pandemics

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  4/28/2021
  

  President Biden is a Very Different Pandemic President than Woodrow Wilson

  by E. Thomas Ewing

  A century ago, there was little expectation that a US President would have much to say about a public health emergency, even one of national scope. 

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• SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
  4/27/2021
  

  Pandemic Lessons From the Era of ‘Les Miserables’

  Medical historian Ed Cohen describes the 1832 cholera outbreak as "imperial blowback," as the disease arrived in Europe from their colonies. Nearly 2% of the city's population died, but the aftermath saw an increase in migration from the countryside and a flourishing of public health-oriented planning. 

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• SOURCE: Bloomberg CityLab
  4/14/2021
  

  How Amsterdam Recovered From a Deadly Outbreak — in 1665

  Attracting migrants was the key to Amsterdam's economic and social recovery, according to a study of historical data by two Dutch economists. 

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• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  4/22/2021
  

  The Great Forgetting: Why We Forget Epidemics and Why This One Must Be Remembered

  by Nina Burleigh

  "For most Americans, the history of the 1918 flu shares space in that ever-larger tomb of oblivion with the history of other diseases of our great-grandparents’ time that vaccines have now eradicated."

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  4/21/2021
  

  Revisiting a 19th Century Medical Idea Could Help Address COVID-19

  by Melanie A. Kiechle

  Although the miasma theory of disease has been replaced by the germ theory, it's nevertheless the case that it drew attention to the connection between air quality and health, and the practical measures inspired by it can be useful in the COVID pandemic. 

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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: Smithsonian
  3/25/2021
  

  Did the Black Death Rampage Across the World a Century Earlier Than Previously Thought?

  The application of DNA testing technology to the bodies of people from the medieval era suggests that the Black Death was present much earlier than believed. 

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• SOURCE: TIME
  3/4/2021
  

  People Longing for Movie Theaters During the 1918 Flu Pandemic Feels Very Familiar in 2021

  As in 2020, public health concerns closed movie theaters in 1918. But then, without home streaming technology, a fledgling industry was threatened with ruin. Hollywood bounced back because so many Americans missed the theater experience.

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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."

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• 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).

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• 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. 

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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: 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.