COVID-19 
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SOURCE: NIH Director's Blog
4/15/2021
Fauci Donates Model to Smithsonian’s COVID-19 Collection
Dr. Anthony Fauci's model of the SARS-CoV-2 virus has been a prop in numerous informational sessions since the beginning of the pandemic. Now, the plastic germ will reside in the Smithsonian's collections.
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SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
Teaching: More Pandemic-Driven Innovations Professors Like
"The themes running through all of these innovations are flexibility and engagement: The more ways in which people can participate in the classroom, contribute to discussions, and share their ideas, readers found, the more learning improves."
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SOURCE: WEMU
4/12/2021
U-M Medical Historian Says It Appears History Is Repeating Itself In Our Current Pandemic
Medical Historian Alex Navarro warns that resistance to vaccines and public health measures are likely to prolong the COVID pandemic the way they did the 1919 influenza.
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SOURCE: BBC
4/12/2021
How US History Explains Vaccine Passport Skepticism
Opposition to requiring documentary proof of vaccination to participate in some activities is rooted both in the weak traditions of public health in the United States and legitimate fears that such "passports" will work to disadvantage the poor, minorities, and others who are less able to access vaccination.
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SOURCE: New York Times
4/10/2021
A Once-in-a-Century Crisis Can Help Educate Doctors
by Molly Worthen
The COVID-19 pandemic has offered valuable lessons on the necessity of humanistic education in the training of medical professionals.
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SOURCE: Salem News
3/24/2021
SSU Faculty Retrenchment Plan Accidentally Released
Salem (MA) State University's General Counsel disputed that a spreadsheet accidentally relased in response to a records request and circulated by a faculty member constitutes a plan to terminate faculty positions for budgetary reasons. Faculty argue that it is consistent with pressure they face to accept furloughs and doubt administration assurances that retrenchment is off the table.
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SOURCE: ABC 10
3/21/2021
Historian Brooke Newman on the Front Lines of COVID Vaccination
Historian Brooke Newman, after careful research, is allowing her daughter to participate in the a trial of a vaccine, already tested for teens, on younger children. They cite the personal desire to return to normalcy, the documented safety of the vaccine in earlier trials, and advancing the collective cause of public health in their decision.
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SOURCE: Scientific American
3/20/2021
We Need Social Science, Not Just Medical Science, to Beat the Pandemic
by Nicholas Dirks
"In order to ensure that scientific advances work not just to create new medicines but to help lead to a healthier and more just world, we need to ensure that science and social science work hand in hand as well."
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
3/15/2021
The Race to Collect COVID Ephemera Before It’s History
"Last year, on March 13th, as Americans began to restructure daily life in response to covid-19, one curator, Rebecca Klassen, had an idea."
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SOURCE: Black Perspectives
3/22/2021
Medical Racism has Shaped U.S. Policies for Centuries
by Dierdre Cooper Owens
Medical racism is as old as America, and the COVID-19 pandemic has been no exception in terms of unequal vulnerability to disease.
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SOURCE: TomDispatch
3/18/2021
The Sports Pages of Death
by Tom Engelhardt
The developing effort to control and contain the COVID pandemic raise the question of why governments and industry are not doing more to avoid the worst case scenarios of climate change.
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SOURCE: New York Times
3/12/2021
Aruká Juma, Last Man of His Tribe, Is Dead
As the last fluent speaker of the tribe’s language, Mr. Juma’s death means that much of the tribe’s language and many of its traditions and rituals will be forever lost.
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SOURCE: Nursing Clio
3/9/2021
Thucydides, Historical Solidarity, and Birth in the Pandemic
by Sarah Christine Teets
A classicist reflects on Thucydides' account of the Athenian plague, and concludes that the point of historical knowledge is to empathize, not to strategize.
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SOURCE: New York Times
3/11/2021
The Coronavirus Killed the Gospel of Small Government
by Zachary D. Carter
Revisiting the work of Keynes highlights the fact that struggles to deal with the pandemic are not only public health failures but economic failures — an inability to marshal resources to solve a problem.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
3/8/2021
Transcript: Race in America: History Matters with Erika Lee & Helen Zia
Historian Erika Lee and Asian-American civil rights activist Helen Zia discuss the way that COVID-19 has reignited hostility against Asian Americans.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
3/1/2021
The Muddled History of Anti-Asian Violence
The COVID pandemic has led to increased hostility and violence targeting Asian Americans. Younger activists, who want to define these attacks as crimes of bias, struggle to convince the wider society that these individual incidents are part of a historical pattern of racism.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
2/24/2021
Many Black Americans Aren’t Rushing to Get the COVID-19 Vaccine – A Long History of Medical Abuse Suggests Why
by Esther Jones
From J. Marion Sims to the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments to the exploitation of Henrietta Lacks' DNA, there are ample historical reasons for Black Americans to feel that medical authorities are unconcerned with their safety and mistrust new COVID vaccines. Acknowledging this history is essential for public health authorities to gain trust.
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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: Tropics of Meta
2/19/2021
The Current Republic of Suffering
by Murray Browne
Drew Gilpin Faust's "This Republic of Suffering" inspires reflection on how the collective experiences of COVID and the loss of a half million Americans may shape the society that emerges.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
2/23/2021
Having Vaccines Alone isn’t Enough to Defeat COVID-19
by Joyce Chaplin
Early efforts at smallpox innoculation showed the importance of social and political factors in making new medical technologies effective.
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