Sarah Naramore is Assistant Professor of History at Northwest Missouri State University. This interview is based on her new book, Benjamin Rush, Civic Health, and Human Illness in the Early American Republic (University of Rochester Press, 2023). JF: What led...
Kevin McQueeney is Assistant Professor of History at Nicholls State University. This interview is based on his new book, A City without Care: 300 Years of Racism, Health Disparities, and Health Care Activism in New Orleans (University of North Carolina...
The American Revolution happened in the midst of a smallpox epidemic. In one of the timeliest history books of the publishing season, historian Andrew Wehrman visits the podcast to talk about what the patriots of the American Revolution and the...
Susan Brandt is a lecturer in history at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. This interview is based on her new book, Women Healers: Gender, Authority, and Medicine in Early Philadelphia (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). JF: What led you...
Last November I joined Michelle Mello of Stanford University Law School in a conversation on religious exemptions and vaccines. The Council on Foreign Relations sponsored the event. You can watch it here:...
Peter Swenson is Charlotte Marion Saden Professor of Political Science and Professor in the Institution for Social and Policy Studies at Yale University. This interview is based on his new book, Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in...
Good to see Andrew Wehrman cited in Maggie Astor’s New York Times piece. A taste: Professor Wehrman this week tweeted an example of what, in an interview, he said was a “ubiquitous” phenomenon: The health board in Urbana, Ohio, Jordan’s hometown, enacted...
Historian Nicole Hemmer writes, “the deliberate spread of demonstrably untrue claims for politics or profit has been a feature of life in the US throughout the nation’s history. From patent medicine to fluoride conspiracies to false claims about the health...
As it should. Here is Ashraf Khalil of the Associated Press: The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has acquired the vial that contained the first dose of COVID-19 vaccine administered in the United States as part of its plans...
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...
1940:...
E. Thomas Ewing of Virginia Tech, a historian of epidemics, offers some historical context. Here is a taste of his piece at The Washington Post: Finally, vaccines are not a magic bullet that will single-handedly end an epidemic. In 1918, […]
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...
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...
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 […]
I have been trying to read more about pandemics in the United States so that I can share some good history with my readers here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. On Saturday night, I read Nancy Bristow‘s fascinating...
If you are in the area on Thursday evening, September 27, join us for the 2018 Messiah College American Democracy Lecture. This year’s lecturer is Nancy Tomes of the State University of New York at Stony Brook. In 2017, Tomes...
Nancy Tomes is Distinguished Professor of History at Stony Brook University. Her 2016 book, Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American history. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJRvfHY10YA&w=560&h=315] “This is like...
Victoria Johnson is Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College of the City University of New York. This interview is based on her new book American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early...
