Download or read book The World the Plague Made written by James Belich and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-19 with total page 640 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking history of how the Black Death unleashed revolutionary change across the medieval world and ushered in the modern age In 1346, a catastrophic plague beset Europe and its neighbours. The Black Death was a human tragedy that abruptly halved entire populations and caused untold suffering, but it also brought about a cultural and economic renewal on a scale never before witnessed. The World the Plague Made is a panoramic history of how the bubonic plague revolutionized labour, trade, and technology and set the stage for Europe’s global expansion. James Belich takes readers across centuries and continents to shed new light on one of history’s greatest paradoxes. Why did Europe’s dramatic rise begin in the wake of the Black Death? Belich shows how plague doubled the per capita endowment of everything even as it decimated the population. Many more people had disposable incomes. Demand grew for silks, sugar, spices, furs, gold, and slaves. Europe expanded to satisfy that demand—and plague provided the means. Labour scarcity drove more use of waterpower, wind power, and gunpowder. Technologies like water-powered blast furnaces, heavily gunned galleons, and musketry were fast-tracked by plague. A new “crew culture” of “disposable males” emerged to man the guns and galleons. Setting the rise of Western Europe in global context, Belich demonstrates how the mighty empires of the Middle East and Russia also flourished after the plague, and how European expansion was deeply entangled with the Chinese and other peoples throughout the world.
Download or read book The Complete History of the Black Death written by Ole Jørgen Benedictow and published by Boydell & Brewer. This book was released on 2021 with total page 1059 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Completely revised and updated for this new edition, Benedictow's acclaimed study remains the definitive account of the Black Death and its impact on history. The first edition of The Black Death collected and analysed the many local studies on the disease published in a variety of languages and examined a range of scholarly papers. The medical and epidemiological characteristics of the disease, its geographical origin, its spread across Asia Minor, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, and the mortality in the countries and regions for which there are satisfactory studies, are clearly presented and thoroughly discussed. The pattern, pace and seasonality of spread revealed through close scrutiny of these studies exactly reflect current medical work and standard studies on the epidemiology of bubonic plague. Benedictow's findings made it clear that the true mortality rate was far higher than had been previously thought. In the light of those findings, the discussion in the last part of the book showing the Black Death as a turning point in history takes on a new significance. OLE J. BENEDICTOW is Professor of History at the University of Oslo.
Download or read book Plagues in World History written by John Aberth and published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. This book was released on 2011-01-16 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Plagues in World History provides a concise, comparative world history of catastrophic infectious diseases, including plague, smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, influenza, and AIDS. Geographically, these diseases have spread across the entire globe; temporally, they stretch from the sixth century to the present. John Aberth considers not only the varied impact that disease has had upon human history but also the many ways in which people have been able to influence diseases simply through their cultural attitudes toward them. The author argues that the ability of humans to alter disease, even without the modern wonders of antibiotic drugs and other medical treatments, is an even more crucial lesson to learn now that AIDS, swine flu, multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, and other seemingly incurable illnesses have raged worldwide. Aberth's comparative analysis of how different societies have responded in the past to disease illuminates what cultural approaches have been and may continue to be most effective in combating the plagues of today.
Download or read book Plague A Very Short Introduction written by Paul Slack and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2012-03-22 with total page 161 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history plague has been the cause of many major catastrophes. It was responsible for the Black Death of 1348 and the Great Plague of London in 1665, and for devastating epidemics much earlier and much later, in the Mediterranean in the sixth century, and in China and India between the 1890s and 1920s. Today, it has become a metaphor for other epidemic disasters which appear to threaten us, but plague itself has never been eradicated. In this Very Short Introduction, Paul Slack explores the historical impact of plague over the centuries, looking at the ways in which it has been interpreted, and the powerful images it has left behind in art and literature. Examining what plague meant for those who suffered from it, and how governments began to fight against it, he demonstrates the impact plague has had on modern notions of public health and how it has shaped our history. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
Download or read book The Black Death 1346 1353 written by Ole Jørgen Benedictow and published by Boydell Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 452 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study of the Black Death considers the nature of the disease, its origin, spread, mortality and its impact on history.
Download or read book Plague Pestilence and Pandemic Voices from History written by Peter Furtado and published by Thames & Hudson. This book was released on 2021-05-11 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An eye-opening anthology from the bestselling editor of Histories of Nations, exploring how people around the globe have suffered and survived during plague and pandemic, from the ancient world to the present. Plague, pestilence, and pandemics have been a part of the human story from the beginning and have been reflected in art and writing at every turn. Humankind has always struggled with illness; and the experiences of different cities and countries have been compared and connected for thousands of years. Many great authors have published their eyewitness accounts and survivor stories of the great contagions of the past. When the great Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta visited Damascus in 1348 during the great plague, which went on to kill half of the population, he wrote about everything he saw. He reported, "God lightened their affliction; for the number of deaths in a single day at Damascus did not attain 2,000, while in Cairo it reached the figure of 24,000 a day." From the plagues of ancient Egypt recorded in Genesis to those like the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the Middle Ages, and from the Spanish flu of 1918 to the Covid-19 pandemic in our own century, this anthology contains fascinating accounts. Editor Peter Furtado places the human experience at the center of these stories, understanding that the way people have responded to disease crises over the centuries holds up a mirror to our own actions and experiences. Plague, Pestilence and Pandemic includes writing from around the world and highlights the shared emotional responses to pandemics: from rage, despair, dark humor, and heartbreak, to finally, hope that it may all be over. By connecting these moments in history, this book places our own reactions to the Covid-19 pandemic within the longer human story.
Download or read book Bubonic Plague written by Barbara Krasner and published by Capstone Press. This book was released on 2019 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Explores the history and impact of the Bubonic plague."--
Download or read book Plagues upon the Earth written by Kyle Harper and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-10-12 with total page 704 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping germ’s-eye view of history from human origins to global pandemics Plagues upon the Earth is a monumental history of humans and their germs. Weaving together a grand narrative of global history with insights from cutting-edge genetics, Kyle Harper explains why humanity’s uniquely dangerous disease pool is rooted deep in our evolutionary past, and why its growth is accelerated by technological progress. He shows that the story of disease is entangled with the history of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, and reveals the enduring effects of historical plagues in patterns of wealth, health, power, and inequality. He also tells the story of humanity’s escape from infectious disease—a triumph that makes life as we know it possible, yet destabilizes the environment and fosters new diseases. Panoramic in scope, Plagues upon the Earth traces the role of disease in the transition to farming, the spread of cities, the advance of transportation, and the stupendous increase in human population. Harper offers a new interpretation of humanity’s path to control over infectious disease—one where rising evolutionary threats constantly push back against human progress, and where the devastating effects of modernization contribute to the great divergence between societies. The book reminds us that human health is globally interdependent—and inseparable from the well-being of the planet itself. Putting the COVID-19 pandemic in perspective, Plagues upon the Earth tells the story of how we got here as a species, and it may help us decide where we want to go.
Download or read book Plagues and Peoples written by William McNeill and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-10-27 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The history of disease is the history of humankind: an interpretation of the world as seen through the extraordinary impact—political, demographic, ecological, and psychological—of disease on cultures. "A book of the first importance, a truly revolutionary work." —The New Yorker From the conquest of Mexico by smallpox as much as by the Spanish, to the bubonic plague in China, to the typhoid epidemic in Europe, Plagues and Peoples is "a brilliantly conceptualized and challenging achievement" (Kirkus Reviews). Upon its original publication, Plagues and Peoples was an immediate critical and popular success, offering a radically new interpretation of world history. With the identification of AIDS in the early 1980s, another chapter was added to this chronicle of events, which William McNeill explores in his introduction to this edition. Thought-provoking, well-researched, and compulsively readable, Plagues and Peoples is essential reading—that rare book that is as fascinating as it is scholarly, as intriguing as it is enlightening.
Download or read book Doctoring the Black Death written by John Aberth and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-09-15 with total page 499 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Black Death of the late Middle Ages is often described as the greatest natural disaster in the history of humankind. More than fifty million people, half of Europe’s population, died during the first outbreak alone from 1347 to 1353. Plague then returned fifteen more times through to the end of the medieval period in 1500, posing the greatest challenge to physicians ever recorded in the history of the medical profession. This engrossing book provides the only comprehensive history of the medical response to the Black Death over time. Leading historian John Aberth has translated many unknown plague treatises from nine different languages that vividly illustrate the human dimensions of the horrific scourge. He includes doctors’ remarkable personal anecdotes, showing how their battles to combat the disease (which often afflicted them personally) and the scale and scope of the plague led many to question ancient authorities. Dispelling many myths and misconceptions about medicine during the Middle Ages, Aberth shows that plague doctors formulated a unique and far-reaching response as they began to treat plague as a poison, a conception that had far-reaching implications, both in terms of medical treatment and social and cultural responses to the disease in society as a whole.
Download or read book Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World written by Nükhet Varlik and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-22 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first systematic scholarly study of the Ottoman experience of plague during the Black Death pandemic and the centuries that followed. Using a wealth of archival and narrative sources, including medical treatises, hagiographies, and travelers' accounts, as well as recent scientific research, Nükhet Varlik demonstrates how plague interacted with the environmental, social, and political structures of the Ottoman Empire from the late medieval through the early modern era. The book argues that the empire's growth transformed the epidemiological patterns of plague by bringing diverse ecological zones into interaction and by intensifying the mobilities of exchange among both human and non-human agents. Varlik maintains that persistent plagues elicited new forms of cultural imagination and expression, as well as a new body of knowledge about the disease. In turn, this new consciousness sharpened the Ottoman administrative response to the plague, while contributing to the makings of an early modern state.
Download or read book Epidemics and Ideas written by Terence Ranger and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From plague to AIDS, epidemics have been the most spectacular diseases to afflict human societies. This volume examines the way in which these great crises have influenced ideas, how they have helped to shape theological, political and social thought, and how they have been interpreted and understood in the intellectual context of their time.
Download or read book A History of Bubonic Plague in the British Isles written by J. F. D. Shrewsbury and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-11-10 with total page 684 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the black rat introduced the bubonic plague into Britain, and the subsequent effects on social and economic life.
Download or read book Plague and the End of Antiquity written by Lester K. Little and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, 12 scholars from various disciplines - have produced a comprehensive account of the pandemic's origins, spread, and mortality, as well as its economic, social, political, and religious effects.
Download or read book Black Death written by Stephen Porter and published by Amberley Publishing Limited. This book was released on 2018-09-15 with total page 591 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The definitive history of the virulent and fatal plague outbreaks that wiped out half of London's populations from the medieval Black Death of the 1340s to the Great Plagues of the seventeenth century.
Download or read book The Black Death written by Hourly History and published by Hourly History. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 45 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sweeping across the known world with unchecked devastation, the Black Death claimed between 75 million and 200 million lives in four short years. In this engaging and well-researched book, the trajectory of the plague’s march west across Eurasia and the cause of the great pandemic is thoroughly explored. Inside you will read about... ✓ What was the Black Death? ✓ A Short History of Pandemics ✓ Chronology & Trajectory ✓ Causes & Pathology ✓ Medieval Theories & Disease Control ✓ Black Death in Medieval Culture ✓ Consequences Fascinating insights into the medieval mind’s perception of the disease and examinations of contemporary accounts give a complete picture of what the world’s most effective killer meant to medieval society in particular and humanity in general.
Download or read book Viruses Plagues and History written by Michael B. A. Oldstone and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Here, my previous edition of Viruses, Plagues, & History is updated to reflect both progress and disappointment since that publication. This edition describes newcomers to the range of human infections, specifically, plagues that play important roles in this 21st century. The first is Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), an infection related to Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). SARS was the first new-found plague of this century. Zika virus, which is similar to yellow fever virus in being transmitted by mosquitos, is another of the recent scourges. Zika appearing for the first time in the Americas is associated with birth defects and a paralytic condition in adults. Lastly, illness due to hepatitis viruses were observed prominently during the second World War initially associated with blood transfusions and vaccine inoculations. Since then, hepatitis virus infections have afflicted millions of individuals, in some leading to an acute fulminating liver disease or more often to a life-long persistent infection. A subset of those infected has developed liver cancer. However, in a triumph of medical treatments for infectious diseases, pharmaceuticals have been developed whose use virtually eliminates such maladies. For example, Hepatitis C virus infection has been eliminated from almost all (>97%) of its victims. This incredible result was the by-product of basic research in virology as well as cell and molecular biology during which intelligent drugs were designed to block events in the hepatitis virus life-cycle"--
