When a Salad Bar Became a Bioterror Crime Scene

When a Salad Bar Became a Bioterror Crime Scene

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Episode description

When a Salad Bar Became a Bioterror Crime Scene

On 29 August 1984, two county commissioners in rural Oregon fell mysteriously ill after visiting a religious commune. What followed was the first large-scale bioterrorist attack in American history: 751 people poisoned across ten restaurants as part of a failed election-rigging scheme. This episode also explores the catastrophic opening day of Mainz Cathedral in 1009, when the newly consecrated building caught fire during its own inauguration ceremony; the 1991 murder of Sicilian businessman Libero Grassi, who publicly refused to pay protection money to the Mafia; and Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s 1588 Sword Hunt ordinance, which disarmed Japan’s peasantry and cemented the samurai class system for centuries. Four stories from the same calendar date, each revealing what happens when humans attempt to control the future through planning, power, or sheer bloody-minded refusal to comply. History, as ever, keeps its options open.

Chapters

  • Introduction A seemingly ordinary Thursday lunch at an Oregon salad bar in 1984 turns out to be anything but normal, as a religious commune’s bizarre election-rigging plot unfolds.
  • The Rajneeshee Bioterrorism Attack How a charismatic guru’s Oregon commune, led by his secretary Ma Anand Sheela, carried out America’s first large-scale bioterrorist attack by contaminating restaurant salad bars with salmonella, sickening 751 people in a failed attempt to influence local elections.
  • Mainz Cathedral Burns on Its Opening Day The spectacular bad timing of Mainz Cathedral’s 1009 consecration ceremony, when the newly completed Romanesque building caught fire on its inauguration day, requiring centuries of rebuilding that produced the structure standing today.
  • Libero Grassi The story of the Sicilian businessman who publicly refused to pay Mafia protection money in 1991, writing an open letter that named his extortionists, and was murdered seven months later on his doorstep.
  • Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s Sword Hunt The 1588 ordinance that required all Japanese peasants to surrender their weapons, crystallising the separation between samurai and commoners and shaping Japan’s rigid class structure for the next three centuries.
  • Outro Four histories of human attempts to control the future, from wisdom to criminal planning, and the determination that connects them all.

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