Analogies to the Second World War are a recurring theme in modern British history. The seeming orthodoxy in Britain in 2020 is that the nation is at war, on a scale not known since the Second World War. The enemy, this time the coronavirus, is invisible to the naked eye.
The sixteenth-century struggle to balance biological and economic well-being implicated a surprising number of authorities, but not everyone accepted their discipline. Matthew Vester explores in Pandemic Politics During the Renaissance.
Bruce Campbell argues that interactions between climate and disease during the fourteenth-century Black Death can inform insights into Covid-19 and alter historians’ understanding of the nature of historical change.
What can the British provincial press tell us about the way pandemics have historically been experienced at a local level? Andrew Jackson proposes that such coverage offers vital insights into community-led responses to global public health crises in 1918 and 2020.
Martin Plaut unearths a Radical Object: the badge struck to commemorate the Spanish flu pandemic that followed the First World War.
The Coronavirus has brought chaos to global sport with major football matches played behind closed doors and postponements widespread across elite football, despite Government insistence that the show would go on.
Here Dr Tosh Warwick reveals how the threat of COVID-19 has echoes of a Victorian epidemic that brought controversial postponements, matches played in secret and conflict between clubs and sport’s governing bodies…
