History

COVID-19 in the Light of History 0
- History
- March 27, 2020
Serious epidemics can have far-reaching social, cultural, and geopolitical consequences. The plague which devastated Athens in 430 BC – in the second year of the Peloponnesian War, when an Athenian victory still seemed within reach – claimed a quarter of the population, some 75,000 people including Pericles. His successors were weak and incompetent, and Athens
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Remember the Black Death and Be Thankful This Isn’t It 0
- History
- March 26, 2020
As an example of biomedical catastrophe, the Black Death of the 14th century stands unmatched. The coronavirus, whatever global havoc it might wreak, is not even remotely in its league. During a four-year period between 1347 and 1351, one quarter to one half of Europe’s population died of the plague, with great variations by region.
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A Real Crisis Yields Real Politics 0
- History
- March 25, 2020
So much of the news cycle and the telegraphed concerns of our commentariat are completely fake. Fake crises like “climate change,” a phone call with the leader of Ukraine, or whether someone used the wrong pronouns tend to dominate the news cycle. The recent Democratic presidential primary is a good example. At one point, the
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The Last Great Pandemic 0
- History
- March 18, 2020
Hardly anything that happens in this world is truly unprecedented. As Americans respond to the coronavirus pandemic, which began in China, with canceled events, business closures, and aggressive social distancing, many are taking an interest in another great pandemic that took place a hundred years ago. “We have an invisible enemy. We have a problem that a
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The New York Times Begins Correcting the Historical Record on ‘1619 Project’0
- History
- March 16, 2020
“I have been thinking about this and reading obsessively for 25 years about all the inequalities in American life that can be traced back to slavery,” Nikole Hannah-Jones of The New York Times told an audience at Harvard in December. Now the Times admits: Her obsession bested her reason. On March 11, the Times issued a correction to
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Do New Inventions Kill Old Liberties?0
- History
- March 13, 2020
There is one aspect of modern science and machinery that nobody has noticed. It is quite new, and it is enormously important. It is this; that the very fact of using new methods makes it easier to fall back on old morals, especially if they are very immoral morals. These prescient words came from the
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