Profs & Pints Northern Virginia: Pandemics That Changed Everything

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Pandemics That Changed Everything,” a look at disease outbreaks that altered the course of world history, with Steve Harris-Scott, affiliate professor of history at George Mason University and teacher of its course on the global history of disease.

The economic and political aftershocks of Covid continue to be felt even as the pandemic itself has subsided. In contemplating its potential long-term impact on our lives, it’s worth looking back on how other pandemics shaped our world, to see what lessons can be learned from them.

Gain a big-picture understanding of the impact pandemics have had with historian Steve Harris-Scott, who both teaches a class and wrote an electronic textbook on the subject and created George Mason University’s academic minor in in Health, Disease, and Culture. He’ll look back at what were arguably the biggest, deadliest, and most world-altering pandemics in history to give you a sense of how pandemics can have long-term affects far beyond those related to health.

We’ll start with perhaps the most well-known and least understood of the pandemics, the Black Death, or the bubonic plague that swept Eurasia in the mid-1300s. It simultaneously destroyed multiple empires and governments and killed scores of millions of people. At the same time, it also improved labor conditions for millions of poor workers, led to several medical advances and innovations, and paved the way for even longer-lasting empires to rise within the power vacuums it had caused. Within the new world that arose, Spain began to sponsor exploratory voyages to the west.

From there we’ll look at how, starting with Columbus’s first voyage in 1492, a series of multiple European and African disease pandemics arrived in the Americas over hundreds of years and decimated indigenous populations to whom they were novel and deadly. Smallpox was chief among them, but they also included typhoid, tuberculosis, influenza, malaria, and yellow fever, as well as others. Together, they accelerated the fall Native American empires, namely the Aztecs and Inca, and cleared the way for European colonization and trans-Atlantic slavery to cover most of the American continents within two centuries.

Finally, we’ll look at the 1918-1919 influenza pandemic, arguably the first truly global pandemic brought about by a novel strain of the flu. Incredibly contagious and spread partly through close contact between troops in the context of World War I’s trench warfare, it might have even afforded an edge to the American doughboys whose arrival on the front help bring the Allies’ victory. The disease’s long-term effects on U.S. President Woodrow Wilson caused him to have a debilitating stroke that prevented him from obtaining Congressional passage of his own creation, the League of Nations. This failure led to a much-weakened League, setting the stage for another world war only two decades later.

You’ll leave the talk with an appreciation of how the long-term effects of Covid have yet to play out, but modern medicine helped shield us from something much worse. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: A 14th century Belgian manuscript’s image of Black Death victims being buried.