HIST 214 Pandemics: A Comparative History
This course will survey pandemics across time and place, looking for patterns and discontinuities. Their relationship to broader environmental and social changes will be examined, both in the setting up of conditions for a pandemic and then in the short- and long-term resolutions to them. Particular attention will be paid to the roles of nursing, governance, and religious culture during and after the crisis. Seven different periods of pandemic will be considered: the Antonine and Cyprian plagues in the second and third century AD, the plague of Justinian in the sixth century, the Black Death of the fourteenth century, the diseases spread by conquest in the sixteenth-century Americas, the Great Plague of London in 1665-6, the waves of cholera in the nineteenth century, and the 'Spanish' flu of 1918-20. The course will conclude by briefly looking at contemporary responses to pandemics, including HIV, Ebola, and influenza. This course counts as a foundational course in History or Political Theory within the liberal arts core requirements.