravings made for the first edition of the ‘Liber Genesis,’ 1612

A recurring theme in most Great Flood myths is how destruction can be creative; the washing away of the past being necessary for a redemptive transformation. A real-life example can be seen in Europe’s response to the crisis of 1816—the so-called Year Without a VolSummer. The 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora in Indonesia ejected a huge cloud of sulfate gases into the atmosphere and created an unseasonable chill in much of the Northern Hemisphere. Endless rain watered already sodden fields. Communities starved; typhus outbreaks infected millions of people; rioting became endemic.

The sheer scale of the human emergency forced a reconceptualization in Britain and elsewhere of the purpose of government. No longer could it be concerned only with taxes, laws and diplomacy. The modern state must also consider public health, public administration and public responsibility.

California’s Great Flood of 1862, which remains the state’s worst disaster, was another catalyst for change. The storm began in late 1861 and lasted eight weeks. California’s Central Valley became an inland sea. At least 4,000 people died and a quarter of the state’s economy was destroyed. The Sacramento government relocated to San Francisco, which was also partially underwater.

The robust reconstruction efforts afterward marked a shift in attitude. Californians erected new flood defenses and instituted better building regulations. Sacramento rose again, literally 10 feet higher than before. The infrastructure may be up to 150 years old, but it is still doing its job. No matter what the rain brings, the answer isn’t an ark. It is being prepared.

Historically Speaking: Tourists Behaving Badly

When today’s travelers get in trouble for knocking over statues or defacing temples, they’re following an obnoxious tradition that dates back to the Romans.

The Wall Street Journal

September 8, 2023

Tourists are giving tourism a bad name. The industry is a vital cog in the world economy, generating more than 10% of global GDP in 2019. But the antisocial behavior of a significant minority is causing some popular destinations to enact new rules and limits. Among the list of egregious tourist incidents this year, two drunk Americans had to be rescued off the Eiffel Tower, a group of Germans in Italy knocked over a 150-year-old statue while taking selfies, and a Canadian teen in Japan defaced an 8th-century temple.

It’s ironic that sightseeing, one of the great perks of civilization, has become one of its downsides. The ancient Greeks called it theoria and considered it to be both good for the mind and essential for appreciating one’s own culture. As the 5th-century B.C. Greek poet Lysippus quipped: “If you’ve never seen Athens, your brain’s a morass./If you’ve seen it and weren’t entranced, you’re an ass.”

The Romans surpassed the Greeks in their love of travel. Unfortunately, they became the prototype for that tourist cliché, the “ugly American,” since they were rich, entitled and careless of other people’s heritage. The Romans never saw an ancient monument they didn’t want to buy, steal or cover in graffiti. The word “miravi”—“I was amazed”—was the Latin equivalent of “Kilroy was here,” and can be found all over Egypt and the Mediterranean.

Thomas Fuchs

Mass tourism picked up during the Middle Ages, facilitated by the Crusades and the popularity of religious pilgrimages. But so did the Roman habit of treating every ancient building like a public visitor’s book. The French Crusader Lord de Coucy actually painted his family coat of arms onto one of the columns of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

In 17th- and 18th-century Europe, the scions of aristocratic families would embark on a Grand Tour of famous sights, especially in France and Italy. The idea was to turn them into sophisticated men of the world, but for many young men, the real point of the jaunt was to sample bordellos and be drunk and disorderly without fear of their parents finding out.

Even after the Grand Tour went out of fashion, the figure of the tourist usually conjured up negative images. Visiting Alexandria in Egypt in the 19th century, the French novelist Gustave Flaubert raged at the “imbecile” who had painted the words “Thompson of Sunderland” in six-foot-high letters on Pompey’s Pillar in Alexandria in Egypt. The perpetrators were in fact the rescued crew of a ship named the Thompson.

Flaubert was nevertheless right about the sheer destructiveness of some tourists. Souvenir hunters were among the worst offenders. In the Victorian era, Stonehenge in England was chipped and chiseled with such careless disregard that one of its massive stones eventually collapsed.

Sometimes tourists go beyond vandalism to outright madness. Jerusalem Syndrome, first recognized in the Middle Ages, is the sudden onset of religious delusions while visiting the biblical city. Stendhal Syndrome is an acute psychosomatic reaction to the beauty of Florence’s artworks, named for the French writer who suffered such an attack in 1817. There’s also Paris Syndrome, a transient psychosis triggered by extreme feelings of letdown on encountering the real Paris.

As for Stockholm Syndrome, when an abused person identifies with their abuser, there’s little chance of it developing in any of the places held hostage by hordes of tourists.

Historically Speaking: The Quest to Look Young Forever

From drinking gold to injecting dog hormones, people have searched for eternal youth in some unlikely places.

The Wall Street Journal

May 18, 2023

A study explaining why mouse hairs turn gray made global headlines last month. Not because the little critters are in desperate need of a makeover; but knowing the “why” in mice could lead to a cure for graying locks in humans. Everyone, nowadays, seems to be chasing after youth, either to keep it, find it or just remember it.

The ancient Greeks believed that seeking eternal youth and immortality was hubris, inviting punishment by the gods. Eos, goddess of dawn, asked Zeus to make her human lover Tithonus immortal. He granted her wish, but not quite the way she expected: Tithonus lived on and on as a prisoner of dementia and decrepitude.

The Egyptians believed it was possible for a person to achieve eternal life; the catch was that he had to die first. Also, for a soul to be reborn, every spell, ritual and test outlined in the Book of the Dead had to be executed perfectly, or else death was permanent.

Since asking the gods or dying first seemed like inadvisable ways to defy aging, people in the ancient world often turned to lotions and potions that promised to give at least the appearance of eternal youth. Most anti-aging remedies were reasonably harmless. Roman recipes for banishing wrinkles included a wide array of ingredients, from ass’s milk, swan’s fat and bean paste to frankincense and myrrh.

But ancient elixirs of life often contained substances with allegedly magical properties that were highly toxic. China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang, who lived in the 3rd century B.C., is believed to have died from mercury poisoning after drinking elixirs meant to make him immortal. Perversely, his failure was subsequently regarded as a challenge. During the Tang Dynasty, from 618 to 907, noxious concoctions created by court alchemists to prolong youth killed as many as six emperors.

THOMAS FUCHS

Even nonlethal beauty aids could be dangerous. In 16th-century France, Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of King Henri II, was famous for looking the same age as her lover despite being 20 years older. Regular exercise and moderate drinking probably helped, but a study of Diane’s remains published in 2009 found that her hair contained extremely high levels of gold, likely due to daily sips of a youth-potion containing gold chloride, diethyl ether and mercury. The toxic combination would have ravaged her internal organs and made her look ghostly white.

By the 19th century, elixirs, fountains of youth and other magical nonsense had been replaced by quack medicine. In 1889, a French doctor named Charles Brown-Sequard started a fashion for animal gland transplants after he claimed spectacular results from injecting himself with a serum containing canine testicle fluid. This so-called rejuvenation treatment, which promised to restore youthful looks and sexual vigor to men, went through various iterations until it fell out of favor in the 1930s.

Advances in plastic surgery following World War I meant that people could skip tedious rejuvenation therapies and instantly achieve younger looks with a scalpel. Not surprisingly, in a country where ex-CNN anchor Don Lemon could call a 51-year-old woman “past her prime,” women accounted for 85% of the facelifts performed in the U.S. in 2019. For men, there’s nothing about looking old that can’t be fixed by a Lamborghini and a 21-year-old girlfriend. For women, the problem isn’t the mice, it’s the men.

Historically Speaking: The Delicious Evolution of Mayonnaise

Ancient Romans ate a pungent version, but the modern egg-based spread was created by an 18th-century French chef.

July 9, 2020

The Wall Street Journal

I can’t imagine a summer picnic without mayonnaise—in the potato salad, the veggie dips, the coleslaw, and yes, even on the french fries. It feels like a great dollop of pure Americana in a creamy, satisfying sort of way. But like a lot of what makes our country so successful, mayonnaise originally came from somewhere else.

Where, exactly, is one of those food disputes that will never be resolved, along with the true origins of baklava pastry, hummus and the pisco sour cocktail. In all likelihood, the earliest version of mayonnaise was an ancient Roman concoction of garlic and olive oil, much praised for its medicinal properties by Pliny the Elder in his first-century encyclopedia “Naturalis Historia.” This strong-tasting, aioli-like proto-mayonnaise remained a southern Mediterranean specialty for millennia.

But most historians believe that modern mayonnaise was born in 1756 in the port city of Mahon, in the Balearic Islands off the coast of Spain. At the start of the Seven Years’ War between France and Britain, the French navy, led by the Duc de Richelieu, smashed Admiral Byng’s poorly armed fleet at the Battle of Minorca. (Byng was subsequently executed for not trying hard enough.) While preparing the fish course for Richelieu’s victory dinner, his chef coped with the lack of cream on the island by ingeniously substituting a goo of eggs mixed with oil and garlic.

The anonymous cook took the recipe for “mahonnaise” back to France, where it was vastly improved by Marie-Antoine Careme, the founder of haute cuisine. Careme realized that whisking rather than simply stirring the mixture created a soft emulsion that could be used in any number of dishes, from the savory to the sweet.

It wasn’t just the French who fell for Careme’s version. Mayonnaise blended easily with local cuisines, evolving into tartar sauce in Eastern Europe, remoulades in the Baltic countries and salad dressing in Britain. By 1838, the menu at the iconic New York restaurant Delmonico’s featured lobster mayonnaise as a signature dish.

All that whisking, however, made mayonnaise too laborious for home cooks until the invention of the mechanical eggbeater, first patented by the Black inventor Willis Johnson, of Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1884. “Try it once,” gushed Good Housekeeping magazine in 1889, “and you’ll never go back to the old way as long as you live.”

Making mayonnaise was one thing, preserving it quite another, since the raw egg made it spoil quickly. The conundrum was finally solved in 1912 by Richard Hellmann, a German-American deli owner in New York. By using his own trucks and factories, Hellmann was able to manufacture and transport mayonnaise faster. And in a revolutionary move, he designed the distinctive wide-necked Hellmann’s jar, encouraging liberal slatherings of mayo and thereby speeding up consumption.

Five years later, Eugenia Duke of North Carolina created Duke’s mayonnaise, which is eggier and has no sugar. The two brands are still dueling it out. But when it comes to eating, there are no winners and losers in the mayo department, just 14 grams of fat and 103 delicious calories per tablespoon.