The book is out! Thanks to family, colleagues, and the team at Princeton University Press for making it happen. Over the last few weeks, I’ve written a few articles, mostly drawing from a historical perspective to think about the COVID-19 pandemic. “Vaccines Can’t End Pandemics Alone—And We’ve Known That Since We Eradicated Smallpox,” TIME, October…
New Book! Plagues upon the Earth
On October 5, my next book, Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History, will be published by Princeton University Press. I started writing the book in 2017, and it was surreal to find myself finishing the book under lockdown while the globe was swept by a new pandemic. The book is…
Chimps in Europe
Given my interest in human disease, I’ve become very interested in animals and the role of animals in human history. I’m curious what primates were known to the Romans, and specifically whether they had encountered any true apes. It seems not. From what I have found, the first descriptions of an ape in Europe appear…
Pandemic Reflections Roundup
The COVID-19 pandemic has naturally stirred interest in the history of infectious disease. This interest in history is fantastic! But the intellectual challenges of comparing pandemics past and present are enormous. Here is a digest of links to some of the essays, podcasts, etc. over the last year. ESSAYS TIME Magazine “What Makes Viruses Like…
Isotopes and Inscriptions: Bringing Geochemistry to Classics
(A personal reflection on a study just published along with my colleagues Mike Engel, Matt Hamilton, Mike McCormick, Raymond Michels, and Chantal Peiffert) Is the “Nazareth Inscription” really from Nazareth? That is a question that historians have been unable to resolve for nearly a century. The Nazareth Inscription is a mysterious inscription written in ancient Greek. A…
Pathogens and the Anthropocene
The “Anthropocene” is the name that many propose for the current geological epoch in recognition of how fundamentally humans (= anthropoi) have altered the earth’s physical and biological systems. In a guest blog post for a site published by my OU colleagues, I try to bring to bear some historical insights on how human social…
Database of Pestilence in the Roman Empire
The term “endemic,” when applied to disease, is a spatial term: it means a particular disease is native or persistently present in a specific place. The terms “epidemic” and “pandemic,” by contrast, generally denote events – disease outbreaks that occurred at specific times, when the incidence of a given disease significantly increased. The Greeks and…
Framing the Fifth-Century Climate
The need to understand contemporary climate change – and the role of human activity in driving climate change – has an unintended side effect for historians: we are learning a lot about climate history. Earth scientists are scouring the globe for natural archives – like ice cores, tree rings, cave deposits, pollen, lake, and glacier…
Smallpox: Resources and Thoughts
Smallpox, We Hardly Knew Ye* [updated 2/7/2017] In an important new study, Duggan et al. sequenced the genome of a 17th-century smallpox virus (Variola major) from a mummy in Lithuania. The results were striking. Perhaps the most important claim of the study is that all known modern strains of smallpox (based on a few dozen…
Lecture on history, genetics, and infectious disease
Here is the video of a lecture I gave in October of 2016 titled “Nature Did It: Romans, Ecology, and the Global History of Infectious Disease.” The lecture was sponsored by the Initiative for the Science of the Human Past at Harvard University. In AD 165, the Roman Empire and its neighbors were struck by…
