Expl/Pandemic Blk Death-COV19
Term: Fall 2020 - Full Term (08/31/2020 - 12/11/2020)
Grade Mode: Letter Grading
CRN: 16934
Times & Locations
Start Date | End Date | Days | Time | Location |
---|---|---|---|---|
8/31/2020 | 12/11/2020 | MWF | 1:10pm - 2:00pm | HORT 201 |
NEW COURSE* PANDEMIC! FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO CORONAVIRUS
Pandemics. They bring death and disruption, chaos and fear. They have also been the overlooked engines of momentous historical change. Throughout history, they’ve transformed attitudes to health and illness; they’ve shaped social interactions and diplomatic relations; they’ve reformed institutions and reconfigured the infrastructure of cities and towns. They’ve caused some societies to rise and others to collapse. More recently, they’ve put in conflict modern medicine, civil liberties and state power. This introductory course examines the complex role disease has played in human history by studying key moments in which people and pathogens have collided. Our analysis begins in the fourteenth century with the Black Death that came to Europe across trading networks from the Far East; we proceed then to the great geopolitical changes Malaria and Yellow Fever brought to the Greater Caribbean between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries; from there we study the march of Small Pox across America beginning in the revolutionary era, before examining Cholera, the quintessential urban disease, in mid-nineteenth century London and New York; we then tackle some of the twentieth century’s most fearsome global battles with viruses, including the 1918 Spanish Flu, Polio, HIV, and Ebola. We end the course amidst the twenty-first century’s ongoing confrontations with the new Coronaviruses and pop culture’s imaginative apocalyptic clashes with zombies in World War Z.