plague

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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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• 12/6/2020
  

  How Venetians Invented Health Care

  by Meredith F. Small

  It's been widely discussed during this pandemic year that Venetians invented the quarantine. But the author of a new book on Venice's history of innovation argues that it was just one of the public health measures for which we can thank them.

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• 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: 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
  7/25/2020
  

  Ancient Teeth Show History of Epidemics is Much Older than we Thought

  Scientists and archaeologists now believe that the plague bacteria, which caused the medieval Black Death, infected humans roughly 5,000 years ago in the Stone Age.

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  7/14/2020
  

  When Plague Is Not a Metaphor

  by Hunter Gardner

  It's not always a blessing when current events make a researcher's specialty suddenly and urgently relevant. 

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• SOURCE: Science
  5/14/2020
  

  From Black Death to Fatal Flu, Past Pandemics Show Why People on the Margins Suffer Most

  Evidence from bioanthropology and history suggests that late medieval plagues (and other pandemics) are not levelling forces; they often reinforce the divisions in society.

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• SOURCE: The Guardian
  4/29/2020
  

  How Humans Have Reacted To Pandemics Through History – A Visual Guide

  From arguments about masks to riots outside hospitals, history shows some common threads in the human response to pandemics.

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• SOURCE: TIME
  4/20/2020
  

  Christian Groups That Resist Public-Health Guidelines Are Forgetting a Key Part of the Religion's History

  by Matthew Gabriele

  Scholars have shown that a large part of Christianity’s attraction in the Roman world was that it cared for the welfare of the people who were suffering.

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• SOURCE: The Guardian
  4/18/2020
  

  What History Can Teach Us About Building a Fairer Society After Coronavirus

  Local protests and uprisings against landlords had happened before, but after the Black Death they became more common.

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• 4/12/2020
  

  Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year and the Year of COVID-19

  by Frank Palmeri

  Defoe's accomplishment as a work of history lies not so much in the accuracy of its numbers or facts as in its power as a work of fiction, in the observing eye and skeptical intelligence of H.F., and in the stories he tells, which convey through common language and the details of common life what it was like to live through the plague. 

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  3/23/2020
  

  What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About

  by Jill Lepore

  In the literature of pestilence, the greatest threat isn’t the loss of human life but the loss of what makes us human.

• 
• SOURCE: Slate
  

  The Plague That Killed Athenian Democracy

  by Robert Zaretsky

  Want to know how disease can permanently alter a society? Read Thucydides.

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• SOURCE: History.com
  3/17/2020
  

  How 5 of History's Worst Pandemics Finally Ended

  Here’s how five of the world’s worst pandemics finally ended.

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  3/14/2020
  

  Shakespeare Wrote His Best Works During a Plague

  by Daniel Pollack-Peltzner

  The most heartening lesson from Shakespeare’s era is that the playhouses will likely survive and reopen, again and again. What plays to perform when they do?

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• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  12/3/19
  

  The Justinianic Plague's Devastating Impact Was Likely Exaggerated

  by Katherine J. Wu

  After poring through data ranging from historical texts to pollen samples and mortuary archaeology, an international team of researchers has concluded that reports of the havoc wreaked by the Justinianic plague may have been exaggerated.

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• SOURCE: History.com
  November 15, 2019
  

  The first time the plague broke out in the US, Officials tried to deny it

  by Becky Little

  In 1900, newspapers and politicians claimed the doctor trying to stop the plague had made the whole thing up. 

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• SOURCE: Science Magazine
  3/6/19
  

  The Black Death may have transformed medieval societies in sub-Saharan Africa

  Some researchers point to new evidence from archaeology, history, and genetics to argue that the Black Death likely did sow devastation in medieval sub-Saharan Africa. 

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• SOURCE: The Local
  12-7-2018
  

  Ancient strain of plague found in Sweden – and it could rewrite history

  A group of researchers from Sweden, Denmark and France analyzed skeletons from a tomb outside Falköping and found DNA traces of yersinia petis, the bacteria that cause plague.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  2-23-15
  

  New Study: Plague outbreaks that ravaged Europe for centuries were driven by climate changes in Asia

  These outbreaks were traditionally thought to be caused by rodent reservoirs of infected rats lurking in Europe’s cities, or potentially by rodent reservoirs in the wilderness. But research published in the journal PNAS suggests otherwise.