Hi and welcome to ‘a handful of history’, my fortnightly sharing of real-life stories from around the world. All the narratives I pick are rooted in history one way or another, yet I feel that most of them carry themes and happenings that seem very present day-like. I create this blog out of love and curiosity for the field of human history and culture, and I’m happy that you find it interesting too. My blog and newsletters are free; if you want to help me keep it going, please join my newsletter. THANK YOU. Thanks for being here - let's dive in. Enjoy! Majken xx
Pessimism - A Recipe for Life
Pessimism prepares you for the worst, reduces tensions of expectations, protects you from disappointment. It should be a recipe for life!
As we (almost) always learn to ‘stay positive’ no matter what, I got curious when I stumbled upon this short video. Pessimism should be a recipe for life, they claim - quite a provoking thought being a citizen of this overall optimistic world. Or “absurdly and painfully optimistic world”, as the narrator puts it.
We are so optimistic that we have lost sight of the wisdom of seeing the glass half empty, it continues.
But actually, I do believe the pessimist worldview has a point. At least to some extent.
In the video we learn about the American psychologist William James (1842-1910) who formed the principle: Happiness = Expectations : Reality. This, the narrator sums up, tells us that there are two ways to ensure contentment: You can try to change reality or try to change your expectations.
If you are a pessimist you would go for changing your expectations, i.e. lower them as much as you can. In my experience it can work. Just think about it: How often have you had high expectations that, when it came to it, weren’t fulfilled? And, on the other hand, how often have you expected close to nothing and ended up pleasantly surprised? It happens, right?
To help you train your pessimist view, here are some recommended daily life lessons (you’re welcome!):
Life generally goes wrong.
We’re worried and sad most of the time.
It’s normal to have very big regrets about careers.
The only people we can think of as normal are people we don’t yet know very well.
It’s hard to be happy for more than 15 minutes.
Almost all your hopes are going to be dashed.
Mediocracy is the norm.
Video: "The Wisdom of Pessimism" - The School of Life.
Rain Is Coming, Draught Is Ending
So we’ve reached October. It's autumn, the rainy season. At least in my corner of the world.
Rain. Most of the time, we see it as pretty annoying, right? And I’m not just speaking on a personal note. “There’s a risk of rain,” they say in the weather forecast, whereas the sun gets a more positive mention: “Good chances of seeing the sun here and there”.
I don’t know how you feel about rain - if you’ve ever given it a thought at all? After listening in on “Rainsong in Five Senses”, I can tell you that there is quite a different feel to rain depending on where you live in the world.
In five radio shows, Professor Nandini Das guides the listeners through stories and personal experiences of rain in various countries. In each place, they focus on a particular sense. In India, it's all about the sound of rain and in Japan it's about taste. In Australia, we hear about the smell of rain. In Paris, they focus on the look of rain whereas in England they talk about the touch of rain.
Although I recommend each episode, to me, one of the most interesting ones was perhaps the one from Australia. Probably because here the rain is highly appreciated. If the rain didn't fall, people, plants, and animals would all be lost. The Australian writer Mark O’Connor poetically puts the longing and the need for rain into words:
“Looking up at the Australian sky, I hope for abundant rain. Rain to banish the fires, feed the farms, seal all the deals. [..] But that hope in these parts is haunted by misgiving. The sense of optimism is always flanked by its familiar contrary, the dry scent of fear”.
Also, he explains the earthy scent produced when rain falls on dry soil - and how this phenomenon is connected to Australia particularly.
In 1964 two Australian scientists, Isabel Bear and R.G. Thomas, identified and bottled(!) the smell of rain on dry ground, O’Connor says. They extracted it as a complex yellow oil (created from a complicated natural chemical processes). Whenever the rain falls, the oil is released into the air, and the smell is spread all around.
The two scientists named the smell petrichor: 'Petros', meaning rock and 'ichor', the blood of the Greek gods. To O’Connor, the smell of petrichor is the scent of renewals; when it’s present, it means that rain is coming and drought is ending.
The World’s Most Mysterious Book
In the 15th - or perhaps 16th - century, an unknown author sat down (probably) somewhere in Central Europe and created the Voynich Manuscript. The book is written in an unknown script, and many believe it is the world’s most mysterious book.
Until now, no one has ever truly figured out what it says, although many people have attempted to translate it over the years. Is it about magic? Or science? Or is it simply a hoax? Last year the German archaeologist Rainer Hannig claimed that he had cracked the code - and he will probably not be the last.
If you want to have a look yourself the full text is available online - including all its colourful and lively drawings of plants, floating heads, suns and moons and signs of the zodiac, fantastic creatures (including dragons), castles and naked women bathing. Also, it has been copied and made into a book.
Actually we should feel lucky that we have access to the book at all, considering how the manuscript has changed hands numerous times throughout history. It appeared in the library of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II of Germany, who then handed it over to his personal doctor. With a few stops on the way, it turned up years later at a Jesuit College near Rome, and here the Polish-American antiquarian bookseller Wilfrid M. Voynich bought it in 1912. It is, of course, him the manuscript is named after.
Today the Voynich Manuscript is stored in the archives of the Beinecke Library of Yale University.
Illustrations from the Voynich Maunscript p. 85v + 99r.
Sacred Keyhole Tombs in Japan
From one mysterious object to the next: The Kofun Tombs in Japan, the large burial sites that were built for important people more than 1600 years ago. To create this big monument, we are told in this video, "people worked during the day, and the gods worked at night". One of the bigger kofuns - the Daisen Kofun - is larger than the Egyptian pyramids in surface area, and it took more than 15 years to finish it.
Like many other burial monuments around the world, the Kofuns were not only about burying a person; it also had to do with showing off political power.
Through the years, more than 20.000 kofuns have been constructed in Japan, dating from the 3rd to the 6th centuries. About 50 of them still exists today in Osaka’s Sakai City region. But despite their size - and even though they have “always” been there - we only know very little about them.
Many kofuns have never been investigated, so nobody knows what they hold inside.
Even today, they are not open for visitors and also they are mainly off-limits to historians and archaeologists. People, therefore, start to speculate that the tombs may hold embarrassing secrets about Japan’s imperial past. According to officials, though, the kofuns are closed not to hide away classified information, but simply because, in Japan, tombs are sacred.
In 2019 the Mozu Kofuns in Sakai, Osaka, was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Kofun Tomb, Sakai, Osaka, BBC.
Hijacked Histories
I once heard about an anthropological study that dealt with young women coming of age in the Samoan Islands. It was carried out by the famous American anthropologist Margaret Mead. In the early 1900s, she observed and interviewed young Samoa women about their rituals of entering into adulthood. She put together the results and published them in her book “Coming of Age in Samoa” in 1928.
Half a century passed by, and in 1983 the New Zealand anthropologist Derek Freeman argued that Mead had misunderstood the whole thing. Freeman had, he claimed, been able to find one of the original participants in Mead’s study, and she had admitted that she and her friends had misled Mead on purpose. Instead of honestly answering Mead’s questions, they had had some fun telling her their own made up stories. (Later again, Freeman’s arguments were also questioned, though.)
So who was right and who was wrong? Personally I have no idea; however, the example makes me wonder: what is ‘the truth’ when studying history and culture?
It’s not always as exact as we may think.
In the podcast “Hijacked Histories”, historian Dominic Sandbrook explores how the past has constantly been manipulated. “Many of the widely held beliefs about our past are based on a web of lies”, he claims. We hear about the Roman Emperors Nero and Caligula, who are remembered as some of history’s greatest monsters. But according to Sandbrook, the truth about these “depraved” rulers is very different. We also pass by the US, where the former slave-owning Southerners attempted to rewrite history by erasing slavery as one of the root causes of the American Civil War. And we stop by Great Britain, where the story goes that as Hitler’s bombs fell during WWII, Britain was united, also known as the ‘Blitz spirit’. However, this is a myth, Sandbrook says. The truth is a lot darker.
“We’ve all heard of fake news, but what about fake history? Dominic Sandbrook explores two and a half millennia of human history, traveling from the American Deep South to the air raid shelters of wartime Britain, to discover how the past has constantly been manipulated, rewritten and reshaped. It turns out that when it comes to history, separating fact from fiction isn’t always easy.”
"Hijacked Histories" is available on Audible. Six episodes á c. 30 minutes. ‘The Horse That Ruled Rome’, ‘England’s First Socialists’, ‘The Storming of the Winter Palace’, ‘The Lost Cause’, ‘The Spirit of the Blitz’, ‘The Warrior on a Horse’.
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