18 April 2020

Bad History

Bad history is common, especially in a world that favors crowd sourcing over the views of experts. Even experts, however, are not infallible. Bad history grows from ignorance, laziness, lies, ideology. It has been a theme of Patriots and Peoples that ideology often cultivates error.

I wrote the comment below on a YouTube video three months ago. The video was put up by Political Juice, a popular channel with over 125 thousand subscribers. I have not watched other videos on this channel, but it is clear to me from this one that the creator is not a historian.

The video purports to present the history of the Second Amendment. It gets a few things correct, especially a small portion of Justice Scalia's argument in D.C. v. Heller (2008). It gets a whole lot wrong. I need to finish my review of Adam Winkler, Gun Fight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2011). That book presents a clear and accurate history of the Second Amendment that shows how extremists who are both pro- and anti-gun have been misguided in their understanding.
Patent Application for Puckle Gun (1718)

My comment (there are typos in the original that remain here):

The issues in this video start at the beginning. In the first eight minutes or so, PolJuice offers a short history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and its changing relationship with England over half a century. About 80% of the facts are accurate (a couple of websites offer thin research), but the narrative itself is far from accurate in its interpretation. For instance, you mentions how the Puritans in the early years admitted people to church membership and full citizenship. However, this dramatically changed in 1662 with the Halfway Covenant (not mentioned in the video), due to internal pressures from growing secularization of the colony. Instead of seeking to understand the complexities of 1660s Massachusetts, the video blames all the conflicts on Charles II and James II. That's simply wrong. 
Then, the next eight to ten minutes race through a host of actions of Parliament from the 1660s to the 1770s with minimal context. Such facile generalizations are always grounded in shortcuts that distort. 
This video only becomes tolerable when PJ summarizes Justice Scalia's grammatical analysis of the Second Amendment in the Heller decision. This portion is well-done and accurate until he addresses the counter arguments in the dissenting opinions. There mockery reigns, even using a comic voice to undermine the credibility of the arguments. 
The final ten minutes or so is a mixed bag. The Puckle gun gets too much credit, as it does so often by people who don't delve into the history with any real effort. The Puckle gun was almost completely forgotten by the time Jefferson was born. Its deployment in any argument about the Second Amendment is anachronistic. It is also unnecessary. As the video points out, the First Amendment protects the sort of speech one finds on YouTube. Likewise, the Second Amendment has the flexibility to cover modern firearms. Using bad arguments to counter bad arguments does not strengthen your argument; it weakens it.

15 April 2020

Pandemic History: The Bibliography

"[T]here remains the simple fact that the Black Death was, indeed, the greatest and most sustained demographic disaster in the history of the world."
John Aberth 
"Before that worldwide [influenza] pandemic faded away in 1920, it would kill more people than any other outbreak of disease in human history."
John M. Barry 
"[T]he disaster to Amerindian populations assumed a scale that is hard for us to imagine, living as we do in an age when epidemic disease hardly matters. Ratios of 20:1 or even 25:1 between pre-Columbian populations and the bottoming-out point in Amerindian population curves seem more or less correct, despite wide local variations."
William H. McNeill
"Variola was the deadliest killer in a terrible onslaught of alien microorganisms that, by some historical estimates, may have decimated as much as 90 percent of the precontact population of the Americas."
Michael Willrich

As I noted in Pandemic History, the books in this list were not selected by a rigorous criteria of historical relevance. Rather, these are the books that I have have on shelves in my home (or as ebooks on my iPad). I am still reading some of these books, some I finished recently, one I have yet to start, and some were consumed more than thirty years ago. These books vary in quality, cost, and relevance.

Today, the number of people worldwide confirmed to be infected with COVID-19 crossed two million. A minuscule portion of the population has been tested. The number of confirmed deaths is closing in on 130,000. The pandemic still seems to be on a steep upward climb. The most serious global impact, however, will be economic, rather than demographic. Advances in medicine and understanding of the possible consequences of epidemic disease protect us in immeasurable ways even as globalization has sped the process of epidemics becoming pandemics.

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/
Screenshot form the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center

The Bibliography


Aberth, John. The Black Death: The Great Mortality of 1348-1350, A Brief History with Documents, 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017.

This book is a text designed for college classes. As such, it has limited, but highly focused analysis, a good summary of the state of the research, and consists mostly of extracts from primary sources. Aberth also has authored a scholarly monograph concerned with the Black Death, another general book on plagues throughout history, and several works on the European Middle Ages.

Arnold, Catherine. Pandemic 1918: Eyewitness Accounts from the Greatest Medical Holocaust in Modern History. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2018.

Technically, this book is not shelved in my house, but rather on my electronic devices as an ebook. I started it in late March, but others keep getting in the way of my progress. It is well-written, but somewhat disappointing. The phrase "eyewitness accounts" in the title led me to expect more in the way of excerpts from primary sources (see "Reflective Thinking, Teaching and Learning" [2009]). The author quotes many sources at length, but the book is her narrative. Arnold offers a compelling account of the lives of people who struggled to survive a devastating pandemic. She draws on some of the best secondary works by historians, such as Alfred Crosby, America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (2003) and John Barry (see below), and she draws from a range of primary sources that include works of fiction written by survivors. Nonetheless, as I am reading the book I am marking a few passages that I intend to return to with more attention because I have a hunch they contain some gross inaccuracies.

Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004.

My bookmark reveals that I had read just over one-third of this book before it gathered dust on my shelf for a decade. I started it anew in early March as COVID-19 could no longer be ignored. I finished it last week. About 20 March 2020, I saw that it had risen to a number one bestseller in several categories tracked by Amazon, including history of medicine. Barry narrates stories of the physicians who battled the pandemic in the context of a history of science. He asserts that the 1918 eruption of influenza "was the first great collision between nature and modern science" (5). The Great Influenza concentrates on the work of Paul Lewis, Simon Flexner, William Crawford Gorgas, William Henry Welch, and a host of others who built medical institutions and who struggled to find both cure and cause of influenza.

Brown, Jeremy. Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018.

Jeremy Brown is a medical doctor with decades of experience in emergency rooms. This book, which I read on my iPad the week I was also finishing Barry's The Great Influenza, does an excellent job of presenting the medical history of influenza. Brown then builds on the medical history to discuss both the strengths and weaknesses of how the US government stockpiles medicines and other resources for combating pandemics. He shows how political influence of certain pharmaceutical companies tilt some of these preparations towards medicines of little to no value. Reading this book while under partial-quarantine is a chilling reminder of the failures of political leadership in a nation with a hostile relationship to science and expertise.

Crosby, Alfred. The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972.

I have characterized this book as among a small number that every historian of America knows, whether by reading or by the references made to it by others. If Crosby and this book did not introduce the term "Columbian Exchange" into the vocabulary of historians, then he is at least responsible for promoting it. His thesis asserts the significance of disease in facilitating the European conquest of the Americas, but also highlights the role of flora, fauna, and ideologies. The exchange went both directions--Europeans acquired tobacco, tomatoes, and quinine, among many other things. The Columbian Exchange enriched the world, while impoverishing indigenous Americans. The core ideas from this book are expanded to global history in Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Also, Crosby's "Virgin Soil Epidemics as a Factor in the Aboriginal Depopulation in America," William and Mary Quarterly 33 (April 1976): 289-299 was, the last time that I checked, the most cited article in American history writing. Crosby is essential reading.

See also "The Columbian Exchange" (2014).

__________. America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, 2nd. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

This book just arrived. I am looking forward to reading it.

Crosby, Molly Caldwell. The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic that Shaped our History. New York: Berkley Books, 2006.

The Yellow Fever epidemic that struck Memphis, Tennessee in 1878 was not the first outbreak of the disease in American history. The 1793 epidemic in Philadelphia is better known. A graduate school colleague wrote his dissertation on the topic (Arthur Robinson, "The Third Horseman of the Apocalypse: a Multi-disciplinary Social History of the 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Philadelphia," 1993). Caldwell Crosby starts with a compelling story of Memphis as the disease kills nearly everyone she introduces (some readers have found the narrative difficult on this account), and then follows Yellow Fever to Cuba two decades later. There Walter Reed identified the mosquito that transmits the virus. Caldwell Crosby is a journalist who writes well, but there have been some critical concerns raised with respect to her accuracy.

Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997.

I read this book at the end of the twentieth century after it came out in paperback. When I mentioned it as a guest lecturer in spring 2000, the professor and a few students had heard of it. When I mention it in college classes today, a few students have seen the PBS documentary based on the book (2005). Jared Diamond's work synthesizes and popularizes the work of others with his own meta-narrative. His answer to the question of why Eurasia, and more particularly Europe, became dominant in global affairs begins with the Neolithic Agricultural Revolution. Most of the virulent epidemic diseases that have tilted the balance of world history emerged from human associations with domesticated livestock. Long association with these diseases led to relative immunity for Eurasians that conferred an advantage over virgin populations in the Americas. Central to his argument is the east-west axis of the geography of Eurasia and the north-south axis of the Americas. The east-west axis facilitated the spread of crops, animals, diseases, and technologies. However, his extension of this contrast to Eurasia's advantage over Africa is less convincing. Africa is nearly as wide east to west, as it is long north to south. See the YouTube video, "African History Disproves 'Guns, Germs, and Steel' by Jared Diamond" (2019).

Dobyns, Henry F. Their Numbers Become Thinned: Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983.

This book is groundbreaking and controversial. Henry Dobyns' research is broad and deep, his inquiry imaginative, and his importance to the historiography of disease in the Americas undeniable. Dobyns has led the way in revising estimates of the pre-Columbian populations of the Americas upward. Few scholars agree with him, but the opposite extreme embraced by American conservatives from Rush Limbaugh to the authors of A Patriot's History of the United States is vastly less credible. Dobyns deserves credit for raising the critical questions, even if his answers are disputable. I recall that his efforts to assess carrying capacity of the land reshaped some of my thinking about history in fundamental ways, but also that several of us in the graduate seminar found his estimates a little too generous, as it seemed that a sense of ecological balance was missing.

Reconsideration of what should now be considered thoroughly discredited estimates begins with Dobyns, “Estimating Aboriginal American Population: An Appraisal of Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate,” Current Anthropology 7 (1966): 395-416. See also "Indian Population 1492: John D. Daniels", where I assess some of the flaws of the most comprehensive overview of the topic.

Fenn, Elizabeth A. Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82. New York: Hill and Wang, 2001.

Fenn's Pox Americana highlights the significance of smallpox to the American Revolution, controversies over early efforts to inoculate against it, and carries the story into the allegations of biological warfare (the notorious "orders" of Sir Jeffrey Amherst [88-89]), and the long-term impacts as smallpox spread across the continent, devastating native communities. Unfortunately, I can say little about this book. I started it while proctoring a final exam in American History: A Survey--reading that was frequently interrupted by students telling me how much they enjoyed the course (a job hazard). By the time I finished grading those exams, I had moved on to reading several other books (a hazard of my reading habits). I recall that I read the first few chapters with great enthusiasm for the quality of Fenn's research and analysis, and also that the book is well-written.

Johnson, Steven. The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2006.

John Snow was a physician before he became one of the heroes of Game of Thrones. He believed that cholera spread through contaminated water, not through foul air (the miasma theory of disease that was orthodox science at the time). Snow, thus, stands as an important figure in the development of the germ theory disease that would be articulated with solid evidence later in the nineteenth century by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch. Snow appears to have understood the germ theory, argued it through the 1850s, and later produced a map of London's epidemic that helps to demonstrate the source of the tainted water and the spread of the disease. Johnson writes well.

Lapham, Lewis H., ed. "Medicine". Lapham's Quarterly, vol. II, no. 4, Fall 2009.

Lewis Lapham compiled and organized into this issue of his quarterly an astounding range of excerpts from ancient times to the present. All excerpts concern the quest for health amid sickness, the arts of healing, the nature of medicine across ages and cultures. Writers range from Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Ken Kesey to Hippocrates, Plato, Oliver Sacks, Louis Pasteur, and the unknown writer of The Plum in the Golden Vase from the late Ming Dynasty. The issue is absorbing, surprising, and insightful. Lapham's sequencing is well considered. The issue was published against the backdrop of Barack Obama's presidency and the promise of what became the Affordable Care Act.

McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. New York: Anchor Books, [1976] 1998.

This book was vital in the process of bringing disease epidemiology into the consciousness of members of the history profession. William McNeill is concerned with the whole of human history from the evolutionary success of homo sapiens to global dominance by a few large bureaucratic states in the modern world. Diseases spread by invisible microparasites affect human societies in much the same way as macroparasites--humans preying upon other humans. Parasites survive by reaching equilibrium with their host populations just as governments built upon exploitation of subject peoples must protect them from more virulent threats (72). In the astounding success of European expansion in the wake of Columbus that largely set the structure of the modern world, "bacteriology was at least as important as technology" (235). This book sat on my shelf nearly untouched for more than a decade. Then I started examining it with the expectation that it would offer a quick and broad overview of the state of disease history half a century ago. Instead, I found a provocative approach to the subject as fresh as it was when first published. See also "Only a Quote" 2020.

Parker, Samuel. Journal of an Exploring Tour Beyond the Rocky Mountains. Ithaca, N.Y.: Self-Published, 1838.

This book is a primary source with minimal information useful to the study of disease. Nonetheless, it is a text that I often refer to it while lecturing on the topic of disease. Samuel Parker was a missionary with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions--the American West was foreign territory when he traveled there 1835-1837. Prior to his journey, he acquainted himself with the writings of explorers and fur traders who had been in the region. During his travels, he learned what he could from observation and through conversations with others. He observed the population of Native villages along the lower Columbia, noted that the number of people was substantially below what had been reported by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, and discussed the matter with John McLoughlin, Chief Factor of the Hudson's Bay Company. Parker reports his estimate that 7/8 of the Chinook had perished, and mentions McLoughlin's estimate of 9/10. Many scholars have suggested that the epidemic that ravished the Chinook 1829-1832 was malaria. Others are less certain of the identity of the disease. Parker, and others of his time uses the term, "fever and ague" (178). Whatever the disease, the Chinook had controlled trade between the Pacific Coast and the interior before the epidemic, and effectively ceased as viable communities after.

Rosen, William. Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe. New York: Penguin Viking, 2007.

William Rosen seeks connections between and among microbiology, ecology, geography, military history, architecture, and other areas. His concern is for the large questions, such as whether the fall of the Roman Empire was a consequence of a flea-borne plague. The answer is nuanced. He asserts that the pandemic changed history, but labors to avoid overstating the case. Rosen seems to spurn a linear narrative. Those who grow frustrated with an author's extensive pursuit of what seems tangential to the central narrative should look elsewhere.

The author has a website with excerpts from the book, reviews (including a negative one), maps, errata.

Welch, James. Fools Crow. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Fools Crow was Blackfeet writer James Welch's third novel. It is a coming of age novel focused on a year in the life of a Piegan teenager. Welch makes him part of the Lone Eaters Band, a fictional group grounded in history. The fiction is set against the backdrop of a smallpox epidemic and the Marias River Massacre. As Welch noted in several interviews, after the massacre, the Blackfeet never lifted arms against the United States again. Welch stated that he read what historians wrote about this era, and also drew from Blackfeet oral tradition. My dissertation, "Spring Wind Rising: The American Indian Novel and the Problem of History", has a chapter that examines the interplay of Welch's first four novels with history. I suggested that this novel inscribes history that is more accurate than government sources, but was insufficiently clear that it contains fewer errors than the most popular secondary histories on the topic as well.

Willrich, Michael. Pox: An American History. New York: Penguin, 2011.

The smallpox epidemic that struck parts of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century was notable for its lack of severity. Even so, it came on the heels of a transformation of medicine, was met with widespread efforts to vaccinate large populations, and had a tremendous impact. I'm 10% into the Kindle version of this text and may revise this annotation at a later date.

03 April 2020

Pandemic History

Epidemic disease has been a decisive factor in many of history's turning points. The "black death" (bubonic plague) has been credited with stimulating the end of the Middle Ages and ushering in the Renaissance.* Smallpox and other epidemic diseases infecting "virgin soil populations" was the decisive factor in the European conquest of the Americas.

In the present, the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) that causes COVID-19 provoked American universities to move most instruction online in the course of a few weeks in late February and early March 2020.** Further measures developed day-by-day as I was writing this post over the course of two weeks in late March while finishing winter quarter grading and beginning to record my spring quarter lectures. On 23 March 2020, Governor Inslee (Washington) ordered "stay-at-home" effective 48 hours later, closing all but essential businesses for two weeks, with the possibility that the partial quarantine could be extended. It has now been extended into May.

COVID-19 may also prove to be the defining moment in the Presidency of Donald J. Trump. Initially, Trump dismissed the epidemic as "under control", but as matters developed his views appeared to shift.*** Predictable partisan dissension made it impossible from the midst of the crisis to understand how well the United States was prepared, and whether actions had been taken, or not taken, that exacerbated or slowed the spread.

The number of confirmed cases globally topped half a million 27 March, while it had been under 200,000 the weekend before Saint Patrick's Day.  Confirmed cases topped one million 2 April, and the number of deaths passed the 50,000 mark that day also. The accuracy of the numbers are open to question as testing protocols vary. There are also suspicions that some countries might deliberately report inaccurate numbers. For up-to-date information on the COVID-19 pandemic, I recommend Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center.
Some of my Disease History Books

Disease in history long has been a personal interest--sometimes it is my main focus, sometimes it sits in the back of my mind while I pursue other questions. Emphases often shift in the life of a historian. These days, my central concerns are the global history of science and technology. This focus brings me back to the impact of bubonic plague, a topic I have neglected. My Amazon order of John Aberth, The Black Death, the Great Mortality of 1348-1350: A Brief History with Documents (2016) will arrive about four weeks from the date of the order because I chose to pay for faster shipping. Amazon is backed up due to the pandemic, and has prioritized shipment of medical supplies.

As someone who focused on American Indian history and culture in graduate school, I could not avoid the study of disease epidemiology (see "depopulation" in the index). Moreover, the origins of Patriots and Peoples (this site) stem from a challenge in A Patriot's History of the United States (2004) to generally accepted understanding of the impact of disease on indigenous populations (see "Patriots' and Peoples' Histories" [2007]). The authors of A Patriot's History favor the lowest estimates of pre-Columbian indigenous populations and dismiss claims that disease epidemics were a significant factor. In the course of their arguments, they violate nearly every standard of honest scholarship.

This post continues with "Pandemic History: The Bibliography", published nearly two weeks later. It offers short annotations to a list of books on the history of disease that were selected on the whimsical base that I can find them on the shelves in my home within a few minutes.

My Journey


My introduction to the topic of disease in history began spring 1988 as both a teaching assistant for American Indian History, where the professor assigned Francis Jennings, Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1976) as one of the texts, and in a graduate seminar, "Ethnohistory and the New Social History" with the same professor. Jennings' book (not annotated in the companion post) offers:
Not even the most brutally depraved of the conquistadors was able to purposely slaughter Indians on the scale that the gentle priest unwittingly accomplished by going from his sickbed ministrations to lay his hands in blessing on his Indian converts. As the invaders were descendants of the toughened survivors of the Middle Ages, so the Indians of today descend from those who could live through the trauma of a European handshake.
Jennings, Invasion of America, 22.
In the seminar, the one dozen assigned books began with Their Numbers Become Thinned (1983) by Henry F. Dobyns. That seminar concluded with a social gathering that included dinner with William R. Swagerty, Dobyns' co-author for the longest chapter in the book. It was a good introduction to some of the controversies in efforts to estimate in impact of disease in the Americas.

In that seminar, we each selected one of the books and led that week's discussion, created and distributed an annotated bibliography that put the book in context, and then wrote a paper. My text was James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (1985). Four years later when I started teaching the upper-division American Indian History course for which I had been a TA in 1988, I assigned it as one of the texts. Axtell's book focused on Christian missions to indigenous Americans. Disease epidemics proved vital to the topic. His thesis concerning the sources of indigenous perceptions of European power identifies two principle factors: Europeans, especially priests, were akin to "the Indians' own shamans and conjurers" because they seemed to be "purveyors or preventers of disease" (10). Then he claims, European technological superiority was more vital.

Since reading The Invasion Within early in graduate school, I have frequently revisited Axtell's assertion. I have expanded and developed my agreement of the central significance of disease, while qualifying and critiquing his assumptions of technological superiority. A thesis statement I wrote for an encyclopedia article twenty years ago appears several times on Patriots and Peoples.
Epidemic disease was the decisive factor in the European conquest. Epidemics not only eliminated entire communities, but the resulting sociocultural disruption created conditions that made Native peoples more receptive to European trade items and religious ideas.
James Stripes, "Native Americans: An Overview," Encyclopedia of American Studies, vol. 3 (2001), 198.
In fall 1989, I worked up a twenty minute lecture on the impact of epidemic disease on Native populations as part of my responsibility as a teaching assistant. Twenty minutes exhausted most of what I knew at that point. By 2004, this kernel had grown into a three hour PowerPoint presentation. I use Axtell's title, The Invasion Within, as my lecture title. In the course of the presentation I venture into Dobyns' work and some of the views of his many critics. Often while presenting this lecture, I struggled to focus on the prepared material because I sensed that the whole three hours merely brushed the surface. I developed an extended version of this presentation for American Indian History (a course I created at Whitworth University) and a shorter version for Pacific Northwest History. For a course in Atlantic History, I created a Prezi presentation that qualified somewhat my assertion in Encyclopedia of American Studies (See "The Decisive Factor" [updated 17 August 2017]).

For Technology in World Civilization, a course that is now my teaching focus, I cut this lecture down to ten minutes to expand and critique assertions in chapter four of Arnold Pacey, Technology in World Civilization (1991), one of the two texts. Pacey also has a section on the impact of bubonic plague. The other current text, Society and Technological Change, 8th ed. (2017) by Rudi Volti, has a section concerned with medical technologies and in my lectures I find it apropos to highlight success in the battle with infectious diseases. Moving this course online during the current pandemic causes the medium and the message to intertwine in ways that Marshall McLuhan anticipated.

In short, my study of epidemic disease and histories of pandemics has been broad, sometimes deep, and has occupied a fair portion of the past four decades. Nonetheless, I am a mere dabbler compared to those who have specialized in this area. In the past few weeks, I have been dabbling with greater attention, reading quite a bit about the Influenza Pandemic that struck in 1918.


*See Samuel Kline Cohn, "Plague and its Consequences," Oxford Bibliographies (updated 10 May 2010), www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780195399301/obo-9780195399301-0062.xml

**World Health Organization, "Naming the Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) and the Virus that Causes it," WHO.int (accessed 3 April 2020), https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2019/technical-guidance/naming-the-coronavirus-disease-(covid-2019)-and-the-virus-that-causes-it?

***"CNBC Transcript: President Donald Trump Sits Down with CNBC's Joe Kernan at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland," CNBC.com (22 January 2020), www.cnbc.com/2020/01/22/cnbc-transcript-president-donald-trump-sits-down-with-cnbcs-joe-kernen-at-the-world-economic-forum-in-davos-switzerland.html