Insufficient attention was paid to the first influenza death in the city. The United States was in the throes of the Great War, and the Kaiser, not the flu, was on the minds of Philadelphians.
The coronavirus will not succeed in doing to American society what fascism did to Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, but it has sparked a virulent wave of racism and intolerance, especially aimed at Chinese Americans.
If history shows Hoover followed the wrong path for principled reasons, what will it say about Donald Trump, who has several tools that were not available to Hoover?
Our 46th president, whenever he or she arrives, will confront a changed world, partly because of COVID, but also because of the effects of Trump’s personality and policies.
"This pandemic is global in scale and personal in impact, and as a result, it’s touching and transforming virtually every topic that historians have studied. We have a duty to share our insights with the larger world. They’re interested in what we have to say. (And, let’s remember, most of them are stuck at home looking for something to read!)"
Defoe's accomplishment as a work of history lies not so much in the accuracy of its numbers or facts as in its power as a work of fiction, in the observing eye and skeptical intelligence of H.F., and in the stories he tells, which convey through common language and the details of common life what it was like to live through the plague.
Gardener’s historic appointment as U.S. Civil Service Commissioner marked one symbolic step toward the idea that women should be universally recognized as “self- respecting, self- directing human units with brains and bodies sacredly their own.”
History teachers have two urgent challenges: helping their students cope with this crisis, and helping them understand the society that created it. Neither allows teaching as usual.
Yes, let’s end “endless wars” and enhance peaceable diplomacy around the world. But let us not at the same time renounce by redefinition America’s international responsibilities and its capacity for wise, moral leadership.
The coronavirus disaster, like the other current catastrophes ravaging the planet, might finally convince people around the globe that transcending nationalism is central to survival.
McNeil’s major achievement was to incorporate developments in microbiology, anthropology and archeology and synthesize them in a popular world history that identified disease as a primary shaper of world history.
Defying the broader conservative political forces of the time, the Farm Security Administration extended health care to tens of thousands of migratory agricultural workers because it understood that farmworkers’ health was vital to the nation’s wellbeing.
It is well past time for lawmakers to provide permanent paid sick days protections, so that no one is forced to work sick, risk their paycheck or risk their job.
Comparing the first 100 days in power of Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler offers a sobering reminder of the consequences of decisions pursued by leaders in crisis.
We are all struggling, and we all need the distractions that only absurdity can provide. So laugh now and then; see the silly, the absurd and the comic in life.
A Supreme Court decision in United States v. Sineneng-Smith that broadens the authority of the federal government to suppress the rights of advocates for undocumented immigrants could divide the nation irreparably.
Pundits have described fighting the pandemic in terms of “medieval” or “modern” approaches. A historian of late medieval public health explains that dichotomy is a false one, and dangerous as well.
