Showing results for "The Digital Pandemic" in World

It can come in waves - like tidal waves. It changes societies. It disrupts life. It ends lives. As far back as 3000 B.C.E. (the Bronze Age), plagues have stricken mankind. COVID-19 is just the latest example, but history shows that life continues. It shows that knowledge and social cooperation can save lives. Viruses are neither alive nor dead and are the closest thing we have to zombies. Their only known function is to replicate themselves, which can have devastating consequences on their hosts.

In the middle of the second century AD, Rome was at its prosperous and powerful apex. The emperor Marcus Aurelius reigned over a vast territory that stretched from Britain to Egypt. The Roman-made peace, or Pax Romana, seemed to be permanent. Then, apparently out of nowhere, a sudden sickness struck the legions and laid waste to cities, including Rome itself. This fast-spreading disease, known now as the Antonine plague, may have been history’s first pandemic. Soon after its arrival, the Empire began its downward trajectory toward decline and fall.

Christian W. McMillen provides a concise yet comprehensive account of pandemics throughout human history, illustrating how pandemic disease has shaped history and, at the same time, social behavior has influenced pandemic disease.

From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and this century's deadly SARS outbreak, plagues have been a much more relentless fact of life than many realize. The legacy of epidemics, Brian Michael Jenkins observes, is not only one of lives lost but of devastated economies and social disorder, all of which have severe political repercussions.

In this insightful book, an underwater archaeologist and survival coach shows how understanding the collapse of civilizations can help us prepare for a troubled future. Pandemic, climate change, or war: our era is ripe with the odor of doomsday. In movies, books, and more, our imaginations run...

A Saga about an Orkney family over a thousand years from the Viking Age and Medieval Warming Period to a 21st century Pandemic and Global Warming.

Series Summary "Plagues and Pandemics: How Disease Shaped Civilization" explores how history's most devastating disease outbreaks transformed human society far beyond their immediate death tolls. Host Alex Calder examines how these biological catastrophes accelerated social change, revolutionized medical science, altered economic systems, and reshaped cultural attitudes toward death, religion, and community. Through her engaging, conversational style, Alex reveals how the Black Death helped dismantle feudalism, smallpox facilitated European colonization while inspiring our first vaccine, and ...

In this podcast we talk about the covid 19 pandemic and the consequences it had on society as well as on young people and adults.

A podcast about the intersection of public health, cultural history, and war in Kansas. School closures, mask mandates, infection waves, front line workers, debates over the disease’s origin, disparities in health care access, quarantine fatigue. All of these descriptions could easily apply to both current times and a century ago. In the midst of the current Covid-19 pandemic, many have started looking back to the last global health catastrophe of this magnitude - the 1918 influenza pandemic, also known as the “Spanish flu”. Approximately 50 million people globally, including 675,000 ...

Early in September, 1918, the United States was invaded by a scourge of highly infectious and fatal disease, which spread with rapidity throughout the country, eventually infecting 500 million people worldwide, or about 27 percent of the world population, killing anywhere from 17 million to as many as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest epidemics in human history. Known as Spanish Influenza, it was pandemic in its nature. No one seemed to know much about the disease or its treatment, and medical science and public health agencies were alike unprepared to cope with it.

When the Pandemic Came to Town - How a Small New England Town Survived Covid with Kindness and Resilience. Professor Mary Christensen brings you a series of podcasts, each one geared towards an aspect of how Westborough MA, a small New England town, survived the Covid-19 pandemic with kindness and resilience. Each episode covers a different group or department and how they handled the pandemic and made the town thrive through the adversity of such a devastating pandemic. Topics include the 1918 Flu, Town Departments, Education, First Responders, IT, Civic Organizations, Mental Health, Fai