The Bizarre Case of the Tanganyika Laughing Disease

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The Bizarre Case of the Tanganyika Laughing Disease

On 30 January 1962, a girls’ school in Kashasha, twenty-five miles outside of Bukoba on the coast of Lake Victoria in the state of Tanganyika (present day Tanzania), was suddenly afflicted with a bizarre case of spontaneous laughter. Three girls began laughing and couldn’t stop. Stranger still, the laughter spread throughout the school and eventually into surrounding villages. The laughter lasted on average seven days and sometimes as long as six months. By the time the epidemic ended, 14 schools had to be shut down and 1000 people were infected. What happened?

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New Identities and the Cultural History of #GamerGate

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If you have an ear to the gaming world, you might have recently read about the #GamerGate campaign and the furious debate between its supporters and opponents. Both sides hold complex opinions that are blurred by the variety of individuals supporting them – it’s hard to pin down what each actually represents. The diversity of positions and actions taken in the name of one side or the other obscures any claims to the debate’s cohesion. To better understand #GamerGate, we turn to cultural historians to shed light on the problems raised by the messy divides of the newest “culture war” in 2014.

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The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald

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The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, sings Gordon Lightfoot in one of the most famous songs of his career, of The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.  If you haven’t heard it before, you should listen to it before reading this post. In a recent Reddit AMA, Lightfoot explained that he was compelled to write the song after it seemed to go unnoticed when it happened in November of 1975. The song rose to the top of the charts in 1976, and The Wreck is one of his most famous songs. Lightfoot gave new longevity to the memory of the men who went down on the Edmund Fitzgerald.  The song is a fascinating display of memory and history.

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