Blood Rules the Water: Kinship Diplomacy in Early America
Jacob Lee’s Masters of the Middle Waters traces warfare, conquest, trade, and diplomacy throughout Middle America from the fall of Cahokia to the rise of the United States. Taking aim at the “false...
View ArticleA Postcard from Yeongju, South Korea
By Mina ParkYeongju, a city in South Korea, is famous as the historic home of the Seonbi, Confucian scholars who lived and studied during Korea’s Joseon period (1392-1897). At sites such as Sobaek...
View ArticleThe Society That Started It All: The Origins of Modern Science
Adrian Tinniswood begins The Royal Society and the Invention of Modern Science by describing seventeenth-century England’s intellectual paradigms, which rested upon ancient Christian doctrine,...
View ArticleA Postcard from Leith, Scotland
By Kristin OsborneAs you ride the Number 22 bus towards Ocean Terminal, you watch the city of Edinburgh fade away as its port neighborhood of Leith replaces it. The wealthy Georgian facades of New Town...
View ArticleA Postcard from New Orleans, Louisiana
By Sarah PaxtonThe St. Louis No. 1 Cemetery sits on Basin Street, within the Tremé neighborhood and about a block north of New Orleans’s famed French Quarter. Completely walled in, the cemetery is...
View ArticleCommon Good and Common Evil in American Religion
Every election year is a good time to remind each other that you do not discuss religion, sex, or politics in polite company. Sex to one side, in America’s Religious Wars, Kathleen M. Sands reminds us...
View ArticleTop Ten Origins: From Bollywood to Indywood
By Abhijit VardeMultilingualism in India is as common as daylight. India recognizes 22 official languages and its 1962 census recorded residents speaking over 1600 native tongues. It is common to find...
View ArticleApril 2020: “No News Day” at the BBC
By Thomas HajkowskiFebruary 3, 2020 was supposed to be a busy news night. It was the evening of the Iowa caucuses, the first chance for voters to cast ballots in the 2020 presidential elections. With...
View ArticleThe Respirator and Cloth Mask
By James EspositoWe now live in a world of masks and respirators. It is a world we are not prepared for. The biomedical, sanitary, and technological advances of the last century left us accustomed to...
View ArticleThe Black Death and its Aftermath
By John L. BrookeThe Black Death was the second pandemic of bubonic plague and the most devastating pandemic in world history. It was a descendant of the ancient plague that had afflicted Rome, from...
View ArticlePandemics: Today and Yesterday
The emergence of the novel coronavirus COVID-19 (SARS-CoV-2) has been a grim reminder of the role that disease-causing microbes such as bacteria and viruses have played across the long span of human...
View ArticleThe Justinianic Plague
By Kristina SessaThe “Justinianic Plague” is the popular name for a pandemic of bubonic plague in the Late Roman or Byzantine Empire, which first appears in our sources in 541 CE. The pandemic...
View ArticlePandemic Redux: Revisiting Cincinnati’s 1849 Cholera in the Age of COVID-19
By Matthew SmithDecember 25, 1848, brought an unwelcome gift to the Queen City. That Christmas Day, a dying man was borne from the Lewis Wetzel, a New Orleans steamboat moored on the Ohio River. His...
View ArticleGoing Viral: COVID Conspiracies in Historical Perspective
By Cameron GivensAs national governments and the global scientific community struggle to contain the spread of the coronavirus, they have also spent the last few months confronting a different type of...
View ArticleThe American Dream after Covid-19
The Covid-19 pandemic has brought widespread changes to the United States and around the world at record speed, from tragic illnesses and deaths to the quirkiness of social distancing and...
View ArticleWork and Life after COVID-19
By David J. StaleyIt is the time honored way to deal with plagues and pandemics: those who have the means flee the crowds. In the past, Roman aristocrats would leave for their rural villas and summer...
View ArticleThe Justinianic Plague
By Kristina SessaThe “Justinianic Plague” is the popular name for a pandemic of bubonic plague in the Late Roman or Byzantine Empire, which first appears in our sources in 541 CE. The pandemic...
View ArticleMobilizing for Common Purpose in the Covid Era
By Allan M. WinklerJust how has American society mobilized for a sense of common purpose in the past? And why have we seemed to lose that sense of common purpose today in the midst of the coronavirus...
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