Dancing mania (also known as dancing plague, choreomania, St John’s Dance and, historically, St. Vitus’s Dance) was a social phenomenon that occurred primarily in mainland Europe between the 14th and 17th centuries. It involved groups of people dancing erratically, sometimes thousands at a time. The mania affected men, women, and children who danced until they collapsed from exhaustion. One of the first major outbreaks was in Aachen, in the Holy Roman Empire, in 1374, and it quickly spread throughout Europe; one particularly notable outbreak occurred in Strasbourg in 1518, also in the Holy Roman Empire.

Affecting thousands of people across several centuries, dancing mania was not an isolated event, and was well documented in contemporary reports. It was nevertheless poorly understood, and remedies were based on guesswork. Generally, musicians accompanied dancers, to help ward off the mania, but this tactic sometimes backfired by encouraging more to join in. There is no consensus among modern-day scholars as to the cause of dancing mania.

The several theories proposed range from religious cults being behind the processions to people dancing to relieve themselves of stress and put the poverty of the period out of their minds. It is, however, thought[by whom?] to have been a mass psychogenic illness in which the occurrence of similar physical symptoms, with no known physical cause, affect a large group of people as a form of social influence.

Lived: Oct 25, 1881 – Apr 08, 1973 (age 91)
Height: 5′ 4″ (1.63 m)
Spouse: Jacqueline Roque (m. 1961 – 1973) · Olga Khokhlova (m. 1918 – 1955)
Children: Claude Picasso (Son) · Paloma Picasso (Daughter) · Paul Joseph Picasso (Son) · Maya Widmaier-Picasso (Daughter)
Periods: Cubism · Picasso’s Blue Period · Picasso’s Rose Period · Picasso’s African Period · Surrealism · Modern art · Analytic cubism · Synthetic cubism
Parents: José Ruiz y Blasco (Father) · María Picasso y López (Mother)

Born: Mar 29, 1915 · Sebeka, MN
Died: Jan 16, 1984 · Bellevue, WA
Spouse: Doris Arnold
Education: University of Minnesota
Parents: Bertha E. Barden · Edward Erb Arnold

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Highlights

• 1940: Arnold began Great Western Fire Control Supply in Boise, Idaho in 1940, a company that sold and installed fire suppression systems, a job that took him around the Pacific Northwest.


• 1947: He is best known for making what is generally considered the first widely reported unidentified flying object sighting in the United States, after claiming to have seen nine unusual objects flying in tandem near Mount Rainier, Washington on June 24, 1947.


• 1962: He ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor of Idaho in 1962.


• 1977: On June 24, 1977, however, he attended the First International UFO Congress in Chicago, curated by Fate to mark the 30th anniversary of the “birth” of the modern UFO age.


• 1984: Kenneth Arnold died on January 16, 1984 in Bellevue, United States.

Lived: May 24, 1819 – Jan 22, 1901 (age 81)
Height: 5′ 0″ (1.52 m)
Spouse: Albert, Prince Consort (m. 1840 – 1861)
Children: Edward VII (Son) · Victoria, Princess Royal (Daughter) · Princess Alice of the United Kingdom (Daughter) · Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom (Daughter) · Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha
Parents: Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (Father) · Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld (Mother)
Movies: Queen Victoria’s Last Visit to Ireland

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Highlights

• 1819: The Duke and Duchess of Kent’s only child, Victoria was born at 4.15 a.m. on 24 May 1819 at Kensington Palace in London.


• 1830: In 1830, the Duchess of Kent and Conroy took Victoria across the centre of England to visit the Malvern Hills, stopping at towns and great country houses along the way.


• 1835: At Ramsgate in October 1835, Victoria contracted a severe fever, which Conroy initially dismissed as a childish pretence.


• 1840: During Victoria’s first pregnancy in 1840, in the first few months of the marriage, 18-year-old Edward Oxford attempted to assassinate her while she was riding in a carriage with Prince Albert on her way to visit her mother.


• 1847: She did undertake her official government duties, yet chose to remain secluded in her royal residences—Windsor Castle, Osborne House, and the private estate in Scotland that she and Albert had acquired in 1847, Balmoral Castle.


• 1888: Victoria’s eldest daughter became Empress consort of Germany in 1888, but she was widowed within the year, and Victoria’s grandchild Wilhelm became German Emperor as Wilhelm II.


• 1901: She died on Tuesday, 22 January 1901, at half past six in the evening, at the age of 81.

Date: 1905

Start date: 1971
End date: 1973

Born: May 22, 1942 (age 74) · Evergreen Park, IL Height: 5′ 9″ (1.75 m)
Movies: The Net
Siblings: David Kaczynski (Brother)
Education: Harvard University · University of Michigan

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Highlights

• 1942: Kaczynski was born on May 22, 1942, in Evergreen Park, Illinois, to second-generation Polish Americans, Wanda (née Dombek) and Theodore Richard Kaczynski.


• 1971: In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water, in Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills in an attempt to become self-sufficient.


• 1994: In 1994, Burson-Marsteller executive Thomas J. Mosser was killed by a mail bomb sent to his North Caldwell, New Jersey home.


• 1996: In 1996, a docudrama was produced titled Unabomber: The True Story, featuring actors Dean Stockwell as Ben Jeffries, Robert Hays as David Kaczynski and Tobin Bell as Ted Kaczynski.


• 1996: Kaczynski’s brother, David—who would play a vital role in Kaczynski’s capture by alerting federal authorities to the prospect of his brother’s being involved in the Unabomber cases—sought out and became friends with Wright after Kaczynski was detained in 1996.


• 1996: In 1996 the Evergreen Park Community High School District No. 231 was also placed on lockdown while FBI agents searched Kaczynski’s school records.


• 1996: In February 1996, Bisceglie provided a copy of the 1971 essay written by Ted Kaczynski to the FBI.