Primary Sources and Teaching Tools
This section includes primary sources, maps, and timelines related to past epidemics that are suitable for research or classroom use.
Maps and Timelines
Sarah Schuetze, "Mapping a Demon Malady: Cholera Maps and Affect in 1832," Commonplace
"Pandemics That Changed History," History.com (May 19, 2020)
Primary Sources
"The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918: A Digital Encyclopedia," University of Michigan Center for the History of Medicine and Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library
"The Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878," Digital Public Library of America
"Archive-It—Global Health Events web archive," National Library of Medicine
"Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics," Curiosity Collections, Harvard Library
"Fifth Annual Report of the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital for the Year 1918," Harvard Library
"Infectious Disease in American History," National Museum of American History
Karl Hall, "Sic Transit Pestilentia: Contagious Historical Images for the Pandemically Confined," Sic Transit Pestilentia (April 16, 2020)
Various authors, "South African Verses from 1918," World History Bulletin (Spring/Summer 2020)
Kristie Flannery, "How to Research the History of Maritime Asia and the Spanish Pacific during a Pandemic," Toynbee Prize Foundation (August 19, 2020)
Jason M. Kelly, "The COVID-19 Oral History Project: Some Preliminary Notes from the Field," The Oral History Review (September 2, 2020)
Jordan Meyerl and Katy Kole De Peralta, "Identifying and Filling Silences in a COVID-19 Archive," History @ Work (September 30, 2020)
Ian Milligan, "Help Archive 2020 for Future Generations," Waterloo Chronicle (October 8, 2020)
Amy Bentley and Stephanie Borkowsky, "The Food and COVID-19 NYC Archive: Mapping the Pandemic's Effect on Food in Real Time," Gastronomica (November 1, 2020)
Lucie Levine, "How to Gather the Oral Histories of COVID-19," JSTOR Daily (December 2, 2020)
Laura Spinney, "What Are COVID Archivists Keeping for Tomorrow's Historians?" Nature (December 17, 2020)
Samuel Kelton Roberts, "Bearing Witness: The Covid-19 & Inequality Documentation Project," Columbia University Center for Science and Society (December 31, 2020)
Videos and Podcasts:
Gillian Frank, Fern Hill: A Podcast about Growing up during a Pandemic, (April-May 2020)
Amy Bentley and Stephanie Borkowsky, "The Food and COVID-19 NYC Archive: Mapping the Pandemic's Effect on Food in Real Time," Meant to Be Eaten (November 15, 2020)
Teaching Guides
Kristin Anderson-Bricker, "'Keep Germs to Yourself': Lessons from the 1918 Influenza Epidemic," The Loras Daily (April 9, 2020)
Sarah Pesola, "Pedagogical and Historical Resources for the Pandemic," The Middle Ground Journal (May 22, 2020)
Phillip A. Cantrell, II, "World History in the Time of Covid-19: Using Stay-at-Home Orders to Process IDP Experiences," World History Bulletin (Spring/Summer 2020)
Whitney A. M. Leeson, "Jesuit Relations Reading Workshop: A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Jesuit and Wendat Medical Responses to the 1636 Influenza Epidemic," World History Bulletin (Spring/Summer 2020)
Kevin Mitchell Mercer, "Artifacts, Virality, and Connection: Social Media and Teaching in the Age of COVID-19," The Middle Ground Journal (June 12, 2020)
Lynneth Miller Renberg, "Project-Based Pedagogy in a Pandemic," The Electronic Sixteenth Century Journal (June 29, 2020)
Joseph M. Gabriel, "Teaching the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in the Time of COVID-19, Part 1" Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (July 21, 2020)
Joseph M. Gabriel, "Teaching the Influenza Pandemic of 1918 in the Time of COVID-19, Part 2" Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (July 28, 2020)
Ed Ayers, "Teaching History in Pandemic Times," Medium (October 30, 2020)
Syllabi
Michael G. Vann, "Microsyllabus: Histories of Epidemic Disease," The Abusable Past (July 10, 2020)
David Barnes, Merlin Chowkwanyun, and Kavita Sivaramakrishnan, "Pandemic Syllabus," Public Books (July 13, 2020)
Antoine S. Johnson, Elise A. Mitchell, Ayah Nuriddin, "Syllabus: A History of Anti-Black Racism in Medicine," Black Perspectives (August 12, 2020)
Books
John Fabian Witt, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID-19, Yale University Press (October 27, 2020)
Vinayak Chaturvedi ed., The Pandemic: Perspectives on Asia, Columbia University Press (December 2020)
David Kenley ed., Teaching about Asia in a Time of Pandemic, Association for Asian Studies (December 2020)
Explore the Bibliography Using Zotero
The AHA’s Bibliography of Historians’ Responses to COVID-19 Zotero Library allows users to sort and filter entries using more than 145 topics.
AHA on COVID-19
In the wake of COVID-19’s disruption to daily life in the United States, the American Historical Association responded to the pandemic’s impact by advocating for historians, emphasizing the importance of historical thinking in understanding the current crisis, and urging all institutions that employ historians to be flexible and humane in considering the needs of their employees and constituencies. This section includes AHA statements on the impact of COVID-19 on historians, as well as Perspectives on History articles on topics contextualizing the pandemic.