The World the Plague Made

The World the Plague Made PDF Author: James Belich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691222878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
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.

The World the Plague Made

The World the Plague Made PDF Author: James Belich
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691222878
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 640

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

The Plague Year

The Plague Year PDF Author: Lawrence Wright
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593320735
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 417

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Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Looming Tower, and the pandemic novel The End of October: an unprecedented, momentous account of Covid-19—its origins, its wide-ranging repercussions, and the ongoing global fight to contain it "A book of panoramic breadth ... managing to surprise us about even those episodes we … thought we knew well … [With] lively exchanges about spike proteins and nonpharmaceutical interventions and disease waves, Wright’s storytelling dexterity makes all this come alive.” —The New York Times Book Review From the fateful first moments of the outbreak in China to the storming of the U.S. Capitol to the extraordinary vaccine rollout, Lawrence Wright’s The Plague Year tells the story of Covid-19 in authoritative, galvanizing detail and with the full drama of events on both a global and intimate scale, illuminating the medical, economic, political, and social ramifications of the pandemic. Wright takes us inside the CDC, where a first round of faulty test kits lost America precious time . . . inside the halls of the White House, where Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger’s early alarm about the virus was met with confounding and drastically costly skepticism . . . into a Covid ward in a Charlottesville hospital, with an idealistic young woman doctor from the town of Little Africa, South Carolina . . . into the precincts of prediction specialists at Goldman Sachs . . . into Broadway’s darkened theaters and Austin’s struggling music venues . . . inside the human body, diving deep into the science of how the virus and vaccines function—with an eye-opening detour into the history of vaccination and of the modern anti-vaccination movement. And in this full accounting, Wright makes clear that the medical professionals around the country who’ve risked their lives to fight the virus reveal and embody an America in all its vulnerability, courage, and potential. In turns steely-eyed, sympathetic, infuriated, unexpectedly comical, and always precise, Lawrence Wright is a formidable guide, slicing through the dense fog of misinformation to give us a 360-degree portrait of the catastrophe we thought we knew.

The Plague Cycle

The Plague Cycle PDF Author: Charles Kenny
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982165359
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A vivid, sweeping, and “fact-filled” (Booklist, starred review) history of mankind’s battles with infectious disease that “contextualizes the COVID-19 pandemic” (Publishers Weekly)—for readers of the #1 New York Times bestsellers Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and John Barry’s The Great Influenza. For four thousand years, the size and vitality of cities, economies, and empires were heavily determined by infection. Striking humanity in waves, the cycle of plagues set the tempo of civilizational growth and decline, since common response to the threat was exclusion—quarantining the sick or keeping them out. But the unprecedented hygiene and medical revolutions of the past two centuries have allowed humanity to free itself from the hold of epidemic cycles—resulting in an urbanized, globalized, and unimaginably wealthy world. However, our development has lately become precarious. Climate and population fluctuations and factors such as global trade have left us more vulnerable than ever to newly emerging plagues. Greater global cooperation toward sustainable health is urgently required—such as the international efforts to manufacture and distribute a COVID-19 vaccine—with millions of lives and trillions of dollars at stake. “A timely, lucid look at the role of pandemics in history” (Kirkus Reviews), The Plague Cycle reveals the relationship between civilization, globalization, prosperity, and infectious disease over the past five millennia. It harnesses history, economics, and public health, and charts humanity’s remarkable progress, providing a fascinating and astute look at the cyclical nature of infectious disease.

In the Wake of the Plague

In the Wake of the Plague PDF Author: Norman F. Cantor
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476797749
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
The Black Death was the fourteenth century's equivalent of a nuclear war. It wiped out one-third of Europe's population, taking millions of lives. The author draws together the most recent scientific discoveries and historical research to pierce the mist and tell the story of the Black Death as a gripping, intimate narrative.

Clichés

Clichés PDF Author: Nigel Fountain
Publisher: Michael O'Mara Books
ISBN: 184317796X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 150

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Book Description
Entertaining and informative, this collection of clichés really is the best thing since sliced bread ...

The Plague

The Plague PDF Author: Kevin Chong
Publisher: arsenal pulp press
ISBN: 1551527197
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 191

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Book Description
At first it was the dead rats. They started dying in cataclysmic numbers, followed by other city creatures. Then people begin experiencing flu-like symptoms as well as swellings in their lymph nodes. The citizenry reacts in disbelief when the diagnosis comes in and later, when a quarantine is imposed on the increasingly terrified city. Inspired by Albert Camus’ classic 1948 novel, Kevin Chong’s The Plague follows Dr. Bernard Rieux’s attempts to fight the treatment-resistant disease and find meaning in suffering. His efforts are aided by Megan Tso, an American writer who is trapped in the city while on a book tour, and Raymond Siddhu, a city hall reporter at a daily newspaper on its last legs from the latest round of job cuts. Told with dark humor and an eye trained on the frailties of human behavior, Chong’s novel explores themes in keeping with Camus’ original vision--heroism in the face of futility, the psychological strain of quarantine—but fraught with the political and cultural anxieties of our present day.

The Plague in Print

The Plague in Print PDF Author: Rebecca Totaro
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0820705292
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In The Plague in Print, Rebecca Totaro takes the reader into the world of plague-riddled Elizabethan England, documenting the development of distinct subgenres related to the plague and providing unprecedented access to important original sources of early modern plague writing. Totaro elucidates the interdisciplinary nature of plague writing, which raises religious, medical, civic, social, and individual concerns in early modern England. Each of the primary texts in the collection offers a glimpse into a particular subgenre of plague writing, beginning with Thomas Moulton’s plague remedy and prayers published by the Church of England and devoted to the issue of the plague. William Bullein’s A Dialogue, both pleasant and pietyful, a work that both addresses concerns related to the plague and offers humorous literary entertainment, exemplifies the multilayered nature of plague literature. The plague orders of Queen Elizabeth I highlight the community-wide attempts to combat the plague and deal with its manifold dilemmas. And after a plague bill from the Corporation of London, the collection ends with Thomas Dekker’s The Wonderful Year, which illustrates plague literature as it was fully formed, combining attitudes toward the plague from both the Elizabethan and Stuart periods. These writings offer a vivid picture of important themes particular to plague literature in England, providing valuable insight into the beliefs and fears of those who suffered through bubonic plague while illuminating the cultural significance of references to the plague in the more familiar early modern literature by Spenser, Donne, Milton, Shakespeare, and others. As a result, The Plague in Print will be of interest to students and scholars in a number of fields, including sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, cultural studies, medical humanities, and the history of medicine.

The Plague

The Plague PDF Author: Joanne Dahme
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458779734
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
Fifteen year-old Nell bears an uncanny resemblance to King Edward the Third's daughter, Princess Joan. The king brings Nell and her brother George from the murky streets of 14th-century London so that Nell can be the body double for the princess in times of danger. When the plague takes the princess' life, Joan's brother, the Black Prince, forces Nell to continue in her role so he can marry her to the Prince of Castille in Joan's place. Nell, however, is determined to return to England to report the princess' death to the King.

Plague Year

Plague Year PDF Author: Jeff Carlson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1440634211
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Read Jeff Carlson's blogs and other content on the Penguin Community. View our feature on Jeff Carlson's Plague Year.The nanotechnology was designed to fight cancer. Instead, it evolved into the Machine Plague, killing nearly five billion people and changing life on Earth forever. The nanotech has one weakness: it self-destructs at altitudes above ten thousand feet. Those few who've managed to escape the plague struggle to stay alive on the highest mountains, but time is running out-there is famine and war, and the environment is crashing worldwide. Humanity's last hope lies with a top nanotech researcher aboard the International Space Station-and with a small group of survivors in California who risk a daring journey below the death line...

Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times

Plague Image and Imagination from Medieval to Modern Times PDF Author: Christos Lynteris
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030723046
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
This edited collection brings together new research by world-leading historians and anthropologists to examine the interaction between images of plague in different temporal and spatial contexts, and the imagination of the disease from the Middle Ages to today. The chapters in this book illuminate to what extent the image of plague has not simply reflected, but also impacted the way in which the disease is experienced in different historical periods. The book asks what is the contribution of the entanglement between epidemic image and imagination to the persistence of plague as a category of human suffering across so many centuries, in spite of profound shifts in our medical understanding of the disease. What is it that makes plague such a visually charismatic subject? And why is the medical, religious and lay imagination of plague so consistently determined by the visual register? In answering these questions, this volume takes the study of plague images beyond its usual, art-historical framework, so as to examine them and their relation to the imagination of plague from medical, historical, visual anthropological, and postcolonial perspectives.