Course Description
This course studies the social, economic, political, and cultural history of the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic within a world historical context. Readings such as William McNeil's book, Plagues and People, and Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, will set a temporal framework for understanding the effects of pandemics on societies around the world. The course focuses on the last century of pandemics as global processes of trade, migration, and urbanization made the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 an early warning of the world's vulnerability to evolving diseases. The course concentrates on the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic as a twenty-first century dynamic that has upset assumptions about the ability of governments and societies to manage or downplay pandemics. The histories of the contemporary spread of HIV-AIDS, Ebola, Marburg, and other diseases seemed to allow some to disregard these outbreaks as problems of marginal populations and regions. The history of the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the reality of a linked and interdependent world even as it has revealed how power, privilege, and hierarchies have meant that the medical and economic costs of the pandemic have had disproportionate impacts on families, communities, and nations.
Units
4
