I have much more time for reading, listening and watching history now that the days of my active fathering of young children are long past and the downsizing phase of life comes with townhouse groundskeepers. Along with hours of audiobook listening on my long commute and all the hard-copy and journal reading those books lead me to, I like to do a lot of history reading, watching and listening for lesson development, and often dive into dozens of side-stories each lesson uncovers. In the process, something very weird is happening. Facts, names or references that I haven’t thought about in years or just learned will come to my attention in a book, essay or video, then they will appear again a few days or in some cases just a few hours later. These coincidental connections test the bounds of believability.
For example, last April I was listening to the oral argument of Trump v. United States from the Supreme Court during lunch one day and heard Justice Thomas mention Operation Mongoose while questioning whether U.S. presidents could be prosecuted for official acts. This reference wasn’t especially remarkable but I’d just read about Operation Mongoose and the CIA’s efforts to destabilize Cuba in 1961 two days beforehand in Daniel Ellsberg’s book, Doomsday Machine. How did just one random event in the hundreds of thousands of events in US History come across my attention twice in less than 48 hours?
When I was reviewing a video of Gary Gallagher speaking at Chautauqua for a lesson on the causes of the Civil War, I clipped the excerpt in which he explains how the Confederate Constitution did not give its states the right to abolish slavery. The next day I’m listening to Alan Taylor’s American Civil Wars as my audiobook commute companion and wouldn’t you know it, he makes a reference to that very clause of the Confederate Constitution. How is it possible that this little factoid would land in my head twice in less than 24 hours?
When researching Upton Sinclair to find more about what he did besides write The Jungle, I came across a note I made in 2020 about a novel he wrote about syphilis, which of course never makes it into anyone’s lesson plans. Three days later I’m scrolling through Edward Bernays’ book Crystallizing Public Opinion after dinner, as one does while trying to add material to a 1920s advertising lesson, and come across a reference to Sinclair’s syphilis novel, Damaged Goods.
It would take some fairly sophisticated mathematics to measure the randomness of Operation Mongoose, a clause in the Confederate Constitution and a play about syphilis written by Upton Sinclair. Yet I’d bet that there’s no way to explain how I could hear about each of these factoids twice in a matter of days.
As a compulsive chronicler and note-taker, I recorded these coincidental connections because I’m sure that no one would believe they actually happened. Then they continued to happen.
I was helping teachers add some meat to a SHEG (now Digital Inquiry Group) lesson about life of homesteaders on the plains and opened YouTube, noticing this guy Dewayne from Dry Creek Wrangler School in the recommended videos. I know nothing of him, but his look caught my eye and the 4.4 million videos nudged me to watch his video for a couple minutes. While listening to him talk about “having it all together” I scrolled through the comments and found someone thanking Dewayne for helping him deal with losing his wife. He was 27 years old and had three kids – that is staggeringly difficult. Getting back to work a minute later, I started looking through the photography of Solomon Butcher, who is celebrated in Nebraska for his pictures of homesteaders in the 19th century. What do I find? A picture of a man who had just lost his wife, standing in front of his sod house in 1887, with, you guessed it, three children. The universe found a way to connect the grief of one commenter to a 21st century video to a Nebraska settler in the 19th century and put that thought in my head.
Sometimes it is words and phrases that coincidentally echo at the same time. I was writing something and wanted to use the phrase “orders of magnitude” to be dramatic and really drive a point home. Searching it in a thesaurus to see if there were other options I came across a couple of posts that said the phrase is often misused, so ultimately I didn’t use it. But two days later I’m reading an article from the AHA and come across the phrase “orders of magnitude”.
My assignment to entry-level students on The Prince and Thomas More’s Utopia (see “Some Very Detailed Examples,” Renaissance Humanism) differs from the norm in several ways, starting with its length. It is several orders of magnitude longer than the typical assignment
These are coincidences that test your understanding of a rational universe. How often is that phrase used? What are the chances that I could come across it? Of those chances – how many of them are likely to happen within just a few days of each other?
Yet this coincidence continues – not just a paired set of references, but a string of them,
I was listening to Keith Richards’s audiobook “A Life” one summer because I wanted to hear something different. I’m not a Rolling Stones fan but having heard the radio host Imus gush over the book years ago, I thought it could be an interesting diversion. It was. I found myself drawn into the way Richards talks about music. After hearing him describe something called “open-G tuning”, I flipped through a couple of videos of him describing his attraction to open-G tuning and explaining how, musically, it shouldn’t work. Apparently, you have to play around with it to find the right chords and play notes differently. At the end of the brief answer, he says that he still hasn’t figured it out yet. He’s been playing guitar for fifty years, he’s universally regarded as one of the most famous guitar players of all time – and, he still hasn’t figured it out yet.
How does this string along?
At the same time I was writing about that “orders of magnitude” AHA article, I was trying to connect it to a poster I made and hung in the Social Studies office at our high school. The poster has a quote from Stanley Hauerwas, a professor in Duke University’s Divinity School. He’s universally regarded as an expert on the Protestant Reformation, he’s studied it for 50 years and on its 500th anniversary, he said he “still doesn’t know what to think about the Reformation”. Keith Richards, rock star, Stanley Hauerwas, theologian, both experts in their respective fields, and both saying that they “still don’t know”.
And then, as if to close the loop, I stumbled across an “Ask Keith” video, Richards mentioned reading “From Dawn to Decadence” by Jacques Barzun and that book was also mentioned in the “orders of magnitude” the AHA article that started this string.
Once these connections became more commonplace it was easier to notice them. But still, every once in a while, a connection will come out of the farthest reaches of the universe and crash into my consciousness.
Sometimes these connections make your blood run cold in disbelief, because they’re simply unfathomable.
What are the odds of me coming across a reference to a reference from Odysseus “piloting between Scylla and Charybdis” during the day in a reading about the war on history and then hearing it referenced again that evening when watching TV?
I read this paragraph in an essay about the War on History from Dan Gardner during the day…
“As members of society and sharers in the historical process,” McNeill concludes, “historians can only expect to be heard if they say what the people around them want to hear — in some degree. They can only be useful if they also tell the people some things they are reluctant to hear — in some degree. Piloting between this Scylla and Charybdis is the art of the serious historian, helping the group he or she addresses and celebrates to survive and prosper in a treacherous and changing world by knowing more about itself and others.”
He was quoting William McNeill in an essay entitled “Mythistory, or Truth, Myth, History, and Historians” so of course I have to read that then jumped to wikipedia to learn more about piloting this Scylla and Charybdis because I’ve never heard of it before. Odysseus’s steering between a whirlpool and six-headed sea monster seemed like a classic, “rock and a hard place” reference. Interesting, maybe, but perfectly inconsequential also.
Until later.
That evening after dinner, I watched another episode of the miniseries Turn, which is about Abraham Woodhull and the Culper Ring of spies during the American Revolution. In one especially dramatic, riveting scene marking the end of a romance between a British officer and an American woman, the officer laments that he feels that his life had left him between Scylla and Charybdis. Shocked and speechless, I immediately hit pause. Then I rewound it and played it again and again one more time to make sure. Then I hunted through scripts to see it in print. Right there, in Episode 2 of Season 3 stood a reference to Greek Mythology in a series about the American Revolution that I just heard for the very first time 12 hours beforehand, in an essay about war in history.
As much as I might like to see these connections as a sign from the universe to keep looking for them, I have to admit that there is no lesson to take away from them. It’s enough to know that they happen, that the unbelievable happens. And the more you learn, the more you’ll see it.