How did a couple's holiday save Kyoto from certain ruin? How did a landslide contribute to the Revolutionary War? Basically, how have chance encounters and decisions influenced the history of the United States?Don is joined for this episode by Brian Klaas, author of 'Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters'.Brian is a political scientist, a contributing writer at The Atlantic, and an associate professor in global politics at University College London.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Nick Thomson. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media
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Deep in the rainforest of Brazil, the humid air hums with a chirping of cicadas, distant bird calls, the babbling of a stream running towards the Amazon, and the constant quiet dripping of moisture from leaves to the ground cover below.
A morpho butterfly, its vivid iridescent blue wings spanning five inches, flutters delicately between branches, landing to sip juices from decayed acai berries in the dappled sunlight. It is a fragile and elegant creature, here among the massive trunks of trees reaching hundreds of feet into the sky.
And yet, with a particular flutter of its wings, unseen by human eyes, indecipherable to scientists and meteorologists, a ripple of air extends outward. A minuscule force, but it joins with accumulating air currents that feed finally into the higher atmospheric systems above. Days later, a storm a continent away gathers strength. Winds build and tornado warnings blare.
Meanwhile, this same butterfly flutters onward in its verdant and peaceful habitat, oblivious to any force it may have exerted. the butterfly effect. The idea that a tiny development in one location can set off a chain reaction, triggering events in the world at large. Music
It's American History Hit here. I'm Don Wildman, your host. Welcome back. Human history can be viewed as one event leading to another, which leads to others in a constant phenomenon of cause and effect. That's certainly the view of most historians, I'd say, who work diligently to order events and present a coherent, defensible record of whatever happened and how it came to pass.
But there is another dynamic at play in history, never mind in the whole of existence, where random occurrence is as much a factor as logical order. It's the butterfly effect that borrows from the mathematical ideas of chaos theory. Unicorn moments that just happen because they happen, and then steer historical consequence in one direction or another, banal or profound.
leads to all sorts of what-ifs and counterfactuals that provide so many enlightening hypotheticals on how our world could be so different if one or another choice had been made, or if another door had been knocked upon, or if, well, you get the idea.
And there's a new book about this notion, and it's called, appropriately, Fluke, Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters, written by Brian Klass, who is a political scientist working at University College London as a professor. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic magazine, and today, Randomly, a guest on American History Hit. Hello, Brian. Nice to have you. It's great to be here.
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