Class Readings and Plans for Tuesday, November 5
Disease

Class Plan
Class Plan
Everyone should read Newson and the readings in one of the groups as assigned in the prior class. The purpose of these readings is to get a historical understanding of how disease and health have affected human populations, when they tend to be most devastating, and how they relate to broad patterns of human history. By 9:00 p.m. on Wednesday, November 4, please post a comment or question on the general reading and the readings for your group, related to one or more of the following questions: How is disease related to human demography, population density, sedentism, and environmental conditions? How are the histories of diseases linked to the history of the world? What implications, if any, do these histories have for how we could plan for the future?.

Readings

Everyone read
Newson, Linda A. (1998) A historical ecological perspective on epidemic disease, 42-63. In Advances in Historical Ecology, ed. by W. Balee. New York: Columbia U. Press.

Group 1
Ruddiman, William (2005) Chapter 13: The Horsemen of the apocalypse: which one? and Chapter 14: Pandemics, CO2, and climate, pp. 127-146. In Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Princeton: Princeton U. Press.

Group 2
McNeill JR. 1999. Ecology, epidemics and empires: environmental change and the geopolitics of tropical America, 1600-1825, Environment and History, 5 (2): 175-84.

Yates et al. (2002) The Ecology and Evolutionary History of an Emergent Disease: Hantavirus Pulmonary Syndrome, Bioscience 52(11):989-998.

Group 3
Wood, James W. (2003) The temporal dynamics of the fourteenth-century Black Death : new evidence from English ecclesiastical records, Human Biology 75(4):427-448.