The History Book Club discussion

That is very interesting Andre - thank you

Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750

by Lester K. Little (no photo)

Synopsis

Plague was a key factor in the waning of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Eight centuries before the Black Death, a pandemic of plague engulfed the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea and eventually extended as far east as Persia and as far north as the British Isles. Its persisted sporadically from 541 to 750, the same period that witnessed the distinctive shaping of the Byzantine Empire, a new prominence of the Roman papacy and of monasticism, the beginnings of Islam and the meteoric expansion of the Arabic Empire, the ascent of the Carolingian dynasty in Frankish Gaul and, not coincidentally, the beginnings of a positive work ethic in the Latin West. In this volume, the first on the subject, twelve scholars from a variety of disciplines history, archaeology, epidemiology, and molecular biology have produced a comprehensive account of the pandemic's origins, spread, and mortality, as well as its economic, social, political, and religious effects. The historians examine written sources in a range of languages, including Arabic, Syriac, Greek, Latin, and Old Irish. Archaeologists analyze burial pits, abandoned villages, and aborted building projects. The epidemiologists use the written sources to track the disease s means and speed of transmission, the mix of vulnerability and resistance it encountered, and the patterns of reappearence over time. Finally, molecular biologists, newcomers to this kind of investigation, have become pioneers of paleopathology, seeking ways to identity pathogens in human remains from the remote past."

Just started reading a book on the Black Death yesterday. Fascinating info. The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly(no photo).

I read that book a couple of years ago and it was fascinating......and chilling!!!

BTW,if the book you cite has a cover photo, you do not need a link:

by John Kelly (no photo)

The Pox And The Covenant: Mather, Franklin, And The Epidemic That Changed America's Destiny

by Tony Williams (no photo)

Synopsis:

For one hundred years, God had held to his promise, and the colonists had as well. When the first Puritans sailed into Massachusetts in the seventeenth century, weak from the ocean journey, they formed a covenant with each other and with God to establish a city on a hill-a commitment to live uncorrupted lives together or all suffer divine wrath for their collective sin. But now, a century later, the arrival of one doomed ship would put this covenant to its greatest test. On April 22, 1721, the HMS Seahorse arrived in Boston from the West Indies, carrying goods, cargo, and, unbeknownst to its crew, a deadly virus. Soon, a smallpox epidemic had broken out in Boston, causing hundreds of deaths and panic across the city. The clergy, including the famed Cotton Mather, turned to their standard form of defense against disease: fasting and prayer. But a new theory was also being offered to the public by the scientific world: inoculation. The fierce debate over the right way to combat the tragedy would become a battle between faith and reason, one that would set the city aflame with rage and riot.

The Pox and the Covenant is a story of well known figures such as Cotton Mather, James Franklin, and a young Benjamin Franklin struggling to fight for their cause among death and debate-although not always for the side one would expect. In the end, the incredible results of the epidemic and battle would reshape the colonists' view of their destiny, setting for America a new course, a new covenant, and the first drumbeats of revolution.

An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793

by Jim Murphy

Synopsis:

1793, Philadelphia. The nation's capital and the largest city in North America is devastated by an apparently incurable disease, cause unknown . . .

Jim Murphy describes the illness known as yellow fever and the toll it took on the city's residents, relating the epidemic to the major social and political events of the day and to 18th-century medical beliefs and practices. Drawing on first-hand accounts, Murphy spotlights the heroic role of Philadelphia's free blacks in combating the disease, and the Constitutional crisis that President Washington faced when he was forced to leave the city--and all his papers--while escaping the deadly contagion. The search for the fever's causes and cure, not found for more than a century afterward, provides a suspenseful counterpoint to this riveting true story of a city under siege.

Plague Among the Magnolias: The 1878 Yellow Fever Epidemic in Mississippi

by Deanne Stephens Nuwer (no photo)

Synopsis:

Deanne Stephens Nuwer explores the social, political, racial, and economic consequences of the 1878 yellow fever epidemic in Mississippi. A mild winter, a long spring, and a torrid summer produced conditions favoring the Aedes aegypti and spread of fever. In late July New Orleans newspapers reported the epidemic and upriver officials established checkpoints, but efforts at quarantine came too late. Yellow fever was developing by late July, and in August deaths were reported. With a fresh memory of an 1873 epidemic, thousands fled, some carrying the disease with them. The fever raged until mid-October, killing many: in Mississippi 28 percent of yellow fever victims died. Thought to be immune to the disease, blacks also contracted the fever in large numbers, although only 7 percent died. There is no consensus explaining the disparity, although it is possible that exposure to yellow fever in Africa provided blacks with inherited resistance.

Those fleeing the plague encountered quarantines throughout the South. Some were successful in keeping the disease from spreading, but most efforts failed. These hit hardest were towns along the railroads leading from the river, many of which experienced staggering losses.

Yellow fever’s impact, however, was not all negative. Many communities began sanitation reforms, and yellow fever did not again strike in epidemic proportions. Sewer systems and better water supply did wonders for public health in preventing cholera, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases. Mississippi also undertook an infrastructure leading to acceptance of national health care efforts: not an easy step for a militantly states' rights and racially reactionary society.

An upcoming book:
Release date: March 8, 2016

The Fever of 1721: The Epidemic that Revolutionized Medicine and American Politics

by Stephen Coss (no photo)

Synopsis:

More than fifty years before the American Revolution, Boston was in revolt against the tyrannies of the Crown, Puritan Authority, and Superstition. This is the story of a fateful year that prefigured the events of 1776.

In The Fever of 1721, Stephen Coss brings to life an amazing cast of characters in a year that changed the course of medical history, American journalism, and colonial revolution, including Cotton Mather, the great Puritan preacher, son of the president of Harvard College; Zabdiel Boylston, a doctor whose name is on one of Boston’s grand avenues; James and his younger brother Benjamin Franklin; and Elisha Cooke and his protégé Samuel Adams.

During the worst smallpox epidemic in Boston history Mather convinced Doctor Boylston to try a procedure that he believed would prevent death—by making an incision in the arm of a healthy person and implanting it with smallpox. “Inoculation” led to vaccination, one of the most profound medical discoveries in history. Public outrage forced Boylston into hiding, and Mather’s house was firebombed.

A political fever also raged. Elisha Cooke was challenging the Crown for control of the colony and finally forced Royal Governor Samuel Shute to flee Massachusetts. Samuel Adams and the Patriots would build on this to resist the British in the run-up to the American Revolution. And a bold young printer James Franklin (who was on the wrong side of the controversy on inoculation), launched America’s first independent newspaper and landed in jail. His teenage brother and apprentice, Benjamin Franklin, however, learned his trade in James’s shop and became a father of the Independence movement.

One by one, the atmosphere in Boston in 1721 simmered and ultimately boiled over, leading to the full drama of the American Revolution.

Thanks for those great additions, Jerome.

Poisoned: The True Story of the Deadly E. Coli Outbreak That Changed the Way Americans Eat

by Jeff Benedict

Synopsis:

In POISONED, Jeff Benedict delivers a jarringly candid narrative of the fast-moving disaster drawing on access to key documents and exclusive interviews with the real-life characters at the center of the drama - the families whose children were infected, the Jack in the Box executives forced to answer for the tragedy, the physicians and scientists who identified E. coli as the culprit, and the legal teams on both sides of the historic lawsuits that ensued. This is the story of the permanent transformation of our food supply chain, and the young maverick lawyer, Bill Marler, who staked his career on bringing the victims justice without compromise. Fast Food Nation meets A Civil Action in this riveting account of how we learned the hard way to truly watch what we eat.

The Black Death: A History From Beginning to End

by Henry Freeman (no photo)

Synopsis:

The Black Death▶
Sweeping across the known world with unchecked devastation, the Black Death claimed between 75 million and 200 million lives in four short years. In this engaging and well-researched book, the trajectory of the plague’s march west across Eurasia and the cause of the great pandemic is thoroughly explored.

Inside you will read about...
✓ What was the Black Death?
✓ A Short History of Pandemics
✓ Chronology & Trajectory
✓ Causes & Pathology
✓ Medieval Theories & Disease Control
✓ Black Death in Medieval Culture
✓ Consequences

Fascinating insights into the medieval mind’s perception of the disease and examinations of contemporary accounts give a complete picture of what the world’s most effective killer meant to medieval society in particular and humanity in general.

An upcoming book:
Release date: June 1, 2017

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World

by Laura Spinney (no photo)

Synopsis:

With a death toll of between 50 and 100 million people and a global reach, the Spanish flu of 1918–1920 was the greatest human disaster, not only of the twentieth century, but possibly in all of recorded history. And yet, in our popular conception it exists largely as a footnote to World War I.

In Pale Rider, Laura Spinney recounts the story of an overlooked pandemic, tracing it from Alaska to Brazil, from Persia to Spain, and from South Africa to Odessa. Telling the story from the point of view of those who lived through it, she shows how the pandemic was shaped by the interaction of a virus and the humans it encountered; and how this devastating natural experiment put both the ingenuity and the vulnerability of humans to the test.

Drawing on the latest research in history, virology, epidemiology, psychology, and economics, Laura Spinney narrates a catastrophe that changed humanity for decades to come, and continues to make itself felt today. In the process she demonstrates that the Spanish flu was as significant – if not more so – as two world wars in shaping the modern world; in disrupting, and often permanently altering, global politics, race relations, family structures, and thinking across medicine, religion and the arts.

Thank you Jerome

Pandemic

by Daniel Kalla

Synopsis:

Genesis of a Plague

Right now, in a remote corner of rural China, a farmer and his family are sharing their water supply with their livestock: chickens, ducks, pigs, sheep. They share the same waste-disposal system, too.

Bird viruses meet their human counterparts in the bloodstreams of the swine, where they mix and mutate before spreading back into the human population. And a new flu is born....

Dr. Noah Haldane, of the World Health Organization, knows that humanity is overdue for a new killer flu, like the great influenza pandemic of 1919 that killed more than twenty million people in less than four months. So when a mysterious new strain of flu is reported in the Gansu Province of mainland China, WHO immediately sends a team to investigate.

Haldane and his colleagues soon discover that the new disease, dubbed Acute Respiratory Collapse Syndrome, is far more deadly than SARS, killing one in four victims, regardless of their age or health. But even as WHO struggles to contain the outbreak, ARCS is already spreading to Hong Kong, London, and even America.

In an age when every single person in the world is connected by three commercial flights or fewer, a killer bug can travel much faster than the flu of 1919.

Especially when someone is spreading the virus on purpose...

An upcoming book:
Release date: July 19, 2022

The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe

by James Belich (no photo)

Synopsis:

In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering--it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labor, trade and technology and set the stage for Europe's global expansion.

James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history's greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe's dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand--and plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new "crew culture" of "disposable males" emerged to man the guns and galleons.

Setting the rise of Western Europe in global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.

Thank you Jerome for your add.

Another:
Release date: June 1, 2023

America's First Plague: The Deadly 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic That Crippled a Young Nation

by Robert Watson (no photo)

Synopsis:

As disease spread, the national government was slow to react. Soon, citizens donned protective masks and the authorities ordered quarantines. The streets emptied. Doubters questioned the science and disobeyed. The year: 1793. The place: young America from Baltimore to Boston but especially in Philadelphia, the nation’s largest city and seat of the federal government. For 3 long months yellow fever, carried by mosquitoes let loose from a ship from Africa, ravaged the eastern seaboard The federal government abandoned the city and scattered, leaving a dangerous leadership gap. By the end of the pandemic, ten percent of Philadelphians had died.

America's First Plague offers the definitive telling of this long-forgotten crisis, capturing the wave of fear that swept across the fledgling republic, and the numerous unintended but far-reaching consequences it would have on the development of the United States and the Atlantic slave trade. It is an intriguing tale of fear and human nature, a tragic lesson of how prejudice toward blacks was so easily stoked, an examination of the primitive state of medicine and vulnerability to disease in the eighteenth century, and a story of the struggle to govern in the face of crisis. With eerie similarities to the Covid pandemic, historian Robert P. Watson tells the story of a young nation teetering on the brink of chaos.

Another:
Release date: May 9, 2023

The Autumn Ghost: How the Battle Against a Polio Epidemic Revolutionized Modern Medical Care

by Hannah Wunsch (no photo)

Synopsis:

The appalling death toll of the COVID-19 pandemic would have been even higher were it not for mechanical ventilation and intensive care units. In The Autumn Ghost, Dr. Hannah Wunsch traces the origins of these two innovations back to a polio epidemic in 1952. Drawing together compelling testimony from doctors, nurses, medical students, and patients, Wunsch relates a gripping tale of an epidemic that changed the world.

In vivid, captivating chapters, Wunsch tells the dramatic true story of how insiders and iconoclasts came together in one overwhelmed hospital in Copenhagen to save the lives of many polio patients dying of respiratory failure. Their radical advances in care marked a turning point in the treatment of patients around the world--from the rise of life support and the creation of intensive care units to the evolution of rehabilitation medicine.

Moving, gripping, and informative, The Autumn Ghost will leave readers in awe of the courage of those who battled the polio epidemic, and grateful for the modern medical care they pioneered.

Considering the climate of today with the pandemic situation that we have endured - all of these new books have major relevance.

Another:
Release date: April 18, 2023

Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy (no photo)

Synopsis:

According to the accepted narrative of progress, humans have thrived thanks to their brains and brawn, collectively bending the arc of history. But in this revelatory book, Professor Jonathan Kennedy argues that the myth of human exceptionalism overstates the role that we play in social and political change. Instead, it is the humble microbe that wins wars and topples empires.

Drawing on the latest research in fields ranging from genetics and anthropology to archaeology and economics, Pathogenesis takes us through sixty thousand years of history, exploring eight major outbreaks of infectious disease that have made the modern world. Bacteria and viruses were protagonists in the demise of the Neanderthals, the growth of Islam, the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the devastation wrought by European colonialism, and the evolution of the United States from an imperial backwater to a global superpower. Even Christianity rose to prominence in the wake of a series of deadly pandemics that swept through the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries: Caring for the sick turned what was a tiny sect into one of the world's major religions.

By placing disease at the center of his wide-ranging history of humankind, Kennedy challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions about our collective past--and urges us to view this moment as another disease-driven inflection point that will change the course of history. Provocative and brimming with insight, Pathogenesis transforms our understanding of the human story.

Many thanks, Jerome for another great review!
Regards,
Andrea

Another:
Release date: September 15, 2023

Epidemics and the American Military: Five Times Disease Changed the Course of War

by Jack E. McCallum (no photo)

Synopsis:

In Epidemics and the American Military, Dr. Jack McCallum examines the major role the military has played propagating and controlling disease throughout this nation’s history. The U.S. armed forces recruit young people from isolated rural areas and densely populated cities, many of whom have been exposed to a smorgasbord of germs. After training and living in close contact with each other for months, soldiers are shipped across countries and continents and meet civilians and other armies. McCallum argues that if one set out to design a perfect world for an aggressive pathogen, it would be hard to do better than an army at war.

There are four ways to combat epidemic infectious diseases: quarantine, altering the ecology in which infections spread, medical treatment of infection, and immunization. Each has played a specific but often overlooked role in American wars. A case can be made that General George Washington saved the American Revolution when he mandated inoculation of the Continental Army with smallpox. The Union Army might very well have taken Richmond in 1862 had it not been for an epidemic of typhoid fever during the Peninsular Campaign. Yellow fever was a proximate cause of the American invasion of Cuba in 1898, and its control enabled a continued U.S. presence on the island and in the rest of the Caribbean. Had it not been for influenza, German Gen. Erich Ludendorff might well have succeeded in his offensive in the closing years of World War I. Before senior Army and Naval officers recognized the importance of anti-malarial prophylaxis and forced its acceptance by hesitant troops, the World War II Solomon and New Guinea campaigns were in danger of collapsing.

Thank you, Jerome. This book sounds very interesting.

Another:
Release date: September 19, 2023

Foreign Bodies: Pandemics, Vaccines, and the Health of Nations

by Simon Schama

Synopsis:

With the devastating effects of Covid-19 still rattling the foundations of our global civilization, we live in unprecedented times – or so we might think. But pandemics have been a constant presence throughout human history, as humans and disease have lived side by side for millennia. Over the centuries, our ability to react to these sweeping killers has evolved, most notably through the development of vaccines.

The story of disease eradication, however, has never been one of simply science – it is political, cultural, and deeply personal. Ranging across continents and centuries, acclaimed historian Simon Schama unpacks the stories of the often-unknown individuals whose pioneering work changed the face of modern healthcare. Questioning why the occurrence of pandemics appears to be accelerating at an alarming rate, Schama looks into our impact on the natural world, and how that in turn is affecting us, all while interrogating how geopolitics has had a devastating effect on global health.

Inspirational and tragic by turns, these are stories of success and failure, of collaboration and of persecution, as humanity struggles to work together in the face of one of our most deadly shared enemies: the pandemic.

Great Review, Jerome!. My TBR List is on a diet, so don’t tempt me…

Regards,
Andrea

Another:
Release date: January 23, 2024

Pox Romana: The Plague That Shook the Roman World

by Colin Elliott (no photo)

Synopsis:

In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, now known as the Antonine plague, may have been history’s first pandemic. Soon after its arrival, the Empire began its downward trajectory toward decline and fall. In Pox Romana, historian Colin Elliott offers a comprehensive, wide-ranging account of this pivotal moment in Roman history.

Did a single disease―its origins and diagnosis still a mystery―bring Rome to its knees? Carefully examining all the available evidence, Elliott shows that Rome’s problems were more insidious. Years before the pandemic, the thin veneer of Roman peace and prosperity had begun to crack: the economy was sluggish, the military found itself bogged down in the Balkans and the Middle East, food insecurity led to riots and mass migration, and persecution of Christians intensified. The pandemic exposed the crumbling foundations of a doomed Empire. Arguing that the disease was both cause and effect of Rome’s fall, Elliott describes the plague’s “preexisting conditions” (Rome’s multiple economic, social, and environmental susceptibilities); recounts the history of the outbreak itself through the experiences of physician, victim, and political operator; and explores postpandemic crises. The pandemic’s most transformative power, Elliott suggests, may have been its lingering presence as a threat both real and perceived.

Thank you, Jerome. Very timely indeed!

Another:
Release date: April 7, 2026

The Black Death: A Global History of Humanity's Most Devastating Pandemic

by Thomas Asbridge

Synopsis:

In 1347, a catastrophic plague fell on Europe and its neighbors, halving entire populations and causing untold suffering. The Black Death is, without question, one of the defining episodes in our history, and yet, one critical fact too often gets sidelined in our discussions of the this disease was not solely, or even primarily, a European phenomenon, but rather a catastrophe that touched the whole medieval world, oncluding the Muslim near and Middle East, the Byzantine Empire, north Africa and Asia.

Thomas Asbridge, a historian at Queen Mary University of London, Asbridge treats the Black Death as the truly international phenomenon that it was, crisscrossing the globe to follow the plague’s appearance. Compiling over seven years of research, Asbridge brings the drama of this era to life through hundreds of eyewitness accounts. We're introduced to characters like Ibn al-Wardi, the Muslim writer who witnessed the plague’s onset in Syria, or Ibn Khaldun, who survived the Black Death in Tunis, and went on to develop a new academic framework for the study of human history. We meet people of all walks of kings and queens, peasants and merchants, and we also revisit familiar characters, like Chaucer and Petrarch, to get a sense of what it must have felt like to live through this period of horrific uncertainty. 

As Thomas Asbridge masterfully demonstrates, reducing the story of the Black Death to a Western narrative not only limits our view of the past, but it also makes it impossible to appreciate the pandemic’s true scale and long-term significance. The immediate repercussions of the Black Death, Asbridge shows us, were often felt most severely in the Muslim not only were mortality rates often higher, but the aftermath of disease weakened the mighty Mamluk Empire, contributing to its eventual fall.  

The Black Death first evokes the palpable existential terror of living through this plague, and with graceful clarity, illuminates its effects on almost every aspect of medieval life, including attitudes toward religion and death, the conduct of trade, the balance of political power, and the very structure and fabric of society.