epidemics

Indigenous scholars have long contested the “virgin-soil epidemics” thesis. Today, it is clear that the disease thesis simply doesn’t hold up.

Politics, public health and a pandemic. What we didn’t learn from HIV.

Masks have a history associated with disease, status, gender norms, and more.

The pro-cremation movement of the nineteenth century battled religious tradition, not to mention the specter of mass graves during epidemics.

Illuminating a path forward.

The philosophy behind calls to lift stay-at-home orders.

Extending the narrative of Philadelphia's epidemic past 1793 yields lessons that are more complex and less comforting than the story that's often told.

From the Illuminati to “COVID-19 is a lie,” how pandemics have produced contagions of fear.

For hundreds of years, false theories of “innate difference and deficit in black bodies” have shaped American responses to disease.

Being tough on crime and cutting benefits from the poor left millions more susceptible to disease.

A conversation with Mike Davis about what must be done to combat the COVID-19 pandemic – and all the other monsters still to come.

Unlike cholera, physical and sensory proximity can spread COVID-19 among the populations most vulnerable to it.

Native communities’ vulnerability to epidemics is not a historical accident, but a direct result of oppressive policies and ongoing colonialism.

In a devastating 1793 epidemic people transformed their newspaper into something like today’s social media.

As 19th century reformers showed, only a healthy workforce can fuel economic prosperity.

Jefferson envisioned land-use policies that he hoped would mitigate epidemics – and other urban evils.

Coronavirus songwriting has gone as global as the pandemic itself, creating a new genre called pandemic pop. It’s a tradition with a long history.

In 1625, New England’s “hideous and desolate” isolation suddenly began to seem a God-given blessing in disguise.

Official responses to the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 shows that the refusal to accept responsibility can have catastrophic consequences.

We’re repeating a lot of the same mistakes from the 1918 “Spanish Flu” H1N1 outbreak.