Kathryn Olivarius is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University. This interview is based on her new book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 2022). JF: What led you to write Necropolis? KO:...
COVID-19 is now the deadliest pandemic in U.S. history. Here is Elizabeth Gamillo at Smithsonian Magazine: The coronavirus pandemic has become the deadliest disease outbreak in recent American history with tolls surpassing the estimated deaths of the 1918 flu. According to...
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What did Martin Luther think about those who act irresponsibly during public health crisis? Below is a piece by Mark Schwehn, Professor of Humanities in Christ College, the Honors College of Valparaiso University. Schwehn is perhaps best known as the founder...
Here is a taste of Ronald Shafer’s piece at The Washington Post: At the dawn of the American Revolution, the world was fighting smallpox just as it now is battling the novel coronavirus. Like the novel coronavirus, smallpox was “a highly contagious...
Trump may not be the only president to spread a deadly disease. Here is Michael Rosenwald at The Washington Post: On his way home from delivering the Gettysburg Address in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln was overcome by a splitting headache....
Many Christians believe in providential history. This is the idea that human beings can understand the will of God in the affairs of men and women as they lived through time. Most providential historians have no place for the mysteries...
All of these points come from Ed Yong’s recent piece at The Atlantic: “How the Pandemic Defeated America.” We under-fund public health. Our health-care system is weak. Too much of what we do spend on healthcare is wasted. We have not...
Check out historian Andrew Wehrman‘s piece at The Washington Post: Thomas Paine, who had helped shift public opinion with “Common Sense” in the spring of 1776, wrote a new book weighing in on the French Revolution from London, titled “The Rights...
Between August 1 and November 9, 1793, at least 5000 Philadelphians died of yellow fever. (The city had a population of 50,000). I want to call your attention two short pieces on this front. Lindsay Chervinsky‘s piece at the blog...
When Gabe Lyons, host of the 2020 Q Virtual Summit, invited David French and Eric Metaxas to debate the merits of Donald Trump I wrote (among other things): There is a kind of moral equivalence in Lyons’s introduction that bothers...
Nancy Koester, a writer and historian, is the author of an informative religious history of Harriett Beecher Stowe titled Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Spiritual Life. If you are interested in how Stowe’s faith informed her activism, I recommend Nancy’s book. See...
Here is The Washington Post: Even as states move ahead with plans to reopen their economies, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned Tuesday that a second wave of the novel coronavirus will be far more dire...
In 1780, a smallpox outbreak that ravaged much of the Western North America arrived on the Northern Great Plains. According to historian Scott Berthelette, the disease spread from Mexico through “Indegenous horse-borne trading and warfare” and claimed tens of thousand...
Watch Trump spokesperson Kellyanne Conway on FOX News: [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9d-JiX_0wg&w=560&h=315] What is this mysterious COVID-1? Did they have coronavirus in year 1? Also, I didn’t know there was a World Health Organization in AD 1. Did Augustus cut its funding?...
Over at We’re History, early American historian Peter Wood writes about the London plague from the perspective of Plymouth Rock. Here is a taste of his piece: But in 1625, New England’s “hideous and desolate” isolation suddenly began to seem...
It looks the Trump administration now thinks American history might be important. Here is Gabby Orr at Politico: When the avian flu first spread to pockets of Southeast Asia in 2005, President George W. Bush reassured Americans he would be...
His name was Frederick Trump. He died in the first wave of deaths during the 1918 influenza pandemic. Mary Pilon’s report at The New York Times includes interviews with historians and authors Nancy Bristow, Gwenda Blair, and James Harris. Here is a...
Anthony Fauci is a national treasure. The director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is one of the heroes of this coronavirus pandemic. At Science Magazine, Fauci talks candidly with writer Jon Cohen about his role on...
Over at The Atlantic, Jim Downs, professor of history at Connecticut College and author of Sick From Freedom: African-American Illness and Suffering During the Civil War and Reconstruction, writes about “the epidemics America got wrong.” A taste: By late March […]
