Having read the interview with Frank Snowden in the New Yorker (https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-pandemics-change-history) I keep wondering: if something like Covid-19 or the Spanish flu 1918-19 affects millions of people in various ways (death, social life, family, unemployment, the economy, recession) why is it that these and other historical (what?) “episodes” struggle to find their way into (more mainstream) history books? 

I just went briefly back to two more recent books (past 5 years), much acclaimed books on 20th-Century Europe: Konrad Jarausch, Out of Ashes (2015) and Ian Kershaw (2015), To Hell and Back. By and large silence on the Spanish Flu or similar themes (e.g. science, health, disease). This is not a “blame game”. Jarausch to me is the better, more original synthesis (starting not with 1914 but with and in colonies and colonialism…something different, with Europe yet geographically not set in Europe). Kershaw: well, solid to me, but there were few surprising moments to me reading it…moments where I thought: wow…never thought about it that way. Do not get me wrong: I learned a lot from the book.  

So, credit to both and to Kershaw and his work on Hitler, Germany, the Third Reich. But I strongly feel that a major survey monographs published in 2015 with the aim (publisher) to reach beyond a narrow academic audience…ought to be different. My sense is something else is needed.  

But back to my question (and again no blame game here…others could be named): Why is it that health, disease, contagion, Spanish flu, pandemics do not make the cut? Why is it that these topics get special or separated treatment in dedicated articles and monographs? It seems there is some “social” or “topical” distancing going on…the plague, the cholera in X,Y or Z (Hamburg, London), individual diseases or the technicalities or transfer of knowledge behind small pox vaccination in the later 18th century get “special treatment” and separate treatment in journals and books. Why do major synthesis fall back to narrating history in the way we do? States, wars, economy, international affairs…states and nations in particular.  

My educated guess would be that the problem is narrative and time in our discipline. As historians we mainly think along temporal aspects. And in a way – another educated guess of mine – the most three popular ways of writing history would be: 1) The history of states, nations, nation-states. 2) The history of wars and international relations. 3) The history of a life (aka biography). All three share a commonality: start-end or birth-death are relatively easy to pin down. From A in time to B in time. The Wilhelmine Empire was born on day x out of treaty and war y and died on day z. Then we narrate the next life: Weimar…Nazi Germany…postwar Germany.  

From what we now about the history of diseases (and I am not an expert), in terms of temporality they are very different, they have very short life-spans (not sure if that is good news these days). Cholera outbreaks lasted from a few weeks to a few months maximum. Flu is mainly seasonal. The Spanish Flu in 1918-19 had a long life-span over a year in three waves, the second one starting in autumn 1918 was the deadliest. In all likelihood (and historically speaking) Covid-19 will be with us only for a very short period of time.  

Laura Spinney in her “Pale Rider” refers to the short life cycle of diseases: “The Spanish flu, in contrast, engulfed the entire globe in the blink of an eye. Most of the death occurred in the thirteen weeks between mid-September and mid-December 1918. It was broad in space and shallow in time, compare to a narrow, deep war.”  

So here we have the problem. We historians tend to wade or plunge into “narrow and deep” (war, Napoleonic wars, the depth yet narrow history of individuals or individual states…). We shy away from the “broad in space and shallow in time”? Ok, we could accept this and say: this is just the division of labor between neighbouring disciplines. Let the colleagues in Sociology, Social Sciences, Human Geography, IR go for the shallow time yet broad in space. But division of labor in times of crisis is not good. And we have to confront it: How do we react to it? What can we contribute (academically)? How do we conquer the shallow water and broad in space narrative? Personally, I would not accuse any transnational and global history of being shallow…yet I have heard those reflexes or accusations.  

Back to Spinney (a very good book). She writes: “A linear narrative won’t do; what’s needed is something closer to the way women in southern Africa discuss an important event in the life of their community.” It is interesting to see that Spinney goes to find help in the work of Terence Ranger (yes, the African historian if that is the right label). Ranger: “They describe it and then circle around it..constantly returning to it, widening out and bringing into it past memories and future anticipations.” A little later comes another nod to Ranger who proposed a “feminised history of the Spanish flu: it was generally women who nursed the ill.” “They were the ones who registered the sights and sounds of the sickroom, who laid out the dead and took the orphans. They were the link between the personal and the collective.”  

One final quote from Spinney’s introduction: “The pandemic in turn affects the price of bread, ideas about germs, white men and jinns – and sometimes even the weather. It is a social phenomenon as much as it is a biological one; it cannot be separated from its historical, geographical and cultural context. The way African mothers and grandmothers recount an event gives weight to that contextual richness, even if the event it impinges on lasts no longer than a historical heartbeat.”  

So, can we in the space of our MO3351 module contribute something to it? Or at large: How can History and our discipline respond to this more generally? Can we in MO3351 circle around the historical heartbeat of 1918-1919 from Dundee to Boston…to elsewhere? A short-term synchronous collaborative history between the now and then?  

Pale Rider. History in times of Covid-19