Resources for the Coronavirus Pandemic

a response to Kelly Johnson's article below.

Live on Monday, March 23 at 7:00 pm Eastern Time.

“With all the unavoidable news right now about disease and epidemics,” Philip wrote here last Friday, “it’s an obvious temptation to look back to past eras to see how they coped with such things, culturally as well as medically.” Indeed, as I get more and more emails from my employer, our kids’ school, and our city about coronavirus/COVID-19, I’ve certainly been tempted to brush up on my limited knowledge of the history of disease. Like Philip, I’ve thought a lot about 1918, and the influenza pandemic that killed 50 million people around the world, including 675,000 in this country. But while he considered how the pandemic — coinciding with the last year of World War I — inspired apocalyptic themes in film and literature, I spent some time this weekend revisiting one of my favorite digital history projects. Almost fifteen years ago, the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan began to work on The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918-1919: A Digital Encyclopedia. Updated in 2016, it surveyed how fifty American cities experienced and responded to the “Spanish flu.”...

There have been moments where the world has felt very much like an Edward Hopper painting. Hopper, an American realist painter, is known for placing a single figure in a vacant setting. His work seems to isolate people - sometimes in the country, other times in the city. Men, women, even dogs are alone...or alone together. Detachment is available to anyone in a Hopper painting. One of the things I appreciate about Hopper is that while he places his figures in isolation (sometimes even when there is more than one person in the painting), he does not seem to indicate what these people are feeling, nor does he dictate what the viewer should feel when looking at the paintings...