A series of ‘in conversation’ events exploring the many historical perspectives through which we can view, and better understand, the current coronavirus pandemic.
Tag: pandemic
COVID-19 and Facemask Diplomacy
The COVID-19 pandemic sheds light on the history of “facemask diplomacy”, in which contagion and epidemic become prisms through which power rivalries, tensions and aspirations are conducted – international politics wearing a facemask.
Enoch Powell, The Coronavirus and The Nation
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.
Pandemic Politics During the Renaissance
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.
The Black Death and the future of history after Covid-19
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.
The legacy of pandemics in the community: 1918 and 2020
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.
Radical Object: Spanish flu badge, 1918-19
Martin Plaut unearths a Radical Object: the badge struck to commemorate the Spanish flu pandemic that followed the First World War.
