pandemics

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  2/22/2021
  

  We’re Just Rediscovering a 19th-Century Pandemic Strategy

  by Sarah Zhang

  “We’ve gotten so good at preventing so many diseases, there’s been a loss of knowledge and a loss of experience,” Jeanne Kisacky, the author of Rise of the Modern Hospital, says.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  2/15/2021
  

  Eroding Trust, Spreading Fear: The Historical Ties Between Pandemics And Extremism

  Historian John Fea says that the COVID-19 pandemic is one of a long line of disease outbreaks encouraging paranoid thinking and a siege mentality. 

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• 12/20/2020
  

  The Plague in Ancient Athens: A Cautionary Tale for America

  by Fred Zilian

  The United States in some respects has fared better under COVID than Athens did during the plague that accompanied the Peloponnesian War: a vaccine is in sight, and our head of state survived the day's most feared disease. But in both cases, disease showed the strains and cracks of a society and political system that will be difficult to repair.

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• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  12/9/2020
  

  Clerks Wearing Masks: Building Historical Empathy while Teaching the 1918 Influenza Epidemic

  by E. Thomas Ewing and Jeffrey S. Reznick

  "We, like many in the historical profession, spend a great deal of time asking what people in the past believed, thought, and understood, but we also can—and should—ask what people in the future might think about us and our circumstances."

• 
• SOURCE: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
  10/18/2020
  

  Last Week Tonight: The World Health Organization

  The weekly comedy-investigative program includes an assessment of the World Health Organization's past work eradicating disease in the developing world and the Trump administration's attacks on the agency (includes some vulgar language and jokes).

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/19/2020
  

  What Fans of "Herd Immunity" Don't Tell You

  by John M. Barry

  Prolonged isolation measures to fight COVID-19 do cause harm--social, emotional, and economic. But advocates of "herd immunity" are not offering a practical or safe plan to protect the vulnerable if the virus spreads on a mass scale. 

• 
• SOURCE: Washington Post
  10/15/2020
  

  Medieval Europeans Didn’t Understand how the Plague Spread. Their Response Wasn’t so Different from Ours Now

  "As we spoke with historians and searched for the plague’s lasting marks, what stood out most were the similarities, 672 years apart."

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  10/14/2020
  

  How Do Pandemics End? History Suggests Diseases Fade but are Never Truly Gone

  by Nükhet Varlik

  "Whether bacterial, viral or parasitic, virtually every disease pathogen that has affected people over the last several thousand years is still with us, because it is nearly impossible to fully eradicate them."

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• SOURCE: History.com
  10/5/2020
  

  Why African Americans Were More Likely to Die During the 1918 Flu Pandemic

  Black Americans in the 1918 flu pandemic were anomalously less likely to catch the flu, but died disproportionately from it because of segregated medicine.

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• SOURCE: Perspectives on History
  10/2/2020
  

  Fearing a Fear of Germs

  by Heather Murray

  Will responses to the Coronavirus, like early public health steps taken in response to HIV, foster suspicion and mistrust? 

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• SOURCE: Slate
  9/13/2020
  

  When 194,000 Deaths Doesn’t Sound Like So Many

  by Rebecca Onion

  Historian Jacqueline Wernimont explains that the rise of quantification helps to obscure the human beings behind the numbers and makes the COVID-19 toll seem more acceptable. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/6/2020
  

  ‘It is Getting Better Now’: Family Letters from the Deadly 1918 Flu Pandemic

  Americans throughout the country are climbing attic stairs, descending into dusty basements and flipping through folders in old filing cabinets to seek words of everyday wisdom from ancestors who have suffered through something like this before.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/1/2020
  

  ‘The 1918 Flu Is Still With Us’: The Deadliest Pandemic Ever Is Still Causing Problems Today

  Historians John Barry and Howard Markel are among the medical and social science experts who explain that the 1918 pandemic didn't "end" so much as endure in an era of recurrent viral pandemics. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  9/2/2020
  

  Gerald Ford Rushed Out a Vaccine. It Was a Fiasco

  by Rick Perlstein

  If steady, mature Gerald Ford succumbed to haste when his presidency was on the line, imagine what Donald Trump will do.

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• SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
  8/19/2020
  

  Plague and Protest Go Hand in Hand

  Scholars like Philip Ziegler and Mark Senn have argued that the Black Death of 1348 laid the groundwork for the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, the first large-scale popular revolt in England.

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  8/11/2020
  

  Boston Refused to Close Schools During the 1918 Flu. Then Children Began to Die

  Boston's school health officials in 1918 denied that school attendance posed a heightened risk for children contracting or transmitting the flu. 

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• SOURCE: Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era
  8/11/2020
  

  “The Mask Law will be Rigidly Enforced”: Ordinances, Arrests, and Celebrations during the 1918-1919 Influenza Epidemic

  by Jessica Brabble, Ariel Ludwig, and E. Thomas Ewing

  History teaches us that masking is a community effort in which individuals choose to act for the good of all, despite the inconvenience or discomfort. 

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• SOURCE: History.com
  8/10/2020
  

  5 Hard-Earned Lessons from Past Pandemics

  Do any of the survival strategies developed by past societies seem familiar? 

• 
• SOURCE: National Endowment for the Humanities
  8/6/2020
  

  The Last Pandemic

  by E. Thomas Ewing

  As we look to history for lessons in early 2020, we need to think broadly about how understanding the complexity of the past can inform decisions in the present and the future.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  8/6/2020
  

  America's Coronavirus Endurance Test

  by Howard Markel

  To defeat the virus, we will have to start thinking in years, not months. We must refuse to give up on flattening the curve. It’s up to us to hold the line until our government catches up.