The rooms are already being reserved for the end-of-the-world parties. But academics aren’t waiting for an invitation to look seriously at the approach of 2000.
The simultaneous end of the second millennium and the 20th century has led to a host of new courses, books, and conferences. Academics are weighing in on the meaning of the millennium and the influence of apocalyptic ideas. Although the turn of the century seems to be getting lost in the millennial fever, some scholars are examining the legacy of the 20th century and prospects for the 21st.
“You don’t have to be a prophet to have predicted there’d be so much coming out at this time,” says Daniel Wojcik, an associate professor of English and folklore studies at the University of Oregon.
Naturally, he has a new book on the topic: The End of the World As We Know It: Faith, Fatalism, and Apocalypse in America (New York University Press). He is also designing a course called “The Year 2000" that he plans to offer in 1998. It will look at how the hopes and anxieties associated with the end of the millennium are expressed in religion and culture.
Scholars say it’s not the date itself that is important, although there is a debate about the date, and whether January 1, 2000, or January 1, 2001, should be viewed as the significant marker of the start of the new century and millennium.
“It’s how people project hopes and fear on the date that’s important,” Dr. Wojcik says. “There have been a lot of media hype and rhetoric already, but somehow there’s also been an acknowledgment of this as an important American phenomenon.”
Publishers have heard the message. Two anthologies have appeared this year: The Year 2000: Essays on the End (New York University Press) and Millennium, Messiahs, and Mayhem: Contemporary Apocalyptic Movements (Routledge). Another collection, Teaching Apocalypse (Scholars Press), is due out next year.
Professors are putting their scholarship on 2000 to use in the classroom. Courses have been developed at the College of Notre Dame in Maryland, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and California State University at Long Beach, to name a few. Most of the new electives are seminars aimed at freshmen or seniors and are not intended to last much past 2001.
The Center for Millennial Studies, established last year at Boston University, is intended to last well into the 21st century. It held its first conference, “The Year 1000,” last year and will hold its second, “The Apocalyptic Views of Unbelievers Among Christians, Jews, and Muslims,” next month.
That the study of apocalypticism is no longer regarded as on the fringe of academe is further evidenced by a book out this month from the noted Harvard University zoologist and geologist Stephen Jay Gould, Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist’s Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown (Harmony Books).
In his 190-page volume, Dr. Gould examines the concept of a millennium and the debate over whether the new one begins in 2000 or 2001. A hundred years ago, he writes, high culture dictated that “every important public celebration for the new century” take place from December 31, 1900, into January 1, 1901. This time around, while the Royal Greenwich Observatory in England has deemed January 1, 2001, as the official date, Dr. Gould writes that popular culture will win the day: “The old guard of Greenwich may pout to their heart’s content, but the world will rock and party on January 1, 2000.”
In Western culture, the roots of millennial fervor and apocalyptic predictions are traced to Christianity -- in particular, to the Book of Revelation and the violent end of the world that it depicts when Jesus returns to rule. Scholars are interested not only in the influence of apocalyptic thinking on religion, but also in secular predictions of nuclear annihilation and environmental catastrophe and how these ideas play out in art, literature, music, and politics.
The obvious explanation for the intense public and scholarly interest in 2000 is time itself. And it doesn’t hurt that the 1990s has produced a series of apocalyptic figures, such as the Branch Davidians, the Heaven’s Gate followers, and the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
The co-editor of the new anthology The Year 2000 has no doubt about the subject’s importance. “A lot of intellectuals are still pretty disdainful of this, but they are much less disdainful than they were five years ago,” says Charles B. Strozier, a professor of history at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “You can’t pick up the book and not be impressed with the range of scholarship.” The anthology includes essays by theologians, historians, sociologists, literary critics, and American-studies scholars.
Richard A. Landes, as director of Boston University’s Center for Millennial Studies, has made a personal crusade of arguing for the significance of studying millenarian movements. He is one of the leading scholars in a debate over the significance of the year 1000. Some argue that 1000 passed with little notice, a year like any other. Dr. Landes, an associate professor of history at Boston, is among those who see evidence that people were aware of the date and anxious about its meaning.
“The real problem in studying apocalypticism is that every apocalyptic prophet of our lifetime has been wrong,” he says. “So there’s a tendency to dismiss these people. The other tendency is to disguise the apocalyptic leanings of people we’ve come to regard as heroes. Newton is not known as an apocalyptic thinker, but he spent a lot of time doing commentaries on the Book of Revelation, and he thought the end was imminent.”
The millennial-studies center is intended to spur scholarly research and to archive what Dr. Landes sees as a “wave of millennial activity.” Besides gathering books, fliers, newsletters, and material from sites on the Internet, the center is also collecting what he calls “active archives.” For example, it sent a team of people to the Promise Keepers rally in Washington this month. Dr. Landes defines a millennial movement as any group of people who believe that they are going to “radically transform the way life is lived on this planet.” He points out that the Promise Keepers have announced plans to hold rallies in every state capital on -- you guessed it -- January 1, 2000.
Whether academics focus on millennial movements in the Middle Ages or in more-contemporary times, many insist that their work cannot be dismissed as trendy.
“There’s always a need to imagine the end,” says Tina Pippin, an associate professor of religious studies and women’s studies at Agnes Scott College who is editing the forthcoming Teaching Apocalypse. “It’s the ultimate horror.”
Since 1990, Dr. Pippin has taught an undergraduate seminar called “Apocalypse and Revolution.” Besides the Book of Revelation, her students read Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture (Harvard University Press, 1992), one of the books that scholars credit with bringing legitimacy to the study of millennialism.
Students in Dr. Pippin’s course watch movies such as Dr. Strangelove, Blade Runner, and The Seventh Seal. This semester, her students are using the Branch Davidians as a case study of the sociology of religious movements. They are also conducting an “Apocalypse Watch.” Each student has been assigned to look for examples of such ideas in a specific medium, such as in tabloid newspapers or on the Internet.
To skeptics who view courses like hers as faddish, Dr. Pippin replies: “Apocalypticism is everywhere. It’s in Paradise Lost. It’s in Moby-Dick, Heart of Darkness. It’s in so much poetry, classical and 20th-century literature, and film that you dismiss it at your own peril.”
Lee Quinby agrees. She teaches freshman and senior seminars on the subject at Hobart and William Smith Colleges and says her courses attract students whose religious beliefs tend toward fundamentalism as well as those more interested in the way millennial ideas play out in pop culture, such as heavy-metal music and television shows like “The X Files.”
“A course on the millennium puts in the classroom the most dramatic questions about life, death, and ethical behavior -- about what we can know and what we think we know,” says Dr. Quinby, a professor of English and American studies. “That fills a course for sure.”
Not everyone is jumping on the bandwagon. “The notion that there’s something significant about 2000 is just a human invention,” says Peter N. Stearns, a professor of history and dean of humanities at Carnegie Mellon University. He is not offering any new courses linked to the date, but he did write a book last year that aimed to tone down the rhetoric on 2000. He calls his book, Millennium III, Century XXI: A Retrospective on the Future (Westview Press), a “survivor’s guide to turn-of-the-century and millennial furor.”
Unlike Dr. Landes at Boston, Dr. Stearns believes that the year 1000 passed “largely unremarked.” The academic interest in 2000 does not bother him. He is more concerned about overkill in the popular press, such as Life magazine’s special issue on the millennium, which purports to list the 100 most important events of the past 1,000 years. “It risks giving a coherence to the millennium that just doesn’t exist,” he says.
But if professors are going to design courses around the theme of 2000, Dr. Stearns sees more validity in focusing on the change of centuries. “The millennium is just totally displacing the century,” he says. “From an educational standpoint, that’s too bad, because you can do more with centuries.”
Along those lines, faculty members at Rider University and on the Long Beach campus of the California State University have developed multiyear programs that look back at the 20th century and forward to the 21st. They are bringing in speakers and either designing new courses or using existing ones to discuss key forces changing students’ lives, such as biotechnology and the information revolution.
A 100-year time span is an artificial construct, say historians at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but it does have popular appeal. As Charles C. Stewart, a professor in the history department who is also dean of the liberal-arts college, jokes: “This may be the last time we’re listened to for another century.”
Since 1996-97, the department has offered a popular undergraduate course called “The Fate of the Twentieth Century.” Team-taught by about a dozen historians, it is built around five themes that the department identified during a faculty seminar that was supported by a $23,900 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The course characterizes the 1900s as the century of the state, of social movements, of technology, of global conflicts, and of the individual.
Rather than a march through history, students get different takes on the century. They read a variety of books, including novels such as Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine (Fawcett, 1991), about a character who leaves India and changes her name five times, starting out as Jyoli and ending up as Jane in Iowa.
The Illinois students are also assigned to interview their oldest living relative and write an essay about what they learn. The professors themselves ended up getting telephone calls from some relatives, who wanted to know what grade “their story” got.
The notion of the 20th century as a period of both continuity and discontinuity, and as a topic that is highly biographical, given that we’ve all lived through a part of it, has guided the professors’ new book as well. Imagining the Twentieth Century (University of Illinois Press), out this month, is a collection of short essays on topics such as Freud, decolonization, Barbie, the jukebox, and the suburbs. Each one was written by a member of the history department and is accompanied by a black-and-white photograph illustrating the topic.
The book is not an explanation of the century, but “a scrapbook of how people experienced the century,” says Peter Fritzsche, a professor of history and a co-editor of the book with Dr. Stewart.
Faculty members who are teaching new courses on the turn of the century or the millennium expect that they will not be doing so for long. But they say their scholarly interest in millennialism and in analyzing the 20th century will not ebb with the passage of time.
“I’ll continue to look at the fear that the end is coming and the hope that it is coming,” says Dr. Quinby, of Hobart and William Smith. “That doesn’t need the year 2000 to continue. It’s been around for centuries.”
Still, Oregon’s Dr. Wojcik wonders if the buzz about 2000 will become too much. He thinks his next book may be something like Bored With the Apocalypse.
