Possibly be given the truly crazy world in which we live at the moment. Im scott henkel, im the director of wyoming institute for Humanities Research and im so happy to welcome you to tonights think and drink. The topic of which is, pandemics in historical perspective. So, im so happy to introduce dr. Melissa morris, who is assistant professor of history and american studies here at the university of wyoming and a member of the Humanities Research institutes steering committee, who will be our moderator tonight and who will introduce our speakers. So, please, welcome. Thank you, scott. Thank you to all of our panelists for agreeing to participate, who i know are in later time zones. So, thank you for sticking with us. And, of course, to all of you out there tuning in in some form or another. Im just going to do a brief introduction to our panelists and then ill let them each talk for a couple of minutes more about how their work intersects with our theme tonight. First we have Michael Christopher low, who is an assistants professor of history at iowa state university. He is the author of imperial mecca in the indian ocean due out from Columbia University press in september. Exciting. Next we have Elise Mitchell who is a ph. D. Candidate in history at New York University and her work focuses on slavery and medicine from about 1500 to 1800. She is the author of a recent piece on, perhaps, what earlier pandemics can teach us about our Current Crisis that appeared in the atlantic magazine. Third up we have jacob steerewilliams, 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 in the 19th century. And hes also an editor of the journal of the journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences. So, i will hand it over to them to offer kind of a brief perhaps a little bit more of an overview of their work and how it intersects with our theme here tonight. And we can just go in the order that i introduced you, i suppose, if that works. Thank you for having us. So, my work centers around cholera and plague in the early 18th and 19th century. I have focused on primarily mecca, looking at the ways in which the ecological fallout of British Colonialism impacted the Ottoman Empire and spilled over and became a truly global issue in the late 19th century. Also my work has sort of spun off in a couple of Different Directions but most notably ive written some about desalniization technology which started to be used one of the solutions to this problem to today in Arabian Peninsula, salinated water is the wellspring of water of life in the peninsula. Thats sort of the second project that sprang out of this initial pandemic work that i was doing. Thank you so much for having us. So, yeah, my work focuses most broadly on the intersections of slavery and the slave trade and medicine in the early modern americas, but my current project focuses on smallpox and slavery, specifically enslaved african experiences of different Public Health interventions geared towards curtailing smallpox during slave trades and quarantines and also their experiences with smallpox inoculation with indigenous western practices and west africa and in different parts of the caribbean. Because the slave trade took enslaved people to a variety of locations to different parts of america and spread people across different ethnic backgrounds, i look across british, french, spanish, portuguese territories to sort of put together what the implications of different Public Health interventions and the implications of different smallpox epidemics were in the period before 1800, so before the invention and promise ul gags of the smallpox vaccine. So, ive spent probably about a decade researching the history of typhoid fever and the rise of epidemiology in victorian britain. Typhoid has been this really interesting disease for me to look at because its often been seen alongside cholera in the rise of Public Health and municipal sanitation. Whats so interesting in my research that i found about typhoid is the role of British Colonialism in the process. So, in the earlier period of the midvictorian era, typhoid was almost seen as inherently a british disease, Indigenous People of india and africa couldnt get. By the end of the 19th century it was seen as a disease for which colonialism brought across the world. So, it was seen as a global disease visavis these larger kind of colonial processes. So, i have a book on typhoid a little later than chriss, coming out in november with the university of rochester, and the second book im working on is on bubonic plague in late 19th, early 20th century in british colonies and south africa. A lot of great intersections here between the three of us. Yeah, i agree. So, a couple of you have kind of started to touch upon this, but just as a broad opening question, i thought id ask, you know, what parallels do you see between your own time period, of course being careful historians as we all are, but between your own time period you stud and maybe some things that are happening today. Whoever wants to go first. Ill jump in and take a stap at that one. One of the things that has struck me in the last few weeks is really the parallel about testing and for cholera, really cholera leaps onto the global stage. When you start to get outbreaks moving from the endemic sink of the ganges delta in the 1820s and 18 30z but certainly by the 1860s cholera is on the global radar and is impacting not only india, the middle east, europe, but also making its way all the way to north america. One of the things that i think is interesting is really from these early periods, 1830s through the 1880s and 90s is that everyone was flying blind. No one understand the back tearology, no one understood the entology, really how cholera works and spreads. And so for the better part of three decades in the sort of middle part of my work, you have a British Empire that object stantly denies that india is the source of cholera. And you have a sort of beleaguered ottoma in. Empire following the developments of people like robert cook and pasture. And yet theyre being blamed by the British Empire saying that, you know, mecca is this font of cholera and not india. So, this blame game internationally and lack of clarity about how the disease works is strikingly similar to me. Yeah, ill jump in next. In a similar way the flying blind aspect is pretty similar to some of the early outbreaks that i study. Around 500 years ago the americas saw their first documented smallpox outbreak. In the 1590, early 1520s and at that time smallpox was a novel virus, similar to how the coronavirus is a novel virus globally. So native americans had a variety of different medical practices that might have been helpful for the disease but they didnt have experience with that disease specifically prior to this. So, i think the sort of sense of being in uncharted territory and not having a vaccine or any kind of medical or having to sort of figure out along the way the medical practices that would be most effective is one similarity, another one thats heart breaking but effective is the demographics of whos being affected by this disease. The demographics that black people dying at a much higher rate and being affected and the devastating impact on native American Communities in the u. S. As well as abroad. Is very, very, very similar to the outbreaks that i study. That has everything to do with the way that labor is performed in america, the way that the kind of socioeconomic disparities we have as well as the underresourcing of communities that put them at further risk for contracting this disease. And the fact that there was not a conscious effort early on to make any kind of Public Health interventions that were directed at preserving the lives of native and black people in the u. S. And then now and like looking at that in the past where a lot of times black and native people were paying the cost of mitigation in different Colonial Health strategies, theres definitely a lineage there worth acknowledging. I would say those are probably the two greatest similarities ive seen. Thank you both so much. Just to dovetail with how my work intersects with a couple of the themes we just heard from. One, i think this question that chris brought up about internationalism is super interesting and how it parallels to others. Theres this interesting phenomenon that happens from 1851 with the rise of these International Sanitary conferences of european nations, plus turkey, coming together starting in 1851 in paris trying to think about the spread of cholera, the spread of yellow fever and the spread of plague and think about measures of quarantine and diplomacy and global politics. And whats so fascinating, if you look at those International Sanitary conferences is, one, how much uncertainty there is, like chris mentioned, and, two, that even when they vote on issues and try to come up with global regulations, once those diplomats and the doctors come back to their home countries, they dont often get followed or put in place anyway. So theres this super interesting, i think, acknowledgment from the mid19th century that internationalism as a kind of response to pandemics is something that is a positive sort of public good, but then putting in the practice is constrained from that period, right . Its constrained by local politics. Its constrained by issues of race and labor certainly. So thats sort of definitely one theme that i see resonate in my work, too. This other one that elise brings up about labor and the uneven ways in which antipandemic practices get spread out unevenly, particularly via a race. Thats something thats the focus of my current project on bubonic plague in south africa and india. If you look at the antiplague practices in those colonial locations, what you see is Indigenous Peoples in india and africa being blamed especially for the spread of plague, harbingers of plague, and also doing the antiplague work, like the everyday work of using disinfectants, of tearing down houses, of using dangerous chemic chemicals. I think you seeing that being parallel today, too, of in spite of the fact that we have these stay in shelter in place quarantine measures, theres real on the ground labor happening right now, too, and thats affecting people disproportionately in this country and around the world. I want to pick off pick up on this note of how diseases are fought or, you know, methods effective or otherwise at combating disease that you introduced with this sort of 1851 on meeting. What other ideas are circulating in your projects about how to fight disease or where diseases come from. One of the things that emerges in my work is, again, sort of jacob mentions internationalism. One of the big themes in my work is the Ottoman Empire takes nationalism quite seriously. They want to be viewed as a sort of power player in europe and be taken seriously and have their sovereignty protected under international law. So, they really sort of try to play the game of internationalism. Whereas the british are sort of the big bad in this story. And sort of a weak internationalism cant restrain british free trade, which refuses to be caught in any International Legal agreements, which force them to quarantine or force them to restrict Labor Mobility or pilgrimage mobility in my case. And this becomes a real stumbling block for effective controls. They were certainly times when it would have been appropriate to restrict mobility, whether it be european traders, muslim pilgrims or labor migrants, but either for free trade or for fear of backlash among their subjects, they often refuse to do so. Thats such a tough question for an early modernist to unpack because people had very different ideas about what diseases were and what their significance was in the period i study than we do now. So, for smallpox, i guess the most question i get asked is whether the disease was racialized. For the period i study it wasnt, europeans and africans as well as native people all recognize this was a disease that almost anyone could contract, especially if they didnt have it before, from pretty early on. Of course, folks from different cultural backgrounds ascribe different meanings to it. Sometimes they had spiritual or religious connotations to it or geopolitical connotations. Africans in west africa as well as in the americas, many of them practice smallpox inoculation or rudimentary vaccine that was taking pus from one persons pustule, usually performed on children. And for europeans, western europeans were not really familiar with any form of imyou mization practices until the early 18th century. It was a big part of eastern medicine in east asia as well as turkey, much of the near east, much of the middle east. In the early 18th century, it sort of got an uneven adoption. Folks in the americas were a little bit more willing to experiment with it and adopt it quickly in the early 18th century, in large part because of their contact with west africans and their familiarity with the practice. But western europeans didnt really sanction the practice until the mid18th century. And then it was in use much more. Prior to that they tended to rely on smallpox quarantines, which is similar to the social distancing practices that were doing now, still leave leave anyone whos infected in a very vulnerable position and also doesnt really do anything to prevent the disease from spreading, if it already is. And so, i mean, one of the a big part of my work is focusing on maritime quarantines and quarantining of enslaved africans and slave trade throughout different coastal ports and the americas. I guess that summarizes to answer the question. Thats really interesting, too, elise, that you talk about the ways in which race impacted discussions about slavery and smallpox, but at the same time, theres yellow fever happening here, too, which is patholo pathologyized so thats super interesting to bring up. If i try to think through whats happening in the late 19th century with bubonic plague, for example, in india and south africa and you think about some of these questions of differential blame, xenophobe yeah and labor, im going to try to share a screen, an image here to see if that looks like its disabled. That may not work. One of the things thats so fascinating to me. I found this photograph from 1898 that is depicts its from a kamari dipping station in karachi, and it was this port city central to the British Empire in this period. Its a photograph that shows human dipping, british plague officials dipping indigenous indians in a vat of car bolic acid. Whats to interesting to me about this example that i explore that was happening, both in india and in south africa in this time, its just really harrowing photograph. Its the only photograph that i found that existed of human dipping in this dangerous vat of carbolic acid, which was known to burn the skin. So theres this moment where were in the middle of a pandemic in the late 19th century. Bubonic plague is sweeping across the globe. Its disrupting daily life and trade and everything in between. And theres also this new bacteria knowledge. Theres knowledge about the bacillus and knowledge about the rat, flea, human zoonotic connection and yet the response is to blame africans for bringing in the disease. I think like if you think about some of the visuals that are happening here, too, i think that helps to sort of nuance and contextualize the labor practices and the differential immunity questions, as elise says, are super longstanding in this period. Thanks, thats yeah. Sorry. I mean, its interesting to piggyback on the stratification issue with plague, and certainly cholera and plague were running concurrently during this period, but all of these International Sanitary conferences they tended to enshrine European Mobility and continue to protect trade and european troop movements and tended to demonize labor migrants from places like china and india or muslim and hindu pilgrims coming from the india or indian ocean. This is one of the worries i have about this idea of immunity passports is we end up not really with something that covers or really thinks carefully about immunity but, instead, is just another way to practice these racial inequalities. Yeah, if i can just jump in really quick, i think that pointing out these are ways that sort of enshrine European Mobility is really important because part of the reason why european colonial officials were creating different kinds of maritime quarantine policies is so the slave trade could continue. The perfect solution to stopping smallpox outbreaks on slave ships was to stop enslaving people but thats not what anybody was interested in at the time. So, you know, sort of developing these different kinds of Public Health policies that allow for things to continue along a certain, quote unquote, normal in the way people are kind of trying to figure out how we can get to a normal before that we realize now, at least that the pandemic that our current pandemic has laid bare is not necessarily thats sustainable or safe for everyone in the first place. Yeah. Im glad this question of immunity came up because its obviously something people are talking about so much now. Like, how do you prove immunity . Does having the disease even confirm immunity . Its not, perhaps, unsurprising those were concerns in previous eras as well. Another thing i wanted to ask you all about was kind of the broader effects that pandemics have had. Elise, in your piece that you published recently, you talk a lot about how, you know, the pandemic is one thing, but its like some of the other knockon effects of pandemics that are actually more detrimental to societies and certainly in our own time theres a question of, you know, what are the economic effects or what are the other effects. So, i was wondering if you could just speak to that in your own era. Okay. I can jump sorry. Michael, if you wanted to go. Okay. Ill jump in. In the piece i talk about how for the smallpox outbreaks i study, if they spiral into epidemics, oftentimes they were preceded by famine because, you know, so many of the people who are part of the laboring classes, whether they were enslaved or other bound laborers were often the ones who were most impacted. They were either unable to work or too many people perished for them to work. Many times densely Populated Areas that were devastated by outbreaks, theres several examples ive read where they say where like the colonial officials report that some households were left without a living soul. Massive depopulation and then an end to different aspects of social and cultural and Spiritual Life was often a big thing. Since im working in the early modern period and focus a lot on iberian and french colonization, you know, the Catholic Church is a big part of that. A lot of times people were limiting the end of religious ceremonies, the fact that people died or were buried without having access to last rights and things like that. And they were also incredibly disruptive to trade and commerce. And all manner of trade and commerce. In some cases, the small island territories i studied or remote areas were pretty dependent on getting supplies from locations and those supply chains would get cut off. That would mean people had to go without different foodstuffs or goods for a long period of time. I would say those are probably some of the biggest impacts, in addition to the variety of emotional things that come along with the massive loss. Just to sort of try and think about pandemics as sort of swirl of comorbidities. A lot of what i think about for ottoman arabia, mecca empire, larger muslim world, British India is, again, a swirl of conditions that are conducive to not just cholera outbreaks, plague, malaria, famine, of course, and that this sort of synergy between these things sort of helps to further the possibility of further outbreaks. The other thing i would say is sort of piggybacking on some of the blaming games that are afoot at the moment and sort of playing with statistics, one example that i like to use is the british like to play down cholera deaths and they would often record cholera deaths as famine diarrhea. So, taking one crisis and blaming it so that it didnt draw sort of larger International Attention to the bigger problem. But we do, we see these sort of ways in which theres a sort of cascade of consequences. Water safety, water security in the Arabian Peninsula, tighter border controls, new experimentations with passport controls, which, of course, were racialized as well. We get some of this infrastructures of travel regulation mobility that we tend to, i think as americans, think of, you know, you have your passport and it provides you freedom to go where you want. Point of fact, usually passports were restricted measures. I think its important for us to recognize their other begins. Thats right. Thats a really important work that emerges out of my research, too, with plague and india and in south africa. And i think, you know, its how i see this in particular with my two projects on typhoid and on bubonic plague, on the one hand the story of typhoid in the second half of the 19th century is the rise of global epidemiology of a kind of commitment on the part of the governments to hire people to study epidemics full time, right . And i think long historyial arc we can see that as an important kind of moniker, right . At the same time i think how those Public Health practices were happening on the ground, particularly in colonial locations in the 19th century was very uneven. While we might say the rise of global epidemiology is a positive good for society, and i think thats certainly something we should acknowledge. On the other hand, you know, what happens in the case of capetown, for example. I was in capetown last summer. What i found there was 200 huge archival boxes that hadnt been opened since 1910. They were all plague files. And whats to interesting is british officials when plague starts hitting capetown, they literally clear with Police Officers and soldiers, european, they clear capetown completely. They force the Indigenous People that were living there out of the city. And they totally remake that urb urban landscape. So theres chris, you can speak to this, too, and so can you, elise. Theres this fear of Indigenous People have in the 18th and 19th centuries and also this fear of indigenous landscapes and environments. I think this project was one of racializing disease and also of thinking about landscapes in new ways. I think theres certainly this interesting mix between what Public Health is doing on the what Public Health is doing in idealogically speaking and what its doing on the ground. I mean, this is an interesting thing that you bring up, this sort of idea of an environmental orientalalism. One of the things that comes out in my work is this sort of modernizing state ensemble starts to view the Arabian Peninsula and frontiers as a defective environment, right . Theres something about the bedonin sechlt e, the pilgrims and the desert environment that is dangerous and needs to be rectified. You get more emphasis on infrastructural projects for water and sanitation, et cetera, and but you do, theres a sort of streak of a sort of european orientalism that even the ottomans start to imbibe as well. I think the point about landscapes is really important. In the caribbean, you know, you have from very early on people talking about this is diseaseridden landscape, this place where it promotes unhealth and all of these things, but smallpox never gets wrapped up in those same discourses because europeans from pretty early on recognize that it was the disease that happened because of humantohuman contact, that was common in cold climates. Its sort of an outlier from diseases like yellow fever and malaria in that way. And because of the fact that there were so many horrible outbreaks in europe as well, often contemporaneously effecting the crib yeah as well as coast africa and west central africa, it doesnt quite get it doesnt quite ever get racialized in the same way or attributed to a specific group. Like from pretty early on in the 17th century, they recognized this was a disease that was fomented by keeping people in close quarters, keeping people in sanitary conditions regardless of what climate or environment they were in. Thanks for all of that. And we have some amazing questions from our audience, so ill turn to those. We have different questions that touch upon the issue of Civil Liberties versus, perhaps or not, Public Health. So, we have a question from mary berman who asks about, was that a factor in past pandemics, the sort of clash between people advocating for Civil Liberties and those focused on Public Health . Theres 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. Ill kind of lump those together and ask if you see that in your own work. Ill try and tackle this question maybe a little bit indirectly. Just thinking about the difference between metropolitan societies in europe and this sort of 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 great rebellion in 185758 in india. One of the sort of key ideas that is enshrined is that missionary activity would be frowned upon and that hindus and muslims and other religious groups in india would be given religious freedom. However narrowly defined. So this this idea made it very difficult to restrict mobility that had anything to do with religion. In my case, writing about the pilgrimage to mecca. The colonial state was terrified to do anything that would be seen by the sort of Muslim Population as a sort of reneging on this basic agreement. And so this was sort of a basic, if you will, Civil Liberties question of the day. It really hamstrung the state from acting effectively to control pandemic. Yeah. Civil liberties, i mean, when youre talking about enslaved people, like liberty isnt really something thats much of a factor in that instance. Enslaved people because of the fact they were enslaved were already vulnerable to skrikt mobility, to all manner of different forms of violence as well. Of course, because thats the cornerstone of slavery. But in 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. Its something that is structurally constructed here and legally constructed here. For the period that i study, and ill focus on free people because thats its a bit easier to answer that question because with enslaved people its just not on the table. For folks who were in west africa, they had pretty comprehensive Public Health responses to smallpox outbreaks from the little bit of documentation that we have. And it included like mass in some cases it included mass inoculations of children and included mandatory quarantines or what we consider social distancing today. Or it included, like, having some type of proof, either a scar of inoculation or proof that you had been inoculated before you could go trading at great distances and things like that. And that had to deal with the fact that west africans understood diseases as being a sort of collective as having a more collective impact. If youre working within that framework already, then the kinds of privacy infringements we imagine Public Health having today dont necessarily apply because youre already prioritizing the collective. Whereas from pretty early on, especially in the enlightenment, western europeans especially had a pretty individualized concept of the body, individualized concept of diseases, where these are things affecting one person or a group of individuals. With that then you run into problems when you try to gel get people to adopt Something Like inoculation which might be dangerous for one person but on the whole might be beneficial for everyone. Or thins like different kinds of quarantines and other things where folks want to be the exception to the rule, which i think has to do with some of those fundamental differences and how folks were conceiving of diseases. In terms of quarantine, were they exploited . Absolutely. Unfortunately, some of the examples that i have include enslaved women becoming victims of Sexual Violence during quarantines. People would use quarantine sometimes or use fabricate smallpox epidemics as an excuse to throw rebellious enslaved people overboard during voyages. Some of the descriptions are terrifying. Of course, european enslaveries use these quarantines as opportunities to exploit enslaved people further. The impact of sort of sending folks to these different places over and over again for sometimes cyclical quarantines meant that it was incredibly disorienting for enslaved people, which whether wittingly or unwittingly definitely contributed to the kind of practices of mastery that folks were trying to ensubscribe in the caribbean in the early modern period. I see a lot of the same dovetailing in my research, too. On this issue that elise brings up, i too have seen when British Colonial officials in the cape colony, they remove indigenous africans to these camps. Theyre just these makeshifted camps where theyre forced to live. They are thrown out of their houses or more urban centers, their houses are destroyed, their belongings are destroyed, their bodies are physically disinfected with chemicals. Chemicals imported from europe. Also seen in the archival records there, numerous instances of british officials raping Indigenous Women in these camps and other sorts of infringements on the body of colonized people in very direct ways. The other issue i think whats interesting here is how much pushback there was, too, that i see in the records of requests by indigenous africans for the unequal treatment that they were being had through, you know, train travel, through their belongings being destroyed. Theres petition after petition after petition that show up in the plague records of south africa that show a kind of resistance to these measures as well. The other question that was asked here, you know, about Civil Liberties is really interesting with how it relates to my work on typhoid fever. Some of the audience will undoubtedly know, typhoid mary. Whats so fascinating to me after having studied typhoid for over a decade is how mary malone wasnt the first asymptomatic carrier of typhoid. She wasnt even the first recognized. Theres this long history stretching back to the mid19th century of Health Officials trying to locate what they called the index case for, you know, an individual who started an epidemic. And oftentimes that was people that were already socially maligned in europe. And european locations or in colonial locations. So, you know, theres this longer historical arc here of infringement on Civil Liberties happening, too. Ill go to another question from the audience. Maybe also bundling a couple of questions together so we get through all of these awesome questions. So, first we have a question from keith about it says in 1794 richard allen, two black philadelphians who helped lead their communitys response to the outbreak, wrote to try to combat ideas about black immunity which is something that came up with the coronavirus as well. And hes wondering if the panelists can comment on ideas about racialized immunities or vulnerability. And i also going to pair that with this question from donald otoole, an enslaved person who helped who was owned, i appreciate the air quotes, by Cotton Mather and who helped explain how deliberate infection with smallpox could help increase resistance to that and whether there was an awareness that that was that that knowledge came from an enslaved person. Personally im interested in indigenous. Ill let you three answer those two together. My sense from those questions that theyre about like how i guess with those examples how free and enslaved africans in america were responding to these outbreaks. I can start with the one around Cotton Mather first. Cotton mather called that enslaved man, he was a member of a group that the english called the koramati, people from the gold coast area, so whats now ghana. He wasnt the only person to tell people about there are documents that might even predate that one of free people of african descent and also people of european descent in places whats now haiti described being inoculated by west africans who were 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 im remembering correctly, barbados, but im not quite sure on that one, practicing smallpox inoculations in the americas. And then in terms of french and english, people who traveled to west africa, they cited people practicing smallpox inoculation. It was almost as common as circumcision in a lot of west africas. In places like senegal, along the gambia river, the sierra leone river. Now, we dont have early documentation saying people from west central africa, whats now angola, that area had this form of practice but they had other Public Health responses to smallpox. In terms of the differential immunity, europeans didnt believe that africans were more immune to smallpox, but they believed their bodies were somehow hardier and more resistant to diseases and, therefore, be subjected to harsh labor harsh smallpox experiments. Theres a few folks, john quire is one of the more notorious ones who did horrible experiments on enslaved africans with combating smallpox inoculations in the late 18th century. Because they had this belief that africans could somehow withstand harsher treatments or would experience a less severe form of the disease, they didnt give them the same quality of care that they provided europeans. And once europeans formally adopted smallpox inoculations, they were willing to inbeing o late enslaved off cans that were in physical conditions who they decided they wouldnt inbeing n inocculate. Enslaved people, there are a number of examples. Sasha turner from reproductive medicine in jamaica has a good book where she talks about instances where enslaved mothers tried to withhold their children from being inoculated because they were too young. Then you have examples of people of african descent in places like venezuela where they continue to practice smallpox inoculation despite the Spanish Colonial governments attempts to regulate the practice in the 1770s. You have a few european observers who say we have seen ino inoculation practice without the presence of a physician. Folks were definitely trying to do something to mitigate the disease. Once you get into the 19th century because theres a much more dense documentary record and far more free people of african descent, you have a lot more examples of people, especially folks who were free in northern states writing to advocate for better treatment of enslaved africans in the south and access to the smallpox vaccine once that came out as well, but access under conditions that would actually promote health not under conditions that might cause them to die or have an adverse reaction to it. Does anyone else i can jump in here too, a little bit. I think one of the things thats interest, if you take this long view of this from this period that elise is talking about in the 18th and early 19th century, i think theres this real fear looking back on that and using that historical knowledge today and trying to understand it and just like black boxing that, pigeon holing that into this older era where there wasnt modern scientific understand of disease in the body. But if you speed it up into the late 19th, early 20th century where theres this new knowledge of microorganizisms role in spreading disease as a causative organism, theres still in some ways theres a redoubling of ideas of differential immunity. Theres in spite of new back tearology and epidemiology, these racialist theories persist and in some ways they become even stronger. So, you know, Health Officials in the early 20th century can use tests to determine who has a disease or who doesnt have a disease of bacteria origin at least, but at the same time theyre still thinking about racialized ideas about who is more susceptible or who is spreading the disease. I think this is interesting what jacob brings up, this idea that we cant compare the present with, say, the early 19th century or late 19th century. In many respects, the racial ideologies rear their heads in these moments, right . My colleague from columbia, now at villanova has written some wonderful things in the popular press recently about a sort of fear of east asians, ways in which the west refuse to essentially look at the examples that were put forward by, perhaps, chinas a little problematic, but especially south korea, japan, singapore, and refuse to really follow the examples of social distancing and particularly mask wearing early on in the pandemic. And i think that this is certainly related to racial hierarchies, right . Thinking theres some sort of obedient asian population and these stereotypes get trotted out to say, no, the west will not follow these examples and theres nothing to learn here when, in fact, there certainly was and now were paying the price. Definitely. The next question comes from renee, who asks about diseases that pass from animals to people. And what basically the environmental aspect of the both covid19 and other zoonotic diseases and what your thoughts or whether this is a concern in your own time, but over the putting too much pressure on natural resources, depletion and how that leads to pandemic diseases, if any of you have thoughts on that. So, i teach a Global Environmental history course and zoonotics spillover is certainly a big part of what we do in that course. And, obviously, this semester has been sort of a case study for my students. Early on in the semester we talked about that as the pandemic was unfolding. And i think that my points were brought home maybe a little too well this semester. But i think its interesting. There are ways in which whether were talking about sars and the covid and bats or mers and camels. Animals have become scapegoats, right . Wet markets have become scapegoats, when, in fact, this is a sign and symptom of the great acceleration or the capitalist depending on your sort of ideological perspective and how you want to think about Climate Change and our current predicament, but this is fundamentally a human problem of sort of using cheap resources, cheap land, and encroaching on animal previously undisturbed animal habitats or industrializing our interactions with animals and sort of placing human populations, industrial, Animal Husbandry farming practices and 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. Thats really interesting. And just to jump off that a little bit, if you take this moment, at least with the story of in the history of bubonic plague when the rat was first acknowledged to play some kind of role in the spread of plague in the late 1890s, some of the early epidemiologic maps that British Colonial officials produced in south africa are not the sort of classic cholera spot maps of either cases of sick individuals or dead individuals. Theyre actually maps that are epidemiologic spot maps of rats. So, theyre mapping rats on the urban landscape to try to understand the spread of the animal, because, as you said, chris, it becomes this kind of scapegoat for for a whole set of, i think, issues. One of which is race, right, because those maps, they mapped literally onto that urban landscape but they also mapped onto the houses of Indigenous Peoples. And i think the field of human animal diseases, its history, is a burgeoning one right now and a one that i would highly encourage anybody thats interested in that at all to look at the sort of period in the late 19th, early 20th century when theres this flourishing of this new kind of zoonotic research happening from people trained in back tearology thats really under study. Yeah. This ones a tough one for me to answer from my own research, but i think like thank you for both of your answers, michael and jay, because theyre helpful for me as im thinking about this. Like the first vaccine, its called a vaccine because it comes from cowpox, which is not the same as smallpox but can produce a temporary immunity to smallpox. Thats something that was pretty familiar to different Rural Communities who had close interactions with cows, but the idea around the reason why it become effective is because it sort of was a way to control the spread of the disease and control immunity. I think the nature of humans contact with animals really shapes the way that those kind of diseases can become something thats either harmful or helpful for a community. And i think that kind of gets back to the question that jacob just touched on around the different social inequities and the way race intersects with this in a context where people are actually, like, you know, where physicians and scientists are really invested and a Wider Society is really invested and protecting folks as they come into contact with these diseases. Those diseases can lead to the production of knowledge that might produce a cure for something or produce some type of remedy. But in a context where folks are not investing in those things either because they cant or because for political or social reasons theyre choosing not to, then you end up with the situation where you might have it spiral out into a pandemic. And i do also believe i think we have a think and drink in the works that will also talk more about this specifically. So, stay tuned. This is a question from karenna ike, which i love. What is the best way or other all the ways that we as historians and also humanists generally can inform policies about Public Health . Kind of a tall order, but if you want to just share your thoughts. I mean, i actually try to think about this a lot. Both in a pandemic moment like this and, you know, ive written a handful of opeds for our newspaper in charleston, and conte contextualize and i had a piece that aired on cnn last week. And i think one of the things that historians and humanists more broadly can do is try to use our expertise to sort of complicate some of the big narratives. The narratives of scientific progress, the narratives of we have this progress, right, theres this idea out there, i think, in the Broader Society that, you know, this sort of work like this in the past and it can work like this now that theres this unsolvable mystery, right . Diseases often get likened to these mystery stories to where theres this problem. Its the right knowhow to get fixed and if we just have the right scientific breakthrough, we can solve this problem. And i think, you know, any sort of story of the history of disease is abundantly clear that it hasnt worked that way in the past. And then it probably wont work that way now. So i think the more we can complicate those heroic narratives, the more we can help people to try to navigate, well, what are the gray areas and more complicated areas and the areas of inequality . I think one of the things thats been so interesting for me as an historian of epidemic disease is how much play the spanish flu has gotten in the media lately as way to try to understand the moment were in now. I totally get it. It was the last big american pandemic to happen and it this really important Global Pandemic to happen across the world. And i think, like, you know, having cities all across america quarantined in 1918 and some in early 1919 provides that kind of salient lesson for us. But i think theres been a way in which that story has been reduced to a kind of not very complicated story. And a kind of heroic story that, you know, the kind of things that we have been talking about in the last hour, i think, are much more difficult to try to throw into how they eisley map onto our experience right now with covid. Taking away, that makes them more valuable. Id like to jump in here and, again, sort of make a pitch for environmental history. Our current moment is quite different. And i think jacob brings up a good point, right . These sort of onetoone comparisons. Ive seen lots of stories in popular media about the spanish flu or even cholera, but were living in a quite different moment, right . Certainly different moment, rig . Certainly the 19th century, we could think of it a globalization 1. 0 with telegraph connectivity. The level of connectivity, the speed of travel, the density of our population and all of these sort of accumulated degradations of the environment we collectively think of put us in a quite different spot than we were in the 19th century. And i think trying to sort of piece this together and think of this as a canary in the coal mine is one small data point in a much, much larger picture. And i think some of these 19th century comparisons dont really do service to this. I also like what jakd was saying, too, about the sort of he heroic, great man theory of medicine, right . Theres a dr. Fauci out there somewhere who will come up with a cure and save us all from this. When, in point of fact, these are generally slowrolling efforts. And were very likely to sort of see very similar things happening in the future. Ill butcher the quote but 19th century and then theres the 20th century with all of these wonderful advancements. Immortality, expanding life expectancy, et cetera. What happens after the 20th century, he was asked . Its not the 21st century. You go back to the 19th century. Those games we made in some respects, antibiotics, advances in bacteribacteriology, for exa. To only have a conversation about Public Health, i think, puts us at a big disservice. A second way i would like to address this question about how we can interject ourselves into sort of the Public Discourse is to really think about calling balls and strikes. So my work on the pilgrimage to mecca, im seeing lots of stories about the impending, you know, hodge season is coming up in late july, early august. Pilgrims have been banned from making go to mecca and medicina and sai arabia has put strict travels already. One thing that happened months ago is that the saudis started to float kind of a trial balloon that they would ultimately have to postpone or cancel the pilgrimage this year. And, with that, they sort of put together a package of precedents. Of previous times when, for political conflict, war or pandemic, the hodge had been disrupted. Interestingly, all of their examples come from 7th century up to invasion, nappeoleon. And theres no mention of the 19th century, no mention of the colonial interventions with cholera and plague and developments of Public Health and really a period in which colonial powers sort of reached into the Arabian Peninsula and regulated the pilgrimage to mecca, the most sacred event in the faith. We see it as sort of a reluctance to come to terms with that history in the sort of talking points that they put out. But interestingly, most western observers who have run opeds about the hodge being postponed or the potential have taken the saudi talking points generally without, i suspect without reading the original Arabic Communications and just digest ed all of that information without checking. Theres lots of errors that have been imported really into our sort of understanding of this in the last couple of weeks. Ive worked on a piece to call balls and strikes of this, to adjudicate whats going on. Thats one role where we can have an impact, to come behind and correct the record when journalists make some of these mistakes. Yeah. So, i mean, i think that humanists definitely have a role to play in this period across the board. And i want to he canno the comments around its never a onetoone comparison. Never more is that true than the era i studied about when people are look at ideas of how medicine and disease work. One of the things that you can do with looking with sort of taking a long view is thinking about some different social conditions that produce epidemics, that enable epidemics to spread. So like for my research i gathered a database of small pox outbreaks to around 1803 and the commonalities there, many of them occurred on slave ships. Many occurred in situations where, say, people were in densely Populated Areas. So, you know, when we heard that covid was spreading my first concerns were about homeless conversations, people in urban areas, prisons. While thats not the same thing as a slave ship or at a quarantine location, that forced confinement is still in our world today. And given that were currently living through a pandemic, thinking about how we may 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 said, im seeing cases where enslaved people are dying at two, three times the rate of other groups. Native people are dying at tremendous rates because they cant get access to their normal practice, to their different forms of medicine or perform the kinds of healing traditions that they would because of the disruptions that colonialism caused. In thinking about that in our time period as we sort of continue to push people to perform essential labor without adequate protections and other thing things like that, you know, those parallels are worth exploring and worth consideration and i think humanists have a lot to lend to that conversation. But i also think we dont necessarily have to look at past pandemics or epidemics in ways to understand the way this one might come to bear on our lives. We still have an ongoing hiv pandemic around the world. The numbers are looking pretty bad for communities of color in many western countries. And i think the scholars who do work on that actually have a lot to lend in terms of these questions on infringements on Civil Liberties, Contact Tracing and what that does in terms of the Racial Disparities and the way that, you know, Public Health issues intersect with these other issues of labor exploitation, incarceration, of our housing crisis and things like that. And i think that so as much as im delighted that youre talking to us and people want to hear from me about how things are affected, the people who do work on hiv and disability scholars, too. As i try to trace individual peoples experiences with smallpox, a lot of them end up blind or with physical ailments. Covid can cause people to have strokes or other forms of disabilities if youve been extubated you have a long road to recovery after that. You may never fully recovery from that. As this continues to spread, thinking about how, moving forward, our policies can address those things and can do a better job of caring for folks that have different forms of disabilities and provide better accommodations might be something that it certainly is something that humanists could contribute to moving forward. I want to thank all of you for lending your voi voices to important conversation. But to your point, there are many other people that we should be listening to in this time. And thats certainly something that our organization hopes to promote. Im going to end our time together because were at an hour a little over. 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. Thank you. Weeknight this is month, were featuring American History tv programs as a preview of whats available every weekend on cspan3. In the 2000 president ial election, Texas Governor george w. Bush defeated Vice President al gore in one of the most highly contested races in u. S. History. The outcome was not decideed until five weeks after voters went to the polls when the u. S. Supreme court stopped a florida recount. This ultimately awarded the states votes and the president toy governor bush. We begin with al gores concession speech followed by george bushs victory remarks later that same evening. Watch later tonight at 8 00 p. M. Eastern and enjoy American History tv every weekend on cspan3. Every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern on American History tv on cspan3, go inside a Different College classroom and hear about topics ranging from the american revolution, civil rights and u. S. President s to 9 11. Thanks for your patience and for logging in to class. With most College Campuses closed due to the impact of the coronavirus, watch professors transfer teaching to engage with their students. Gorbachev did most of the work to change the soviet union, but reagan met him halfway. Reagan encouraged him. Reagan supported him. Freedom of the press, which well get to later, i should just mention, madison originally called it freedom of the use of the press. It is, indeed, freedom to print things and publish things. Its not a freedom for what we refer to institutionally as the press. Lectures in history on American History tv on cspan3 every saturday at 8 00 p. M. Eastern. Lectures in history is also available as a podcast. Find it where you listen to podcasts. The 1918 flu pandemic altered American Life in ways familiar to those living through the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Christopher nichols directs Oregon State University for the center humanities. Since the pandemic has begun, since, lets say for our purposes, since we shut down in march, the thing thats been driving our analysis here as historian
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