Category Archives: Historicizing Covid-19

Pandemic Perspectives: Stories Through Collections

The National Museum of American History’s Pandemic Perspectives series of online programs presents curators, historians, and topic specialists in engaging panel discussions offering perspectives on the current pandemic. Panelists virtually share historic objects and photographs as a springboard to a lively discussion of how to better understand the present. Audience questions are encouraged and will be addressed during the moderated dialogue. Information on upcoming programs as well as links to recording of previous sessions are available.

A Bibliography of Historians’ Responses to COVID-19

The American Historical Association is compiling a professionally vetted bibliography of historians’ responses to COVID-19 as a resource for the public, teachers, and scholars seeking historical perspectives on the current crisis and its local and global impacts.

The bibliography includes commentary and publications by historians in both scholarly and popular periodical literature; recorded lectures and webcasts; and digitized primary source materials from past epidemics and pandemics. In amassing these references, the AHA seeks to provide a space where anyone, regardless of expertise, can find digital historical material relevant to the COVID-19 crisis. Educators will find the bibliography especially useful as a professionally vetted index of online resources amenable to remote instruction.

Infectious Historians

A podcast and blog created by historians Merle Eisenberg and Lee Mordechai, historians of disease, the environment, and medieval history. The podcast aims to both provide a flavor of past disease outbreaks while also discussing some pressing present questions. Some episodes discuss a historical pandemic as a way to give a sense of what has happened in the past to contextualize the present. Other episodes will feature experts to discuss specific aspects of disease from quarantine to disease modeling. Future episode arcs will include episodes with scholars on, for example, the forced vaccinations of slaves, black infant mortality, and LGBT rights during the HIV pandemic. The project also plans to expand coverage of historiographical debates and introduce additional diseases such as polio and Ebola.

The podcast argues for the importance of the past’s complexity and the contingent and structural forces that shape human responses to infectious disease outbreaks. It aims to showcase that the past does not offer simple lessons that can be taken from history and simply applied in the present.