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