Don't panic! It's just an outbreak

— -- Fads come and go, but genuine mass scares and delusions provide a kind of long-lasting entertainment. Consider the "Swiss Preaching Epidemic" of 1841, marked by nationwide hallucinatory sermonizing by ordinary men, women and children. Or the tale of "Rhode Island Martian Panic" of 1974, in which a recreation of the 1938 War of the Worlds radio script terrified the tiny state.

In our era of a real estate bust and financial meltdown, learning about wacky, as opposed to costly, varieties of folly may offer some solace. And maybe some lessons too.

"If we are to understand the present, the lessons of the past can save us from tragic mistakes," say historian Hilary Evans of the Mary Evan Picture Library in London, and sociologist Robert Bartholomew, in their recently-released Outbreak!, The Encyclopedia of Extraordinary SocialBehavior. The encyclopedia collects hundreds of panics, manias and scares from the "Abdera Outbreak of Prose and Poetry" of 300 B.C.,where folks in ancient Greece recovering from the flu suddenly started screaming lines from plays ceaselessly, to the "Zoot Suit Riots" in 1940's Southern California, where mobs beat up Mexican-Americans fueled by bogus news reports of gangsterism among young men wearing the shoulder-padded zoot suits.

The classic work on outbursts of unlikely behavior remains Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Delusions, published in 1841, which helped popularize accounts of financial speculations such as the "Tulip Mania" that supposedly swept Holland from 1634 to 1637. Outbreak! brings such accounts up to date, noting how Brown University economist Peter Garber has shown the tulip mania, for example, was "a meaningless winter drinking game" played up by later financial writers, who mistook it for a genuine financial craze.