Public Responses and Human Experiences: Past Pandemics and Epidemics
Class and Labor
Kevin Siena, "Epidemics and 'essential work' in early modern Europe," History & Policy (March 25, 2020)
Walter Scheidel, "Why the Wealthy Fear Pandemics," New York Times (April 9, 2020)
Sohini Chattopadhyay, "The Silence of the Archives: Why the Grave Diggers of the Bubonic Plague Are Unremembered," A Handful of Stories (May 14, 2020)
Laura Mogulsecu, "How Telephone Operators Helped People Connect during the 1918 Flu Epidemic," Women at the Center (April 1, 2020)
Kevin Siena, "Siena: COVID-19 - Our definition of 'essential work' has changed through history, but essential workers haven't," Ottawa Citizen (April 5, 2020)
Eleanor Janega, "Don't kid yourself. The Black Death's aftermath isn't cause for optimism about covid-19," The Washington Post (April 14, 2020)
Women and Gender
Valerie Paley, "Women's History in the Age of Epidemic," Women at the Center (March 23, 2020)
Alisha Haridassani Gupta, "How the Spanish Flu Almost Upended Women's Suffrage," The New York Times (April 28, 2020)
Caitlin Wiesner, "Caring for the Community during a Pandemic: Lessons from HIV/AIDS," Women at the Center (May 11, 2020)
Jessica Brabble, Ariel Ludwig, and E. Thomas Ewing, "'All the World's a Harem': Perceptions of Masked Women during the 1918-1919 Flu Pandemic," Nursing Clio (September 8, 2020)
Personal Stories
Dave Welky, "The President vs. the Epidemic: FDR's Polio Crusade," History News Network (April 12, 2020)
Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith, "When Babe Ruth and the Great Influenza Gripped Boston," Smithsonian Magazine (April 30, 2020)
John Marsh, "Teaching during a Pandemic - a Century Ago," History News Network (April 26, 2020)
Individual Experiences
Joseph T. Cochran, "Distemper in the Family of Sarah Pierpoint Edwards," Patheos (April 7, 2020)
Greg O'Brien, "An Awful Epidemic," TAP into Plainfield (April 30, 2020)
Patrick J. Hayes, "Redemptorists and the Spanish Flu, 1918: The Baltimore Province," Redemptorist North American Historical Bulletin (May 18, 2020)
Joseph M. Snyder, "'Our Town Has Become a Golgotha': Perspectives on the History of and Social Responses to Plague at Eyam, England, from September 1665 to November 1666," World History Bulletin (Spring/Summer 2020)
Chelsea Chamberlain, "'An Avalanche of Unexpected Sickness': Institutions and Disease in 1918 and Today," Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (June 23, 2020)
Jessica Otis, "History Need Not Repeat Itself When We Write the Journal of Our Plague Year," The Guardian (July 19, 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.
Submit to the Bibliography
“Bibliography of Historians’ Responses to COVID-19” includes commentary and publications by historians in both scholarly and popular periodical literature; recorded interviews and webcasts; and digitized primary source materials from past epidemics and pandemics. If you have an article, op-ed, interview, etc. that you think should be included in the bibliography please fill out this form to submit a reference.
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.