PANDEMICS IN WORLD HISTORY
New York J-TERM 2022
David Ludden. NYU Hist-UA 269. J-Term, Jan 3-21, 2022.
CLASS MEETs AND I HOLD OFFICE HOURS IN MY ZOOM MEETING ROOM
CLASS: MTWR 2:00-4:55
Note: All student writing goes into individual student Google Drive folders. PLEASE NUMBER each writing assignment as they are numbered on the Schedule below, from #1 to #8.
This PANDEMIC STUDIES RESOURCE PAGE is work in progress for your reference and for improving with this course.)
Week 1.
The Long First Millennium
Mon. Jan 3. Pandemic Space, Ecology, and Long-Term Globalization
Ref: Visualizing the History of Pandemics
Reading:
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples. Anchor Random House, 1998, pp.19-93.
Adam McKeown, “Periodizing Globalization,” History Workshop, 63, 1, 2007, 218-30. (JSTOR) (online PDF).
Metropolitan Museum of Art, Europe’s Asia Trade in Antiquity. (15 pp)
Raoul McLaughlin, Rome and the Distant East: Trade Routes to the Ancient Lands of Arabia, India and China, pp. 83-111.
To do: please put something to introduce yourself — words and/or images — into your individual student Google Drive folder.
Tues. Jan 4. Roman “Plagues”
Reading:
John Aberth, Plagues in World History. Rowman and Littlefield, 2011, pp.19-33.
Lester K. Little, “Life and Afterlife of the First Plague Pandemic.” Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp. 3–32.
Danielle Gourevitch,”The Galenic Plague: a Breakdown of the Imperial Pathocoenosis: Pathocoenosis and Longue Durée,” History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences, 2005, 27, 1, 57-69. (PDF online)
Caroline Wazer, “Between Public Health and Popular Medicine: Senatorial and Popular Responses to Epidemic Disease in the Roman Republic,” in Popular Medicine in Graeco-Roman Antiquity: Explorations, edited by William Harris, Brill, 2016, pp 126-146.
J.N.Hays and J. Hays. The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History. Rutgers University Press, 2009, Chapter One: “The Western Inheritance: Greek and Roman Ideas about Disease,” pp 9-18.
additional reading:
Paul Slack, Plague: A Very Short Introduction, OUP Press, 2021. (118pp)
Eric Faure, “Malarial pathocoenosis: beneficial and deleterious interactions between malaria and other human diseases,” NCBI Frontiers of Physiology, 2014, 5:441 (PDF online 10pp)
R.P Duncan Jones, “The Impact of the Antonine Plague,” Journal of Roman Archaeology, 9, 1996, 108-136.
#1 1-page writing assignment into individual student Google Drive folders.
Wed. Jan 5. Expanding Eurasian Connectivity, 600-1350
Reading:
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples. Anchor Random House, 1998, pp.94-160.
Michal Biran, “The Mongol Empire and inter-civilizational exchange” (PDF), Chapter 20 in The Cambridge World History, 2015, pp.534-558 (Cambridge Core Link).
Video on Abbasid-Tang conflict at the Battle of Talas, 751. 12:22.
Lynda Shaffer, “Southernization.” Journal of World History, 5, 1, 1994, 1–21.
Group1
#2 1-page writing assignment into individual student Google Drive folders.
Thurs. Jan 6. Europe’s “Black Death” in Context
Reading:
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples. Random House, 1998, pp.161-207.
John Aberth, Plagues in World History, Chap 1, pp.34-61.
Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death. Boydell and Brewer, 2021 (1026pp) pp.137-196. — on the spread of the Black Death plague: more specifics.
Monica H. Green, “Climate and Disease in Medieval Eurasia,” OUP Online Research Encyclopedia of Asian History (OREAH) 2018 (accessed 7 Jan 2022) (PDF online, 32pp) — a longer-term view, with more on plague: John L. Brooke and Henry Misa, “Earth, Water, Air, and Fire: Toward an Ecological History of Premodern Inner Eurasia,” OREAH, 2020 (accessed 7 Jan 2022)
BBC Website: Dubrovnik: The medieval city designed around quarantine.
Sheldon Watts, “The Human Responses to Plague in Western Europe and the Middle East, 1347-1844, Chapter 1, in Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History, Yale University Pres, 1997, pp.1-39.
Recommended:
Daniel Defoe, A Pathetic history of the Plague in London in the year 1665. Worcester, Massachusetts. Daniel Greenleaf. 1803. Daniel Defoe. A Journal of the Plague Year, Dover Publications, 2001.
Columbia Climate School, The State of the Planet, “Europe’s ‘Great Famine’ Years Were Some of the Soggiest in Centuries.”
Jean-Pierre Leguay, “Urban Life,” in M. Jones (Ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 102-123). (PDF online)
Christian Musap, “The Plague Doctor of Venice,” The Internal Medicine Journal, 13 May 2019.
Richard John Palmer, “The Control of Plague in Venice and Northern Italy, 1348-1600,” PhD Thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1978. (PDF online)
Louise Marshall, “A Plague Saint for Venice: Tintoretto at the Chiesa di San Rocco,” Artibus et Historiae, 33, 66, 2012, 153-187.
Meagan Selby Allen, “Individual and Communal Medicine During the Black Death of 1347-1351,” nd. research paper PDF online
Yaron Ayalon, “The Black Death and the Rise of the Ottomans,” In Natural Disasters in the Ottoman Empire: Plague, Famine, and Other Misfortunes (pp. 21-60). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Published online 05 December 2014 (PDF online)
Stephane Barry, Norbert Gualde, “The black death in Christian and Muslim Occident, 1347-1353,” [Article in French] Canadian Bulletin Of Medical History, 2008;25(2):461-98.
Joseph A. Legan,”Medical Responses to the Black Death,” student research, 2015, JMU scholarly commons, 2015. (PDF online)
Mark Welford, Geographies of Plague Pandemics : The Spatial-Temporal Behavior of Plague to the Modern Day. Taylor and Francis, 2018, pp.36-72.
T. Dean, “Plague and crime: Bologna, 1348–1351,” Continuity and Change, 30, 3, 2015 367-393.
Reference: Ole J. Benedictow, The Complete History of the Black Death. Boydell and Brewer, 2021 (1026pp)
Exercise: What are current interpretations of the short and long-term impact of the Black Plague?
Group 2
#3 Fri. Jan. 7. 5-page paper #1 due by 5PM into individual student Google Drive folders.
Prompt: Describe the changing space of the plague from ancient to medieval times. Remember that space include routes of mobility and confines of territoriality, and remember to include the activities and motives that propel mobility and define territory.
Week 2.
The Globalization of Disease
Mon. Jan 10. The Globalization of Disease
Reading:
James L. A. Webb, “Globalization of disease, 1300 to 1900,” in The Cambridge World History, edited by Jerry H. Bentley, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Cambridge University Press, 2015. pp 54-75.
William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples. Random House, 1998, pp.208-242.
Webpage: Visualizing the History of Pandemics
Sheldon Watts, “Smallpox in the New World and in the Old: From Holocaust to Eradication, 1518-1977,” Chapter 3, in Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History, Yale University Pres, 1997, pp.84-121.
Dirk Schubert, Cor Wagenaar, and Carola Hein, “’The Hoist of the Yellow Flag’”: Vulnerable Port Cities and Public Health,” Journal of Planning. May 17, 2021 (accessed 7 Jan 2022)
Group 3
Tues Jan 11. Imperial Pandemics: Cholera (and others)
Reading:
Sheldon Watts, “Cholera and Civilization: Great Britain and India, 1817-1920, Chapter 5, in Sheldon Watts, Epidemics and History, Yale University Pres, 1997, 167-212. (PDF online)
John Aberth, Plagues in World History, Chap 1, pp.101-111.
Fahema Begum, “Mapping disease: John Snow and Cholera,” Royal College of Surgeons of England, 09 Dec 2016, and Theodore H. Tulchinsky, “John Snow, Cholera, the Broad Street Pump; Waterborne Diseases Then and Now,” Case Studies in Public Health, 2018 : 77–99. Published online 2018 Mar 30. NCBI, Elsevier
Myron Echenberg, Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp.13-86.
Sagaree Jain, “Anti-Asian Racism in the 1817 Cholera Pandemic.” April 2020 blog post. (5pp)
Richard J Evans, “Epidemics and Revolutions: Cholera in Nineteenth Century Europe,” in T.O.Ranger and Paul Slack, editors. Epidemics and Ideas : Essays on the Historical Perception of Pestilence. Cambridge University Press, 1992/2011, pp.149-173.
Catherine Odari, “Colonialism, Racism, and the Government Response to Bubonic Plague in Nairobi, Kenya, 1895-1910,” in Epidemic Urbanism: Contagious Diseases in Global Cities, edited by Mohammad Gharipour and Caitlin DeClercq, Intellect Books, 2021, pp. 75-81.
J.N. Hays and J. Hays, The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History, Chapter 7, “Cholera and Sanitation,” pp.135-154.
Resources: K. David Patterson, “Cholera Diffusion in Russia, 1823-1923,” Social Science and Medicine, 38, 9, 1994, 1171-1191, 1994. Elsevier Science Ltd. (PDF online)
Charles E. Rosenberg, The Cholera Years: The United States in 1832, 1849, and 1866, University of Chicago Press, 1987. NYU Ebook
Observations on the epidemic now prevailing in the city of New-York; called the Asiatic or spasmodic cholera; : with advice to the planters of the South, for the medical treatment of their slaves. by Christopher C Yates, MD. 1832. Printed by George P. Scott and Co. 1832
Report of the Committee of Internal Health on the Asiatic cholera : together with a report of the city physician on the Cholera Hospital. Boston (Mass.). Committee on Internal Health. 1849. Eastburn’s Press printer.
Wellcome Collection: The Colonist who faced the blue terror.
Dr. John Bell (1796-1872), All the material facts in the history of epidemic cholera: being a report of the College of physicians of Philadelphia, to the Board of health: and a full account of the causes, post mortem appearances, and treatment of the disease. Philadelphia: Desilver, 1832.
A plain and practical treatise on the epidemic cholera, as it prevailed in the city of New York, in the summer of 1832, David Meredith Reese. 1833. New York: Conner & Cooke.
The Natural History and Epidemiology of Cholera: Being the Annual Oration of the Medical Society of London, May 7, 1888. Sir Joseph Fayrer, RCP Library, 1888. Source: The Royal College of Physicians – Part II
Group 4
#4 1-page writing assignment into individual student Google Drive folders.
Wed Jan 12 Imperial Progress: Disease and Power
Reading:
Hays and Hays. The Burdens of Disease: Epidemics and Human Response in Western History. Chapter 9, “Disease, Medicine, and Western Imperialism,” pp.179-213 and Chapter 12, “Disease and Power,” pp. 283-314.
M Brown Cueto and E. Fee, “The Making of an International Health Establishment,” in The World Health Organization: A History. Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 10-33. (Online PDF)
Sandhya Polu, Infectious Disease in India, 1892-1940: Policy-Making and the Perception of Risk, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, Chapter 5. “Disease as Prism,” pp.140-157.
David Arnold, Technology and Medicine in Colonial India. Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp.71-91.
Anjuli Fatima. Raza Kolb, Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020. University of Chicago Press, 2021, “The Blue Plague,” pp.55-82.
Recommended:
Katherine Mason, Infectious Change: Reinventing Chinese Public Health after an Epidemic. Stanford University Press, 2016.
Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China. U Cal Press, 2004.
Histories of Central Park as a Public Health Project.
Robert Kramm, Sanitized Sex: Regulating Prostitution, Venereal Disease, and Intimacy in Occupied Japan, 1945-1952, University of California Press, 2017.
Mari K. Webel, The Politics of Disease Control: Sleeping Sickness in Eastern Africa, 1890–1920, Ohio University Press, 2019.
Visual Representations of the Third Plague Pandemic Photographic Database online and open access now: it is hosted by the Cambridge University Library Repository. [The third plague pandemic broke out in 1855 in Southwest China and raged across the globe until 1959, causing the death of approximately 12 million people.]David S. Jones, “The Persistence of American Indian Health Disparities,” Am J Public Health. 2006 December; 96(12): 2122–2134.
Group 5
#5 1-page writing assignment into individual student Google Drive folders.
Thurs Jan 13. The Imperial Pandemic War
Reading:
John Aberth, Plagues in World History, Chap 1, pp 111-135.
Maura Chhun, “1918 flu pandemic killed 12 million Indians …” The Conversation. April 17, 2020.
David Patterson and Gerald Pyle, “ The diffusion of influenza in sub-Saharan Africa during the 1918–1919 pandemic,” Social Science & Medicine, 17, 1, 1983, 1299-1307
Nancy Tomes, “’Destroyer and Teacher”: Managing the Masses During the 1918-1919 Flu Pandemic.” Public Health Reports, 2010, 125, 48-62.
Paul Farmer, “Ebola, Spanish Flu and the Memory of disease,“ Critical Inquiry, 46, 2019, 56-71.
Recommended:
John M. Barry, The great influenza : the epic story of the deadliest plague in history
New York : Viking 2004
A Digital Encyclopedia of the United States Influenza Epidemic in 1918
“The Persistent Legacy of the 1918 Influenza Virus,” by David M. Morens, M.D., Jeffery K. Taubenberger, M.D., Ph.D., and Anthony S. Fauci, M.D. New England Journal of Medicine, 2009, 361: 225-229.
Alfred W Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, Cambridge University Press, 2003.
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- Fisher, Envisioning Disease, Gender, and War: Women’s Narratives of the 1918 Influenza Pandemic, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
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Group 1
#6 Fri. Jan 14. 5-page paper #2 due by 5PM in individual student Google Drive folders.
Prompt: How did Western imperialism influence the historical space of pandemics, including their routes and logics of mobility and their experience, understanding, and handling inside interconnected territories?
Week 3.
Our Pandemic Age
Mon Jan 17. Pandemic Ecology in Globalization
Reading:
“The COVID-19 pandemic is intricately linked to biodiversity loss and ecosystem health,” by Odette K Lawler, Hannah L Allan, Peter W J Baxter, Romi Castagnino,
Marina Corella Tor, Leah E Dann. The Lancet: Plantery Health, 5, 11, 1 Nov 2021, E840-E850
World Economic Forum, “Coronavirus isn’t an outlier,,,”
Pierre-Marie David, Nicolas Le Dévédec, Anouck Alary, “Pandemics in the age of the Anthropocene: Is ‘planetary health’ the answer?” Global Public Health, 16, 2021, 8-9: “Politics and Pandemics,” 1141-1154
NCBI Review of Mike Davis, The Monster Enters: COVID 19, Avian Flu, and the Plagues of Capitalism. New York and London: OR Books. 205 pp (the original book is only in print)
Jeff Tollefson, “Why deforestation makes pandemics more likely,” Nature, 584, 13 August 2020 (online PDF)
“Pathocoenosis: A Holistic Approach to Disease Ecology,” by Jean-Pau Gonzalez, et al EcoHealth, 7, 237-240, 2010.
Reference: D. Ann Herring and Alan C. Swedlund, editors. Plagues and Epidemics : Infected Spaces Past and Present,. Taylor and Francis, 2010
Group 2
Tues Jan 18. Pandemic Politics in Nations
Reading:
JP Mackenbach, “Politics is nothing but medicine at a larger scale: reflections on public health’s biggest idea,” Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, 3 December 2008, 181-184. (Good Wikipedia on Rudolph Virchow)
Florian Bieber, “Global Nationalism in Times of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” NCBI Cambridge University Press, 13pp.
Franklin White, Global Public Health : Ecological Foundations, Oxford University Press, 2013, Chap 1, “History, Aims, and Methods of Public Health,” pp. 1-26.
NYTimes Lead Story Jan 17 2022, on Covid, China, and Supply Chain bottlenecks
John Aberth, Plagues in World History, pp.135-179. AIDS mortality Map 2017.
Patricia Siplon, “The Troubled Path to HIV/AIDS Universal Treatment Access: Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?” Chapter 1, in Global HIV/AIDS Politics, Policy, and Activism : Persistent Challenges and Emerging Issues, edited by Raymond A. Smith, and Raymond A Smith, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2013, pp.3-26.
Recommended: Yuval Ben-Ami, “How Plagues Shape the Landscape,” New York Times, 23 Feb 3-21. David Segal, “Why Are There Almost No Memorials to the Flu of 1918?” New York Times, 14 May 2020.
Kimmy Yam, “Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Increased by Nearly 150% in 2020, Mostly in N.Y. and L.A., New Report Says.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 9 Mar. 2021
Group 3
#7 1-page writing assignment into individual student Google Drive folders.
Wed Jan 19. Pandemic Inequity in Capitalism
Reading:
Paul Farmer, Pathologies of Power: Health, Human Rights, and the New War on the Poor. University of California Press, 2004, pp.1-22, 213-46.
“Pandemics and the Poor,” The Brookings Institute, 2017.
Oxfam Report, “Inequality kills: The unparalleled action needed to combat unprecedented inequality in the wake of COVID-19,” Publication date: 17 January 2022, Authors: Nabil Ahmed, Anna Marriott, Nafkote Dabi, Megan Lowthers, Max Lawson, Leah Mugehera. (PDF Online)
Dina M. Siddiqi, “Scandalizing the Supply Chain,” [on Covid-19 in the global garment industry.] HIMAL, Jan 11, 2022.
Anis Chauduri and Jomo Sundaram, “Privatized Healthcare Worsens Pandemic.” (2pp,)
“United States: Pandemic Impact on People in Poverty,” Human Rights Watch, 2021.
David Cross: Why America Sucks at Everything – especially health .. and Jay S. Kaufman, “Science Alone Can’t Heal a Sick Society,” NYTimes, Sept 12, 2021.
Covid-19: An Occupational Disease. Where Frontline Workers are Best Protected. GlobalUnion, 2013, 13pp.
WHO official says Booster shots “make a mockery of vaccine equity. NYT 20 Aug21
Oxfam report: “The Inequality Virus”
India Today: “How Covid-19 crisis has exposed India’s growing wealth gap”
Viewing: (36min): Ludden, “Global Pandemic in National Territory.” Oct 5, 2020. And Global Asia Webinar ion Migration, Globalization, and Covid-19, Oct 23, 2020.
Group 4
#8 Thurs Jan 20. Discussion of final 5-page paper, due tomorrow Jan 21, 5PM. Prompt: How does historical perspective influence your understanding of our latest pandemic?
Group 5