Dances With Witches

The late medieval and early modern world was never short on drama and violence, but few episodes conjure up as much fascination—or horror—as the witchcraft trials.  Picture a Europe of the 16th and 17th centuries, where long winters dragged on endlessly, crops frequently failed, and neighbors kept a wary eye on one another. Into this anxious mix came the belief that witches were not only real, but lurking behind every bad harvest, sick cow, spoiled milk or stubbed toe. 

If your bread didn’t rise or your butter refused to churn, it was entirely reasonable, in the popular imagination, to suspect the woman across the lane had been consorting with the Devil.  If your husband no longer loved you, he must be under a spell.  Courts across Germany, Switzerland, and France dutifully obliged, staging some of the most notorious witch hunts in history—often with tragic consequences.

Fast-forward across the Atlantic to colonial New England, and you’ll find a community every bit as excitable.  In 1692, the quiet village of Salem, Massachusetts, suddenly found itself center stage in what felt like a supernatural courtroom drama.  A cluster of young girls began twitching, shrieking, and blaming local townsfolk for afflicting them with unseen forces.  Ministers thundered, magistrates scribbled, and soon half the community was accused of flying through the night sky or signing Satan’s ledger in blood.  Salem’s brief but intense hysteria left an indelible mark on American history, providing fodder for plays, novels, and more than a few Halloween movies.  (Sadly, Practical Magic 2 with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman is scheduled for release next fall.)

From the forests of Germany to the meetinghouses of New England, the story of the witch trials is a tale of fear, faith, religious zealotry, and the very human urge to explain the inexplicable.  Why people were so ready to see broomsticks and black cats at every corner is a mystery we’ll soon explore—one strange loaf at a time.

So, what sent otherwise sensible villagers into a frenzy of pointing fingers and shouting “Witch!”?  The usual suspects of politics, religion, lack of education, and old grudges certainly played their part, but there’s another, stranger candidate waiting in the wings: a humble grain of rye.  More specifically, what sometimes grew on that rye.

Ergot is a pesky little fungus that thrives in cool, damp fields.  It doesn’t look like much—just dark, shriveled kernels hiding in the harvest—but its effects can be spectacularly weird.  Baked into bread, it can make people twitch, convulse, and see things that aren’t there.  Imagine having a perfectly ordinary breakfast and then suddenly deciding your neighbor has a pet demon besides that ugly child that won’t stay off your lawn.  That was the kind of day ergot could deliver.

Some historians have pointed out that the timing is awfully suspicious.  The great waves of witch trials in Central Europe happened during the “Little Ice Age”—a long period of years of poor weather and soggy harvests.  Salem, too, had endured a string of damp summers just before its own outbreak.  In both cases, rye bread was a staple food, which means the fungus had every chance to sneak onto dinner tables.

Back in the day, folks didn’t know it by its modern, clinical name—ergot poisoning was more colorfully called St. Anthony’s Fire.  The title sounds saintly, but the experience was anything but divine.  Imagine nibbling on your daily rye bread and suddenly feeling as if your limbs were aflame, your fingers tingling like they’d fallen asleep, and your legs determined to dance the Charleston centuries before it was invented.  Some unlucky souls endured spasms and visions so vivid that heaven and hell seemed to be hosting a joint carnival right in their kitchens.  Others, in the grimmer cases, watched their toes or fingers blacken and drop away as if the Devil himself were claiming a tithe.  St. Anthony’s Fire was the ultimate party crasher: half delirium, half horror show, and fully guaranteed to set tongues wagging about witches, demons, and dark forces lurking in the rye.

While city leaders scratched their heads and hired musicians to “play it out” (possibly the worst prescription ever), later scholars suggested a fungal culprit.  If rye bread laced with ergot was on the menu, those convulsions and trancelike states start to look less like a supernatural dance plague and more like a very bad bake-off.  Add in a dash of mass hysteria, and you’ve got a medieval flash mob powered not by music, but by mold.

In Salem, the devil seemed to have a suspicious preference for housewives, widows, and spinsters.  While a few men did end up in the dock (poor Giles Corey got the worst of it, pressed to death under a pile of stones), most of the accusations landed squarely on women’s shoulders.  Why? Because Puritan culture already imagined women as more “temptable,” neighbors found quarrelsome widows easier to blame than landowning men, and the young (mostly female) accusers pictured witches in the form of cranky old ladies rather than cranky old farmers.  In short, witch-hunting followed the path of least resistance: accuse the people who were least likely to fight back, and who were most likely to fit the part.

Now, does this mean every cackling witch trial was really just a case of bad baking?  Not exactly.  Human fear, social tensions, and a taste for drama carried plenty of weight.  But it does raise the deliciously odd possibility that behind the bonnets, broomsticks, and burning stakes lurked something far more mundane: moldy bread.

So, perhaps, the great witch panics and curious outbreaks of old remind us of something bigger than broomsticks and bonfires..or ought to, anyway.  Communities in crisis often reach for the most obvious explanation, especially when fear is already in the air, and the result can be disastrous—or at least wildly misguided.  What looks like possession, a curse, or a devil’s dance may, with calmer eyes, be nothing more than bad luck, or bad harvests, (or…yes, bad bread).  The real cautionary tale isn’t just about moldy rye, but about how quickly people leap to blame the neighbor, the stranger, or the outsider when strange things happen. 

History’s lesson?  Before we kindle torches and rally the mob, it’s worth taking a breath—and maybe a second look at what’s really on the table.  The quick, popular fix is rarely correct.

Van Gogh’s Lost Sunflower Painting

In October 1888, Vincent van Gogh was already suffering from mental illness when he invited the Paul Gaugin, his friend and artistic mentor, to move in with him in Arles, France.  The two were to share what van Gogh called the “Yellow House”, which was to be the start of a planned artistic community.

According to the letter van Gogh wrote to his brother, Theo, the artist planned to make twelve paintings of sunflowers to decorate the house, particularly Gaugin’s bedroom.

"I would like to make a decoration for the walls. Nothing but large sunflowers . . .  Well, if I carry out that plan, there will be a dozen panels of them.  The whole thing will therefore become a symphony in blue and yellow.  I work at it every morning from sunrise, for the flowers wilt quickly and it is a matter of doing the whole thing in one go."

Unfortunately, van Gogh had finished only four of the paintings before the two artists had a falling out and Gaugin moved out.  Van Gogh went into a deep depression that ended with his self-mutilation of his ear and his hospitalization.

After being released, van Gogh returned briefly to Yellow House and completed Vase with Five Sunflowers (F459).  Just to make sure that the painting would be terribly confusing to future art history students, the painting—done in January 1889—is also known as Six Sunflowers 1888.  You can count the number of flowers in the painting (right) for yourself.  (Ironically, as you will soon see, the Yellow House was destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II.)

Van Gogh typically didn’t frame his own works, preferring to leave that to dealers or buyers, but in 1888, when he was preparing to decorate his Yellow House in Arles for Paul Gauguin’s visit, he put extra care into this sunflower still life.  He crafted (or at least had made to his design) a simple, bold orange wood frame that he painted in a complementary tone that was likely to heighten the impact of the vivid yellows and golds of the flowers.  The intention was to create a unified, almost ceremonial presentation of the piece, turning it from “painting” into “altar” for the artistic friendship he hoped to cement with Gauguin.

Only one of the sunflower paintings sold during the artist’s lifetime: Fifteen Sunflowers, which sold to Anna Boch for 400 francs ($1600 today).  The rest were part of the 800-850 paintings and drawings that van Gogh’s brother inherited after the artist died in 1890.   Six months after the artist’s death, Theo died leaving the paintings to his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger who carefully exhibited his work, slowly selling off the paintings as the artist became famous posthumously. 

Vase with Five (Six) Sunflowers was exhibited three times in Holland, then Johanna placed the painting for sale by consignment with her uncle, Cornelius M. van Gogh’s art dealership.  Fritz Meyere-Fierz, of Zurich, purchased the painting in 1908 for £250 and held onto the painting until 1820, when he sold it by consignment via the Paul Vallotton gallery, Lausanne) for £3,200 to Koyata Yamamoto.  (Koyata Yamamoto is not related to Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto.)

Koyato Yamamoto (seated at left in the photo) was a wealthy cotton textile merchant who purchased the painting on the advice of his friend, the writer and artist Saneatsu Mushanokoji (seated at right).  Shipped to Japan aboard the mail steamer Binna, the painting was exhibited in both Tokyo and Osaka.  At the second exhibition, the heavy frame caused the painting to fall from the wall, slightly damaging the artwork.  Angry at the lack of safety for the painting, Yamamoto vowed to never allow it to be exhibited again, taking the Sunflower painting to his home in residence in the Uchide district of Ashiya.

 After the start of World War II and the Allied bombing raids on Japan, Yamamoto became concerned about the painting’s safety.  He tried to convince a bank in Osaka to store the painting in its basement vault for safety, but the bank, fearful that the damp basement would harm the painting, refused.  Unable to find a suitable location at which to store the painting, Yamamoto left the painting in its usual location, hanging on the wall in the drawing room of his home.

Starting on August 1, 1945, the United States Army Air Force began the largest bombing raids of World War II, on the urban areas of Japan.  Thousands of tons of explosives were ripped on Japanese cities by a fleet of 836 B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers.  In several of these missions, M69 and M47 incendiary bombs were dropped in such a manner as to produce firestorms in Japan’s wooden urban structures and industrial facilities. 

Ayisha was not a major industrial city but an airfield that was a vital part of Japan’s air defense system was located there.  The destruction of this field was an integral part of  Operation Olympic, the planned invasion of Japan that was scheduled for November 1945.  Because of Ayisha’s dense population of wooden structures, it was decided that creating a firestorm would be the most effective tactic to use against the city.  The raid dropped a total of a thousand tons of incendiary devices on the city, causing widespread destruction.  In a sad coincidence, the raid occurred on August 6, 1945, the same day as the first use of an atomic weapon, in the bombing of Hiroshima.  The use of atomic weapons forced Japan to surrender, thus eliminating the need for Operation Olympic.

When the air raid sirens alerted the people of Ashiya to go to the air raid shelters, Yamamoto tried to save his beloved Sunflower painting, but the frame was too heavy for him to move, so he was forced to leave the painting behind.   The home, with all of its contents, was one of 2833 homes destroyed that night.

Yamamoto survived the air raid on Ayisha and remained in Ayisha until his death in November 1963.  He never mentioned his Sunflower painting again.

Japan acquired its second Van Gogh Sunflowers painting—Sunflowers (F457)—in 1987, when Yasuo Goto purchased it at a Christie’s London auction for a then-record-breaking £24.75 million (about $39.9 million USD at the time).  Goto intended it as both a prestige acquisition and a cultural gift to the public, eventually displaying it at what is now the Sompo Museum of Art in Tokyo.  We can probably safely assume (this time, anyway) that the van Gogh painting will remain safe, since Goto owns the Yasuda Fire & Marine Insurance Company.

The Dollar Princesses

One of the byproducts of the industrial revolution in Europe was the slow death of the great landed estates of the aristocracy.  Steamships and railroads enabled massive imports of cheap grain from the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Russia.  Refrigerated shipping also brought cheap meat and dairy from overseas. 

European grain and meat simply could not compete with the low production costs of the vast overseas farms, especially those in North America.  Even as the price of food dropped, the cost of labor was steadily climbing, cash-hungry parliaments were raising taxes, and even the nature of farming was changing.  While a few aristocratic estates modernized with mechanized plows, fertilizers, and scientific breeding, most of the inbred and undereducated nobles simply refused to do anything different than their grandfathers.

If the aristocrats wanted to continue those leisurely fox hunts across their fields, they desperately needed to locate a new source of money.

Luckily, the same industrial revolution was affecting the United States and this new  industry created the nouveau riche, who were eager to trade money for social position.  If you’ll pardon the pun, it was a marriage made in heaven. 

American “new money” families wanted the social prestige of membership in Europe’s rigid, aristocratic class system while European aristocrats wanted the funds to maintain the estates that were increasingly expensive to run in the industrial age.  So, the crass Americans provided their daughters with dowries sufficient to make them desirable to even the haughtiest of aristocrats.   These rich American brides were referred to as “Dollar Princesses.”

The Dollar Princesses brought in the money and their husbands brought in the drafty ancestral homes, the priceless silver, and the invitations to royal garden parties.  It was—more or less—a fair trade.  This didn’t stop English newspapers, like Puck, from lampooning the marriages, however.

Starting just after the American Civil War, when American fortunes exploded, and lasting until World War I, when the entire European aristocracy system imploded, roughly 350 rich, young American brides provided rich, (mostly young) dowries to their new aristocratic husbands, thus transferring hundreds of millions of dollars (billions in today’s money) to prop up those old noble estates.  The peak of such marriages occurred during the 1880s and 1890s—the Gilded Age.

Jennie Jerome, later Lady Randolph Churchill, was an early example of a “Dollar Princess,” though the term had not yet entered common use when she married Lord Randolph Churchill in 1874.  Jennie was born in Brooklyn in 1854, to financier Leonard Jerome, who was known as the “King of Wall Street”.  She was introduced to Lord Randolph during the Cowes Regatta on the Isle of Wight and, after a whirlwind romance of just three days, they were engaged.  Her father’s considerable fortune helped smooth over any aristocratic concerns about her American birth and it provided the much-needed cash infusion into the Churchill family’s strained coffers.  Not only did Jennie’s dowry save the Churchill Estate, but it can be argued that her son, Winston Churchill, saved all of England.

If Jennie Jerome’s marriage was a whirlwind romance, Consuelo Vanderbilt’s 1895 union with the 9th Duke of Marlborough was more of a hurricane, engineered by her formidable mother, Alva Vanderbilt.  Consuelo, heiress to one of the largest fortunes in America, was essentially marched down the aisle as a living trust fund who was intended to shore up Blenheim Palace’s leaky roof and the Duke’s equally leaky bank account.  The bride wept through the ceremony (and those were not tears of joy), while society wits whispered about the “wedding of the century” being less a love match than a high-society merger.  Still, the Vanderbilt millions accomplished their architectural rescue mission, even if the marriage itself crumbled into divorce—proof that, while money could buy a dukedom, it couldn’t always buy happiness.  The saga of this dollar princess is the inspiration for the television show, The Gilded Age.

If you were one of those American heiresses in the late 19th or early 20th century, who had just swapped your posh Fifth Avenue address for a drafty English manor, you had two urgent needs: a lady’s maid who could unpack your trunks without fainting at the sight of all that Paris couture and a portrait by John Singer Sargent.

Sargent was the undisputed Instagram filter of his day—minus the phone, but plus a lot of oil paint and the ability to make even the most nervous sitter look as if she had been born knowing how to carry off a tiara.  That kind of talent made the $5,000 price of a Sargent portrait a bargain (Roughly $177,000 in today’s dollars!)

So, why Sargent?  Well, he was the portraitist of choice for anyone who wanted to announce, “I have arrived,” without having to shout it over tea at Claridge’s.  His brushwork had a way of making pearls gleam, gowns ripple, and the sitter’s expression hover between approachable charm and “I summer in the south of France.”  For an heiress, commissioning Sargent wasn’t just about vanity—it was a social credential, the equivalent of having one’s own heraldic crest or of getting a glowing profile in Vogue.  The portrait of Jennie Churchill above is by Sargent.

The families themselves weren’t shy about it, either.  While the official purpose of the portrait was to “capture the likeness for posterity,” it also served as an elegant, full-length calling card.  When a Sargent painting of ‘Lady So-and-So’ was unveiled at a London salon, it might as well have been accompanied by a discreet footnote:  “Yes, the family’s finances are once again in order, thank you, and the young lady is available.”

Sargent painted these women with a knowing blend of flattery and truth.  He understood the subtle alchemy they represented—American steel, railroad, or banking money poured into Old World titles and estates.  Often, the dollar princess, herself, was more modern, witty, and independent than her aristocratic husband’s family quite knew what to do with.  Sargent let just a glimmer of that spark peek through: the tilt of a head, the faintest smile, a glint in the eye that seemed to say, “Yes, I paid for the roof, and no, I don’t regret it.”

And how many did he paint?  Roughly two dozen confirmed dollar princess portraits are  scattered today among major museums, family estates, and auction houses.  In every one, you can see why these women paid (or had their fathers pay) the equivalent of a small townhouse for the privilege.  The gowns may be Edwardian and the backdrops might be grand, but there’s a hint of steel under the satin—exactly what Sargent knew to show.

Consuelo Vanderbilt’s 1903 portrait (right) by John Singer Sargent is the very picture of aristocratic poise—though knowing her story, you can almost imagine her thinking, “If only I could trade this tiara for a ticket back to New York.”  Draped in sumptuous satin and crowned with the Marlborough jewels, she stands like the perfect Edwardian duchess she was trained (or coerced) to be.  Sargent, ever the diplomat with a paintbrush, caught her elegance without betraying the fact that her marriage to the 9th Duke was about as warm as a Blenheim Palace corridor in February.  The result is dazzling—she looks every inch the society goddess—but if you look closely, you might detect the faint glimmer of a woman who knew she had rescued a palace roof (And knew she had  provided the requisite “heir and a spare”!) yet found her own happiness leaking away.

In the end, a Sargent portrait was less about recording a face than about sealing a chapter of social history. The dollar princesses’ marriages may have been transactions, but on Sargent’s canvases, they became triumphs—proof that money, titles, and art could meet on equal terms…at least for the span of one dazzling sitting. 

Educational Immortality

Yesterday, I received a very kind letter from a former student.  Besides the incredibly large salaries and the vast and well-furnished office spaces given history professors, this is the best reward you receive for a couple of decades teaching. 

My former student is now teaching high school history and says that in referring back to her old college notes, she was surprised to realize that parts of her own history lectures were repeating things she had heard in my classroom.  This doesn’t surprise me at all since I long ago realized that most of the lectures that I wrote contained many of the same elements that I had heard while a student of Ray Sadler and Charles Harris, my favorite history professors.  While teaching, I probably unknowingly quoted them on a daily basis.

Ever catch a teacher tossing out a phrase that feels like a blast from your own school days?  Maybe it’s “The Puritans didn’t come to America to escape persecution, they came to start it.” or a quirky quip like, “The perfect classroom is a log with a student on one end and a teacher on the other” (shoutout to Mark Hopkins for that gem).  Have you ever wondered why new teachers sound like echoes of their old ones? Spoiler Alert: it’s less about time travel and more about human nature, nostalgia, and cognitive imprinting.

Picture this: you’re a student in a stuffy classroom, doodling in your notebook, when your professor drops a line so catchy it sticks like gum on your shoe.  Fast-forward a couple of decades, and now you’re the professor, standing at the front of the room, and—bam!—out pops that same phrase.  It’s like your brain hit the rewind button.  So, how does this happen?

For starters, we humans are natural mimicry machines.  From the moment we’re born, we copy what we see—whether it’s a parent’s smile or a teacher’s stern “Eyes on me!”  Students spend years watching their teachers like hawks, soaking up not just math or history but also their teachers’ quirks, catchphrases, and classroom vibes.  When those students grow up to become teachers and professors, those patterns are already hardwired.  It’s like muscle memory for words.  Psychologists call this “modeling,” but let’s be real—it’s just us stealing our teachers’ best lines like crows snagging shiny trinkets.

Then there’s the nostalgia factor.  Remember that one teacher who made algebra feel like an adventure, or history became so real that you dreamt of it at night?  Their words—say, “The only limit is your imagination!”—get etched into your brain, tied to warm fuzzies or those lightbulb moments.  When you’re a teacher facing a room of blank stares, those phrases bubble up like a trusty playlist, ready to inspire (or at least fill the awkward silence).  It’s not just habit—it’s a little love letter to the teachers who shaped you.

Becoming a teacher isn’t just about writing good lectures and putting together that killer PowerPoint.  Instead, it’s like stepping into a cultural relay race.  Teacher training programs and school staff rooms are like cozy clubs where teachers swap stories, strategies, and yes—sayings.  New teachers, eager to fit in, often lean on the lingo of their own mentors or that of the veterans down the hall.  If your old history teacher loved saying, “History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes,” you might find yourself dropping that line to sound wise (and because it’s just so darn quotable).

Classrooms also have a knack for triggering déjà vu.  A student’s cheeky question or a chaotic group discussion can feel eerily familiar, like a rerun of your own school days.  Your brain digs into its archives and pulls out a phrase your old professor used in a similar spot because it feels right.  It’s not lazy—it’s your mind saying, “Hey, this worked back then, let’s try it now!”

So, why do teachers lean on these recycled gems?  First off, they trust them.  If your science teacher’s “Measure twice, mix once” got you through lab experiments, you’re betting it’ll help your students nail their projects, too.  These phrases are like comfort food—reliable, familiar, and crowd-pleasing.    Falling back on a tried-and-true saying is like grabbing a life raft in a stormy sea of whiteboard markers.  (Personally, I always preferred the old chalkboards—I’m a traditionalist.)

There’s also a deeper reason: teaching is a legacy game.  Teachers and professors are part of a big, beautiful chain, passing down wisdom and insights like family heirlooms.  When a teacher repeats, “A log with a student on one end and a teacher on the other,” they’re not just quoting Mark Hopkins (via a speech made by one of his students, President James Garfield, circa 1871).  They’re sharing a belief that real learning happens through connection, not fancy gadgets.  It’s like preferring a blackboard to a white board—old-school, but it still works. 

And let’s not forget identity.  For many professors, their career choice was sparked by a rock star teacher who made school magical.  Repeating their words is like channeling that inspiration, a way to say, “I’m carrying your torch.”  It’s less about copying and more about honoring the teachers who not only made you want to teach but made the subject important.  Long after a teacher has retired, his words live on in the classroom.

This echo effect is, well…effective. Studies, like those by researchers Zeichner and Gore, back in 1990, show that new teachers often lean on their own school experiences to shape their style—phrases included.  It’s not just nostalgia—it’s practical.  Our brains love shortcuts (hello, cognitive fluency!), so when you’re scrambling to explain the Protestant Reformation to students who could not care less, you resort to using the same phrases that explained the subject to you.

Let’s circle back to that Mark Hopkins quote about the log, the student, and the teacher.  It’s the kind of line that sticks because it’s profound yet simple, capturing the heart of teaching: connection.  When a former student-turned-teacher repeats it, they’re not just parroting words.  They’re passing on a philosophy that says, “It’s about us, not the stuff.”  It’s why teachers keep echoing their mentors—it’s a way to keep the magic of learning alive, one catchy phrase at a time.

So, the next time you hear a teacher drop a familiar line, smile. It’s not just words—it’s a time capsule and a little piece of their own school days sneaking into the present.  And who knows? Maybe one of their students will grow up, grab a whiteboard marker (or a piece of chalk), and keep the echo going.  After all, teaching isn’t just a job—it’s a conversation that spans generations, one log at a time.