Extra History Suggestion Survey is OPEN to 12/14 (Patreon)

Our theme for November & December is Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds!

In 1841, Scottish journalist Charles Mackay published one of the landmark works of early social psychology: Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. Covering everything from witch hunts to economic bubbles, the Crusades to haunted houses, popular paranoias over "slow poisoning" or veneration of relics, it tried explain why large groups of people behaved in ways that were (in his Mackay's view) irrational.

So for the 180th anniversary of the book, give us your witch hunts, your dancing plagues, your weird urban panics. Want to hear about the leaping devil Spring-Heeled Jack, or the popular hysteria surrounding his predecessor the London Monster, who was said to prick women with a needle? What about the "Tulip Mania," a 1637 financial bubble in which contract prices for the newly-introduced flower soared to unheard-of levels before crashing, leaving investors with nothing?

Or would you like to go more serious, studying new religious movements such as the Spiritualists, or the Righteous and Harmonious Fists (the "Boxers" of the Boxer Rebellion)? What about the phenomenon of the Ghost Dance, a ritual that swept Native American tribes in 1890, with the goal of ending the United States' westward expansion, and indirectly led to the Wounded Knee Massacre? We can even do the life of a spiritual leader—we'll take any topic provided it hinges on and explores human belief.

Some notes about suggestions:

• If a suggestion we encounter only has enough research material/production scope for a one-off episode instead of a full series, we file it in a separate list to reference later when we are planning to schedule a one-off episode between series (this is true for every survey we do).
• Only one suggestion per person please! Multiple suggestions from the same person during any given survey period will be manually removed.