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COVID-19 pandemic

Back out to epidemics
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Gloved hand holding COVID-19-shaped dandelion

Did the Year 2020 Change Us Forever?

The COVID-19 pandemic affected us in millions of ways. But it evades the meanings we want it to bear.
by Adam Gopnik via The New Yorker on February 19, 2024
CDC Director Rochelle Walensky at a 2022 CDC Briefing.

The Year the Pandemic "Ended" (Part 1)

The following piece presents an incomplete timeline of the sociological production of the end of the pandemic over the last year.
by Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant via The New Inquiry on December 21, 2022

The Country That Could Not Mourn

The Covid-19 pandemic has shown just how hard it is for Americans to grieve.
by Sarah Jaffe via The New Republic on September 23, 2022
Little girl preparing for a polio vaccine.

We Didn't Vanquish Polio. What Does That Mean for Covid-19?

The world is still reeling from the pandemic, but another scourge we thought we’d eliminated has reemerged.
by Patrick Cockburn via The Nation on September 19, 2022
Exhibit

COVID-19 in History

Living through a momentus time has prompted many reflections on what the past has to teach us about why the pandemic took the shape that it did – and how we can better respond to it.
'In America: Remember' public art installation near the Washington Monument

The Black History Lost to COVID-19

Black history lives in memories and minds. COVID-19 has endangered those traditions.
by Janell Ross via TIME on February 1, 2022
People wait for a free coronavirus test outside the Lincoln Park Recreation Center in Los Angeles on Dec. 30.
partner

The 1918 Flu is Even More Relevant in 2022 Thanks to Omicron

The past provides a key lesson to minimize the damage from the omicron surge.
by Christopher McKnight Nichols via Made By History on January 3, 2022
Geometric design of influenza epidemic

The 1918 Influenza Won't Help Us Navigate This Pandemic

We have no historical precedent for this moment.
by Howard Markel via The Atlantic on August 19, 2021
A collage featuring pictures from the 1918 Flu Pandemic and the 1920s, including people wearing masks and nurses on one side and flappers on the other.

What Caused the Roaring Twenties? Not the End of a Pandemic (Probably)

As the U.S. anticipates a vaccinated summer, historians say measuring the impact of the 1918 influenza on the uproarious decade that followed is tricky.
by Lila Thulin via Smithsonian on May 3, 2021
Medical men wearing masks at a US Army hospital

Why Do We Forget Pandemics?

Until the Covid-19 pandemic, the catastrophe of the Spanish flu had been dropped from American memory.
by Nina Burleigh via The Nation on April 26, 2021
2020 time capsule with a roll of toilet paper, mask, hourglass, and syringe

The Things They Buried: Masks, Vials, Social-Distancing Signage — And, of Course, Toilet Paper

Most Americans are eager to forget 2020. But some are making time capsules to make sure future generations remember it.
by Maura Judkis via Washington Post on March 25, 2021
Vienna’s plague column; the AIDS quilt; Mexico City’s Memorial to Victims of Violence; Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe

How Will We Remember This?

A COVID memorial will have to commemorate shame and failure as well as grief and bravery.
by Justin Davidson via Curbed on March 15, 2021
A mural of a woman cleaning a turnstile.

How to Remember a Plague

2020 was full of efforts to archive photos and artifacts of the pandemic — an impulse born of a sense of witnessing history, and a desire to speak to the future.
by Laura Bliss via CityLab on December 31, 2020

Pre-Existing Conditions: Pandemics as History

In times that feel “unprecedented,” it is all the more important to use history as a way to understand the present and chart a path to the future.
by Andy Horowitz via Items on July 9, 2020

Why Humanity Will Probably Botch the Next Pandemic, Too

A conversation with Mike Davis about what must be done to combat the COVID-19 pandemic – and all the other monsters still to come.
by Mike Davis, Eric Levitz via Intelligencer on April 30, 2020

We’ve Never Been Here Before

This is nothing like 2008. Or even 1914.
by Adam Tooze via Washington Post on March 25, 2020

‘A Once-in-a-Century Pathogen’: The 1918 Pandemic & This One

What we can learn from the Spanish flu.
by Mark Honigsbaum via New York Review of Books on March 17, 2020
Crowd marches against high inflation and unemployment in 1973.

What Would Studs Terkel Make of 'Essential Workers'?

What American workers have lost since 1974 — and how some are getting it back.
by Robert Hennelly via Village Voice on August 9, 2024
Three immigrants with chained hands and feet ascending staircase to a plane to be deported.

America’s Medicalized Borders: Past, Present, and Possible Future

Undoing the politics of fear will require us to reckon with the legacies of nativism that divert our attention from the greatest threats to our health.
by Carlos Martinez via Public Books on May 29, 2024
Young boy receiving polio vaccine from doctor

Hesitancy Against Hope: Reactions to the First Polio Vaccine

Hesitancy and opposition to vaccines has existed in the past, and such awareness provides needed context to the COVID-19 pandemic and vaccine within American history.
by Stephen E. Mawdsley via Process: A Blog for American History on January 9, 2024
Sparkles in light coming through windows of an empty room.

Signs of Ghosts

What do we do when there are whole cities full of ghosts, each one with their own unique story to tell, each one with something left undone?
by Colin Dickey via Longreads on October 26, 2023
A group of people standing outdoors wearing masks over their mouths. This was probably during the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918. One of the women has a sign in front of her reading 'Wear a mask or go to jail."

Wear a Mask or Go to Jail

What the history of the 1918 Flu Pandemic can help us understand about today's public health measures.
by E. Thomas Ewing, Jessica Brabble, Ariel Ludwig via Nursing Clio on August 2, 2023
Axe chopping down columns

The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism

The free market used to be touted as the cure for all our problems; now it’s taken to be the cause of them.
by Louis Menand via The New Yorker on July 17, 2023
Cover and pages of "American Redux" book about housing.

The Rich American Legacy of Shared Housing

A visual journalist remembers a time when "housing was more flexible, fluid and communal than it is today.”
by Ariel Aberg-Riger via CityLab on May 2, 2023
Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.) and Jim Jordan (Ohio) during a House select subcommittee on the coronavirus pandemic in Washington. (Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)
partner

Pandemic Origin Stories are Laced Through With Politics

Efforts to pinpoint early cases have been complicated, and in some cases compromised, by distractions and diversions.
by E. Thomas Ewing via Made By History on April 19, 2023

A Lost Operatic Masterpiece Written By White Men For An All-Black Cast Was Found And Restored

Can it be produced without controversy?
by Fredric Dannen via Billboard on March 27, 2023
Flowers and balloons surround Memorial at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, Texas.

How Many Pandemic Memorials Does it Take to Remember a Pandemic?

Calls for Covid-19 memorials echo Pericles' Athenian moratorium, prompting reflection on the appropriateness of commemoration for ongoing crises.
by Andrew M. Shanken via Platform on August 29, 2022
Two photos of children being vaccinated.

Vaccinating Kids Has Never Been Easy

Uptake of COVID vaccines for kids has been slow, but it has been slow for other vaccines too.
by Sarah Zhang via The Atlantic on March 10, 2022
Elijah Muhammad, who was then the leader of the Nation of Islam, speaks to a crowd in Chicago in 1966.

What Do the Nation of Islam and Marjorie Taylor Greene Have in Common?

Stuart compares the shared values of Christian nationalists and the Nation of Islam in the 1960's and today.
by Joseph Stuart via Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera on March 8, 2022
Black and white photo of a beach with a wooden row boat beached on the shore.

The Pandemic Has Given Us a Bad Case of Narrative Vertigo; Literature Can Help

In the work of writers like W.B. Yeats and Virginia Woolf, we can find new ways to tell our own stories.
by Elizabeth Outka via Washington Post on January 25, 2022
A picture of George Aumoithe in a hallway of concrete walls.

Learning From Decades of Public Health Failure

A historian of global health explains how the lack of ICU beds in low-income communities is the result of government spending cuts dating back to the 1970s.
by George Aumoithe, Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins via The Nation on January 19, 2022
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