Director of the wyoming institute for humanities research. Im excited to welcome you to the topic which is pandemics in historical perspective. Im excited to introduce the history and member of the committee who will be our moderator tonight and introduce our speaker. Please welcome. Thank you, scott, and our panelists who agreed to participate. With usu for sticking and to all of you out there tuning in and some form or another. Going to do a brief introduction and i will let them each talk for a couple minutes how their work intersects with our theme tonight. She is the author of an earlier piece of what the pandemic and teaches about the crisis. Williams we have jacob , an associate professor of history at the college of charleston. He specializes in the history of science, medicine, disease, and is working on a book that examines scientific attitudes and cultural constructions of typhoid fever. Editor of the journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences. Toi will handed over to them offer a little bit more of an overview of their work to how it intersects with our theme here tonight. I can just go in the order introduce to you, if that works. Thank you for having us. My work centers around cholera and plague in the late 19th and early 20th century. I focused primarily on the pilgrimage to mecca. Looking at the ways in which the ecological fallout of reddish colonialism in india impacted the Ottoman Empire in the broader middle east and really spilled over and became a truly global issue in the late 19th century. Also, my work had sort of spun off in a couple of different ably somes, but notice about desalination tactics which began to be used. , the salad water is the wellspring of life in the the secondo that is project that sprang out of this initial pandemic. Thank you for having us. My work focuses broadly on the intersection of slavery and the slave trade in early modern america but my current project slavery,n smallpox and specifically enslaved africans experiences of Health Intervention and their experiences with smallpox inoculation both with indigenous west african practices and in different parts of the caribbean. Because the enslaved because the slave trade took enslaved people to a variety of locations across the region, i look across together theo put dislocation of public Health Intervention and the implication of different smallpox interventions, so before the intervention of the smallpox vaccine. I have spent probably a decade researching typhoid fever and the rise of epidemiology. Typhoid has been this really interesting to disease for me to look at because it has often been seen alongside a cholera in the rise of Public Health and municipal sanitation. ,n my research about typhoid was interesting is the role of British Columbia was in the process. Era,e midvictorian typhoid was almost seen as inherently european. Peoplese that indigenous in africa could not get, and by the end of the 19th century, it was seen as a disease colonialism brought across the world. So i have a book on typhoid that is coming out a little later than chriss called the filth disease. In my second project is on bubonic plague in the late 19th early 20th century British Colonial errors areas. Does a lot of great intersection here between the three of us. I agree. Some of you already started to touch upon this, this is a broad question i thought i would ask. What parallels do you see between your own times that you study and today . Whoever wants to go first . Ill take a stab. Things that has struck me in the last few weeks is really the parallel about testing. Really, cholera leaps onto the global stage. You start to get outbreaks moving from the ganges delta in 1860s,s, and by the cholera is on the global radar and is impacting not only europe but also making its way to north america. One thing i think is interesting is really from the 1830s is that everyone was flying blind. The bacteria,ood really how cholera worked and spread. So for the better part of three decades in the middle part of my work, you have a British Empire that obstinately denies that india is the source of cholera and you have a beleaguered Ottoman Empire that is really following the best medical and yet they are being blamed by the British Empire, saying mecca is the spawn of cholera. So this blame game and lack of clarity about how the disease worked is strikingly similar. I will jump in that. In a similar way, flying blind aspect is pretty similar to early up lakes outbreaks i studied. America saw the first documented smallpox outbreak in the early 15 20s. At that time, smallpox was similar to how the coronavirus is a novel virus globally. A varietyricans had of different medical practices that might have been helpful for the disease not experience with that disease specifically. So i think the sense of being in and havingerritory to figure out the medical practices is one similarity, but the other one that is heartbreaking is the demographics of who is affected by this disease. The racial demographics of black people dying at much higher rates and the devastating impact on native American Communities in the u. S. As well as abroad is very, very similar to the breaks i study and that has everything to do with the way that labor is performed in america, the way the socioeconomic disparities we have as well as the under resourcing of different communities that put them at risk. The fact that there was not a conscious effort early on to make any kind of public Health Intervention directing at preserving the lives of natives and black people in the u. S. And now looking at that in the past, where a lot of time black and native people are paying the cost, theres definitely a lineage there that is worth acknowledging. Those are probably the greatest similarities ive seen. With how myovetail work intersects with a couple of the themes we just heard. One, this question chris up about internationalism is super interesting and how it parallels. Phenomenons amazing of european nations plus turkey coming together in paris trying to think about the spread of plague, yellow fever, and think about measures of quarantine and global politics. What is so fascinating is, one, how much uncertainty there is, and to, that even when they vote on issues, once those diplomats come back to their home countries they dont often get followed or put in place. This interesting acknowledgment that internationalism as a response to pandemics is a response to public good, but putting that into practice is constrained. Its constrained by local politics, by issues of race and labor. So that is certainly one thing i have seen in my work theres and theone about labor uneven ways antipandemic practices get spread out, particularly via race. That is something i focused my , and if youect on look at practices in those colonial locations, what you see our Indigenous People being , ed for the spread plague spread of plague, but also doing the everyday work of tearing down houses and doing dangerous chemicals. I think you see those parallels. Despite these quarantine measures, there is real on the ground labor happening. I want to pick up on this fought how diseases are or methods affected or otherwise. What other ideas are circulating in your project about how to fight disease or where diseases come from . One of the things that , jacob in my work mentions internationalism. One of the big things in my work is that the Ottoman Empire takes internationalism quite seriously. They want to be viewed as a power player in europe and be taken seriously and have their sovereignty protected. They really try to play the game whereas theonalism, british are the big bad in this story and week internationalism cannot restrain british freetrade, which refuses to be caught in any legal agreement which forced them to quarantine or restrict labor mobility. This becomes a real stumbling block for effective control. When were certainly times i would have been appropriate to whether it beity european traders or labor migrants. Trade r for fear free trade or fear of backlash, they often refused to do so. Question such a tough for an early modernist dog pack because people have very different ideas of what diseases now. And ideas than they do , i feel like the most obvious question we get asked is whether or not the disease was racialized. To the extent i study. They recognized it was a disease anyone could contract them especially if they hadnt had before. And folks from different backgrounds prescribed different meanings to it that sometimes had different connotations. Those in west africa and america practiced smallpox inoculation from a rudimentary form of immunization that involved taking pus and putting in incision into another location, usually performed on children. And western europeans were not really familiar with any form of immunization practice. It was a big part of eastern medicine and east asia. , folksearly 18th century in the americas were a little bit more willing to experiment with it and adopted pretty part becausearge of their contact with west africans and their familiarity. Did notern europeans really sanction the practice until the mid 18th century. Prior to that, they relied on which isquarantine, similar to the social distance practicing we are doing now. It still leaves the infected in a vulnerable position and does not do anything to prevent the disease from spreading if it already is. A big part of my work is focusing on maritime at different coastal ports. Thats really interesting that you talk about the ways discussions of slavery. Meanwhile, discussions here have been racialized, too. If i try to think about what has been happening in the late 19th century, when you think about questions of differential blame, xenophobia, and labor, im going to try to share an image. It looks like it is disabled. One of the things that is so fascinating to me about this photograph from 1898 is that it station inipping city centralport to the British Empire. Showshotograph that british officials dipping indians into a vat of acid. And what is so interesting to me in india andample south africa is this really harrowing photograph. Is the only photograph i found that existed of human dipping in this vat of acid, which was known to burn skin. So heres this moment where we are in the middle of a pandemic. He bonnet plague is sweeping the globe and disrupting daily life, trade, and everything in between. And theres also new bacterial knowledge. About theowledge disease, and also about the connection. And yet this response is this heavily racialized response to blame indians and africans and to usher in these very heavyhanded, Imperial Health practices. If you think about some of the visuals happening here, it helps to nuance and textual lies the labor practices and immunity questions that they say are longstanding in this time. Thanks. Is interesting to piggyback on the stratification issue with cholera and plague. Certainly, they were running concurrently. But all of these sanitary conferences continued to enshrine mobility and continued to protect trade and troop movements and tended to demonize labor migrants or muslim and hindu pilgrims. So we see this sort of stratification. Iis is one of the worries have about this idea of community passports. We end up with not something that cares about immunity, but instead is another way to practice these racial inequalities. If i could just jump in really quick and say i think that pointing out these are ways to enshrine European Mobility is important. Europeanhe reason why colonial officials were creating different types of quarantine policies was that the slave trade could continue. Towas a perfect solution stop the smallpox outbreak was to stop insulating but that was not what anybody was interested in at the time. So developing these kind of Health Policies that allowed for things to continue along a quote. Nquote normal we realize it is something our current pandemic is now play bear is not something that works is now laid bare as something that is not sustainable or something that works. People are talking about it now. Immunity, howe does having the disease even confer immunity. It is something of concern in previous eras as well. The other thing i wanted to ask was the broader fx pandemics have had. Effects pandemics have had. Pandemics are one thing, but its the other knock on effects of the pandemic that are actually more detrimental to societies and certainly in our own time. There are questions about economic effects so i was wondering if yall could just speak to that your own errors. Oftentimes, people enslaved or inbound labor where the ones most impacted. They were either unable to work or many people perished for the work. Oftentimes, densely populated urban spaces were devastated and there were several examples i read where they report some households were left without a living soul. An end to different a lot on french colonization. Of times, people were lamenting the end of religious people not having access to less rights. They were also incredibly disruptive to trade and commerce and all manner of trade and commerce. In some cases, the small islands and territories, the more remote areas, were dependent on getting supplies from other places. Peopleuld mean that would have to go with different foodstuffs or goods for a long period of time. Those are probably some of the biggest impacts, in addition to the variety of emotional things that go along with it. Tried to think about pandemics as a sort of swirl of comorbidities. Fort of what i think about the Ottoman Empire, the larger muslim world, is that british conditionsswirl of that are conducive to not just cholera outbreaks, plagues, malaria, famine, and the synergy between these things helps to further the possibility of further outbreaks. The other thing i would say is piggybacking on some of the blame games that are afoot at the moment and playing with statistics, one example i like to use our the british like to play down deaths. They would report cholera deaths as famine diarrhea. Blamingg one crisis and it so it did not draw a larger International Attention to the bigger problem. , we see these ways in which there is a cascade of consequences, water safety, water security in the Arabian Peninsula, titer border controls tighter border controls. We get some of the infrastructures of travel regulation that we tend to as americans think of you have a passport and it provides you freedom to go where you want. In point of fact, passports were usually restricted measures. I think it is important for us to recognize their origins. Thats right. That is really important work that emerged from my research too. I see this in particular with my projects on typhoid and bubonic plague is on the one hand the story of typhoid in the second half of the 19th century is the rise of a global a kind ofgy, of commitment on behalf of the government to hire people to study epidemics fulltime. Wea long historical arc, could see that as an important moniker. At the same time, how those Public Health practices were happening on the ground, particularly in colonial locations, was very uneven. While we might say the rise of global epidemiology is a positive good for society, i think that is certainly something we should acknowledge. On the other hand, what happens in the case of cape town, what i found there was 200 huge archival boxes that had not been opened since 1910, and they were all plague files. What is so interesting is british officials, when the plague starts hitting cape town, they literally clear with Police Officers and soldiers, they clear cape town. They move the Indigenous People who were living there out of the city and they totally remake that urban lan landscape. Chris, you can speak to this, and so can you, lisa. There is a fear of Indigenous People that europeans had. There is also a fear of indigenous landscapes and environment. I think the colonial project in its period was one of racial lysing disease, but also thinking racializing disease, but also thinking about landmarks. This is an interesting thing you bring up, this idea of an environmental orientalism. One of the things that comes out in my work is the modernizing state starts to view the Arabian Peninsula and its frontiers as a defective environment, that there is something about the mobility of pilgrims, also the effectiveness of the desert environment, that is particularly dangerous and needs to be rectified. You start to get more emphasis on the infrastructural projects or water and sanitation, etc. Of there is a sort of streak a european orientalism that even the ottomans start to imbibe as well. The part about landscapes is really important. In the caribbean, from very early on, people talking about this as a disease ridden landscape, a place that promotes unhealth. But smallpox never gets wrapped up in those same discourses because europeans from pretty early on recognized it was a disease that happens because of human to human contact, so it is kind of an outlier from diseases malarialow fever and because there were so many horrible outbreaks in europe as well, often contemporaneously with once affecting the caribbean and africa. Ever getot quite racialized in the same way or attributed to a specific group. From pretty early on in the 17th century, europeans recognized this was a disease that was fermented by keeping people in close quarters, keeping people in unsanitary conditions, regardless of what environment they were in. Thanks for all of that. We have some amazing questions from our audience, so i will turn to some of those. We have a couple different questions that touch upon the liberties versus. Erhaps, or not, Public Health we have a question for mary berman, who asks, is that a factor in past pandemics, the clash between people advocating for Civil Liberties and those focused on Public Health . And there is also a question from jason mcconnell, who asks about the use of quarantine as potentially a convenient tool by which to maltreat minority groups or other people considered undesirable in the population . I will lump those together and ask if you see that in your own work. I will try to tackle this question may be a little bit indirectly. Since thinking about the difference between metropolitan theiries in europe and colonial territories that they controlled, Civil Liberties as we might think of it were not really existent in the same way. But one of the things that crops up in my work is the sort of deal that is struck after the 18571858. Lion in one of the ideas that is enshrined is chari activity would be frowned upon and hindus and muslims and other religious groups in india would be given religious freedom. However narrowly defined. This idea, it is very difficult to restrict mobility that had anything to do with religion. The colonial state was terrified to do anything that would be seen by the Muslim Population as a reneging on this basic agreement. Basic civila liberties question of the day, and it really comes from the state, from acting effectively to control pandemics. Civil liberties. When you are talking about enslaved people, liberty isnt really something that is much of a factor in that sense. People, because of the fact they were enslaved, were already vulnerable to being surveilled at a higher rate, to constricted mobility, to all manner of different forms of violence as well. Terms of whether or not Public Health practices were an infringement on that we have to remember that our sense of Civil Liberties here in the u. S. Is a pretty broad conceptualization tha of something that is socially and legally constructed here. For the period that i study, and i will focus on free people , forse it is a bit easier folks who were in west africa, they had comprehensive Health Response to smallpox from the little bit of documentation we have. It included mass inoculation. In some cases it included mass inoculation of children. It included quarantine. Or it included having some kind of proof, either a scar of inoculation, or proof you had been inoculated before you could go trading at great distances and is like that. And things like that. That had to do with the fact that west africans understood diseases as being a collective, as having a more collective impact. So if you are working within that framework already, the kinds of privacy infringements that we imagine Public Health having today dont necessarily apply because you are already prioritizing the collective. Whereas room pretty early on, especially in the enlightenment, western europeans had an individualized concept of the body, where these are things that are affecting this one person or this group of individuals. With that, you run into problems when you try to get people to adopt Something Like inoculation, which would be beneficial for everyone. Or things like different kinds of quarantines where folks want to be the exception to the role, which i think has to do with some of those fundamental differences and how folks are conceiving of diseases. , wheres of quarantines they conflated . Absolutely. In some of the examples i have, and includes women becoming victims of Sexual Violence during quarantine. People would use quarantine or fabricate smallpox epidemics as an excuse to throw rebellious enslaved people overboard during voyages. Many of the descriptions are really terrifying. European slavers often used these quarantines as opportunities to exploit and enslaved people further. The impact of setting folks to these different places over and over again for sometimes cyclical quarantines meant it was incredibly disorienting for enslaved people, which whether wittingly or unwittingly certainly contributed to the practices that folks were trying to inscribe in the caribbean. I see a lot of the same dovetailing in my research, too. Too have seen when British Colonial officials in the cape colony would remove indigenous africans to these camps. They were these makeshift camps where they are forced to live. They are thrown out of their houses. Their houses are destroyed, their belongings are destroyed, their bodies are physically disinfected with chemicals that are imported from europe. Interesting Technology Transfer as well. Also seeing in the archival records there numerous instances of british officials rate being Indigenous Women raping Indigenous Women in camps. Very overt ways. , what i think is interesting, is how much pushback there was in these records. Africansby indigenous for the unequal treatment that they were being had through train travel, through their belongings being destroyed. It is petition after petition after petition that shows up in the plague records in south africa that shows resistance to these measures as well. The other question that was asked here about Civil Liberties is really interesting with how it relates to my work on typhoid fever. Some of the audience will undoubtedly know about typhoid mary. What is so fascinating to me after having studied typhoid for over a decade is how mary malone was not the first asymptomatic carrier of typhoid. She was not even the first recognized. There was this long history stretching back to the mid19th century of Health Officials trying to locate what they called the index case, an individual who started an epidemic. Often times, that was people that were already socially maligned in europe. European locations or colonial locations. Lhere is a longer historica arc of infringing on liberties too. Question go to another from the audience. Maybe also bundling a couple questions together so we get through all of these. First, we have a question about 1794, Richard Allen and jones, two philadelphians who helped lead their communitys response to the outbreak, wrote to combat ideas of immunity of black immunity. He wonders if the panel can comment on issues of racialized immunities or vulnerabilities. And i will also. With this question from donald person about an enslaved owned byd who was Cotton Mather, and who helped explain how deliberately infecting someone with smallpox could help increase resistance to that, and whether there was an awareness that that knowledge came from an enslaved person. Personally, i am interested in indigenous and african knowledge generally. I will kind of light you three i will kind of let you three answer those together. My sense from those questions with thoseout examples, about how free and enslaved africans in the americas were responding to the outbreak. I can start with the one around Cotton Mather first. Cotton mather called that enslaved man, he was a member of from the gold coast area, which is now gonna. Which is now ghana. Documents that might one of free that people of african descent, and also people of european dissent in places like sando main, which inoculatedi, being with west africans who are more familiar with the practice and continued the practice in the americas. There are a few examples of folks from other parts of the caribbean, jamaica, if i am remembering correctly, barbados, but i am not quite sure on that one, practicing inoculation in the americas. And in terms of french and english people who traveled to west africa, they cited people practicing smallpox inoculations, it was almost as common as circumcision in places like senegal, all along the gambia river, all along the sierra leone river. Many people from that part of west africa. We dont have early documentation saying people from angolantral africa like had that kind of practice, but they had other responses to smallpox. Europeans did not believe that africans were more immune to smallpox than anyone else, but they did believe that their bodies were somehow hardier and more resistant to diseases and could be subjected to harsh labor or harsh smallpox experiment. Who didre a few folks some pretty horrible experiments on enslaved africans with smallpox inoculation. Had this belief that africans could somehow withstand harsher treatments or experience a less severe form of the disease, they did not give them the same quality of care they provided europeans. Once europeans formally adopted smallpox inoculation, they were willing to inoculate enslaved africans who were in physical conditions that they would have decided they would not inoculate a european person under. If they already had another disease, someone who was pregnant, someone who was a very young infant, things like that. Enslaved people, there are a number of examples. Sasha turner is an example of reproductive medicine in jamaica. She talks about instances where in slave mothers try to withhold their children from being inoculated because they were too young. You also have examples of people of african dissent in places like that is what african descent in places like venezuela. Observersfew european who say they saw it practiced among these people without the presence of any physician. They were definitely doing things to try to mitigate the disease. Once you get into the 19th century, because there is a much more dense documentary record and more free people of african descent, you have a lot more examples of people who were in norther who were and in northern states access to the smallpox vaccine. Conditions that would promote health, not under conditions that might cause them to die or have an adverse reaction to it. I can jump in here a little bit. I think one of the things that is really interesting, if you take this long view from this period that elise is talking about in the 18th and early 19th century, i think there is a real fear thinking back on this historical knowledge and trying to understand it and pigeonholing that into this older era where there was not modern scientific understandings. But if you speed it up into the early 20th century when there are new when there is a new science of microorganisms growing and spreading disease as a cognitive organism, there is a redoubling of ideas of differential immunity. In spite of new bacteriology and epidemiology, these theories persisted and in some cases became even stronger. Health officials in the early 20th century can use tests to determine who has a disease or who doesnt have a disease of a bacterial origin. But at the same time, they are still thinking about racialized ideas, about who is more is at risk, or who of spreading disease. I think that this is interesting what jacob brings up, the idea that you cannot compare the present with the early or late 19th century. In many respects, these are racial ideologies in these moments. My colleague from columbia now at villanova has written some wonderful things in the popular press recently about a fear of east asians, ways in which the west refused to essentially look at the examples that were put perhaps china is a little problematic, but south korea, japan, singapore, and refuse to follow the examples of social distancing, and particularly mask wearing early in the pandemic. I think this is certainly related to racial hierarchies, thinking there is some sort of obedient asian population, and these stereotypes get trotted out. The west will not follow these examples. There is nothing to learn here, when in fact there certainly was, and now we are paying the price. Definitely. The next question comes from about the asks diseases that pass from animals to people. Basically, the environmental both covid19 and diseases. Otic what are your thoughts and whether this is a concern in your own time, but putting too much pressure on natural toources and how that leads pandemics, if any of you have thoughts on that. I teach a Global Environmental history course, and zoonotics spillover. It is certainly a big part of what we do in that course. Obviously, this semester has been a case study for my. Tudents early on in the semester, we talked about that as the pandemic was unfolding. I think my points were brought home a little too well this semester. I think it is interesting. There are ways in which we are talking about sars or covid in bats and mers in camels. Animals have become scapegoats. This is a sign of depending on your ideological perspective on how you want to think about Climate Change and our current predicament. But this is fundamentally a human problem of using cheap resources, cheap land, and ,ncroaching on animals previously undisturbed animal habitats, or industrializing our interactions with animals, placing human populations, industrial animal husbandry, farming practices, and wild animal populations in very close proximity. But this is fundamentally a human problem, not an animal problem, regardless of what the popular press might say. That is really interesting, and i think just to jump off that a little bit, if you take this moment, elise with the history of bubonic plague when the rat was first acknowledged to play some kind of role in the spread of plague in the 1890s, some of the early epidemiological maps that officials produced in south africa are not the sort of classic cholera spot maps of either cases of sick individuals or dead individuals. They are actually maps that are if the demi a logical epidemiological maps of animals. Became scapegoats for a whole set of issues, one of which is race. Those maps mapped onto the urban landscape, but also onto the houses of Indigenous People. The history is a big one right now, and one i would highly encourage anybody who is interested in that at all to look at this period in the late 19th and early 20th century, when there is this flourishing of zoonotic research that is happening from people trained in bacteriology that is really understudied. This one is a tough one for me to answer for my own , because but thank you it is helpful for me as i am thinking about this. The first vaccine was called a vaccine because it comes from cowpox, which can produce a temporary immunity to smallpox. That is something that was pretty familiar to different Rural Communities who had close interactions with cows. But the idea, the reason why it became effective was because it was a way to control the spread of the disease, to control immunity. I think the nature of humans contact with animals shaped the way those kinds of diseases can become something that is either harmful or helpful for a community. And i think that gets back to the question that jacob just touched on around the different kinds of social inequities and ways in which race intersects with it in a context in and scientists are really invested in Wider Society is invested in protecting folks as they come in contact with these diseases. It can lead to the production of knowledge or produce some kind of remedy, but in a context where folks are not investing because they cant or for political or social reasons they are choosing not to. Then you end up with a situation where you might have it spiral into a pandemic. I do also believe i think we have something in the works that will talk about this specifically, so stay tuned. This is a question from karina, which i love. Or all the best way ways that we as historians but also humans generally can inform policies about Public Health . Kind of a tall order. But if you just want to share something. I actually think about this a lot, both in a pandemic like this, and i have written a handful of op eds trying to contextualize. I had a piece that aired on cnn last week on pandemics and the use of disinfectants and their long history. One of the things that historians in humans more broadly can do is use our expertise to complicate the big narrative, the narratives of scientific progress, the narratives that we have this problem. There is this idea out there in Broader Society that work like this it worked like this in the past and it can work like this now. Diseases often get likened to that where there is this problem. You just need the right knowhow to get it fixed. If we have the right scientific breakthrough, we can solve this problem. I think any story of the history of disease, it is abundantly clear it has not worked that way in the past and it probably will not work that way now. I think the more we can complicate those heroic narratives the more we can help people try to navigate what are the gray areas, the more complicated areas, the areas of inequality . That has been interesting for me as a historian of epidemic disease is how much play the spanish flu has gotten in the media lately as a way to try to understand the moment we are in now, and i totally get it. It was the last big american pandemic that happened, and it was a really important Global Pandemic across the world. Having cities all across america provides a salient lesson for us. But i think there has been a way in which that story has been reduced to a not very complicated story and a heroic story, like the kind of things we have been talking about in the last hour are much more difficult to throw into how they easily map onto our experience right now with covid. But in a way, that makes it more valuable. I just want to jump in here and again make a pitch for environmental history. Thesent moment onetoone comparisons, i have seen lots of stories in popular media about the spanish flu or even cholera. But we are living in quite a different moment. Certainly the 19th century, we with steam and telegraph connectivity. But the level of connectivity, the speed of travel, the density of our population and all of these accumulated degradations of the environment that we collectively think of as the great acceleration put us in quite a different spot than we were in the 19th century. I think trying to piece this together and think of this as the canary in the coal mine is one small data point in a much larger picture. I think some of these 19thcentury comparisons dont really do service to this. I also like what jacob was , greatabout the heroic man theory of medicine, that there is a dr. Fauci out there somewhere that is going to come up with a cure and save us all from this, when in point of fact these are generally slow rolling efforts, and we are very likely to see similar things happening. Crosby,e it was alfred and i will butcher the quote, but he said there is that 19th century and there is the 20th century, where you have all these wonderful advances. [no audio] immortality, expanding life expectancy, etc. He was asked, what happens after the 20th century . You go back to the 19th century. Those gains we have made in some respects are illusory. Antibiotics, advances in bacteriology, etc. They are not enough to keep pace with the changes we are making in the wider environment. And to only have a conversation about Public Health puts us at a big disservice. And a second way i would like to address this question about how we can interject ourselves into the Public Discourse is to really think about calling balls and strikes. I am seeing lots of stories about the impending season coming up in late july, early august. Pilgrims have been banned from going to mecca outside of hud the season. One of the things that happened a couple months ago was that saudis started to float a trial balloon that they would ultimately have to postpone or cancel the pilgrimage this year. With that, they put together a package of precedents, of for reasons of political conflict or pandemic, it had been disrupted. Interestingly, all of their examples come from the seventh century all the way up to the invasion of napoleon in egypt in 1798. There is no mention of the 19th century. No mention of the colonial interventions with colorado and the plague and with cholera and the plague. Powerswhich colonial reached into the Arabian Peninsula and regulated the pilgrimage to mecca, the most sacred event in the faith. We see a reluctance to come to terms with that history in the talking points they put out. But interestingly, most western observers who have run op eds about it being postponed or its potential have taken the saudi talking points generally without , i suspect, without reading the original Arabic Communications and just digested all that information without checking. There are lots of errors that have been imported into our understanding of this in the last couple of weeks. I spent some time working on a piece to call balls and strikes on this and adjudicate what is going on. I think that is one role where we can have an impact, is to come behind and correct the record when journalists make some of these mistakes. Think that humanists definitely have a role to play across the board. I want to echo both comments that it is never a onetoone comparison. There is no place that is more true than when people were working with completely different ideas about how medicine worked. But i think one of the things you can do with taking a long view is looking at some different social conditions that produce epidemics that enable epidemics to spread. Togethersearch, i put a database of around 500 different smallpox outbreaks all the way through to around 1803. The commonalities, many occurred on slave ships. Many occurred in situations where people were in densely populated areas. So when we heard that covid was spreading, some of my first concerns were about homeless populations, People Living in urban areas, people in prisons and detention centers. While that is not the same thing as slavery or being held in a forcedhip, that kind of confinement is something that still indoors in our world today. Given that we are currently living through a pandemic, thinking about how we might build societies that dont include those kinds of forced confinement might be something worth considering at this point in time. Also looking at the staggering mortality statistics for the period i study. I am seeing cases where enslaved people are dying at two or three times other groups. People are dying at tremendous rates because they cannot get access to different forms of medicine or perform the kind of healing traditions they would because of the disruptions colonialism caused. In thinking about that in our time period, it continues to push people to perform essential labor without adequate protections and other things like that. Those parallels are worth exploring and worth consideration3 i think humanists have a lot to lend that conversation. I dont think we need to necessarily look at past epidemics in order to understand the ways this one might come to bear on our lives. We still have an ongoing hiv pandemic going on around the world, and the numbers are looking pretty bad for people of color in many western countries. And i think scholars who do work on that have a lot to lend in terms of these questions on infringement of Civil Liberties, Contact Tracing and what that does in terms of the racial disparities, and the way that Public Health issues intersect with these other issues of labor exploitation, immigration, incarceration, of our housing crisis and things like that. As much as i am delighted you are talking to us and that people want to hear from me about it, the real people to talk to are folks who do work on hiv and disability studies scholars. A i try to trace individuals, lot of them end up blind or with other physical ailments from this. They are learning that covid can cause people to have strokes, have other forms of disabilities. You have a long road to recovery after that. You may never fully recover from that. As this continues to spread, thinking about moving forward, our policies can address those kinds of things. They can do a better job of caring for folks who have different forms of disability and provide better accommodations. It might be something that humanists can contribute to moving forward. I would like to thank all of you for lending their voices to this important conversation, but definitely elise, your point is right that there are many different people that we should be listening to in this time. That is certainly something our organization hopes to promote. Going to end our time together because we are at an hour, a little over, but i want to thank the three of you so much for joining us, and all of you out there who asked excellent questions, many of which we did not get a chance to answer. I apologize. But thank you so much for coming. Thank you all. American history tv is on social media. Follow us cspanhistory. Up next on lectures in history, university of North Carolina and chapel hill Professor Joseph glatthaar teaches a class on the 1898 spanishamerican war. He describes the military engagements in cuba and the philippines, but also outlines the imperialist aims. The acquisition of guam and puerto rico at the end of the war. This class was taught online due to the coronavirus pandemic. The university of North Carolina at chapel hill provided the video. Joseph i hope you