Summary and Outlook

The H1N1 “Spanish influenza” pandemic of 1918–1919 caused the highest known number of deaths recorded for a single pandemic in human history. Several theories have been offered to explain the virulence and spread of the disease, but the environmental context remains underexamined. In this study, we present a new environmental record from a European, Alpine ice core, showing a significant climate anomaly that affected the continent from 1914 to 1919. Incessant torrential rain and declining temperatures increased casualties in the battlefields of World War I (WWI), setting the stage for the spread of the pandemic at the end of the conflict. Multiple independent records of temperature, precipitation, and mortality corroborate these findings.

On privilege and fragility.

Chapter Eight - Novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19): Emergence, early infection rate, and deployment strategies for preventive solutions

There have been several pandemics in the history of mankind. One of the major pandemics was the Spanish flu that took place in 1918, in which millions of lives were lost globally. Despite significant advances in science and medicine since then, the COVID-19 pandemic has still caused major impacts around the world. As evidenced, pandemics not only cause social and public health implications, but also cause effects on the economy as well. This chapter addresses the ill effects of pandemics on the economy and presents how the financial markets and financial institutions were influenced and how they responded to the pandemics. More specifically, this chapter identifies the effects of the pandemics on various assets (e.g., crude oil, gold, currencies, equity, bonds, and cryptocurrencies) around the world. In addition, the chapter also presents evidence of corporates’ characteristics relative to their responses to the ill effects of the pandemics.

In 2020, we are facing unprecedented times, and as some form of lockdown continues with no signs of ending feelings of hopelessness are completely natural and understandable. Unprecedented times does not mean that these current issues and struggles have never been faced by humanity before, however. The Spanish Flu which took place after World War One and the Black Death that was rampant in Asia and Europe in the 14th century quickly come to mind as examples of past pandemics, but these are only two examples of devastating diseases throughout human history. The Plague of Athens that was raging during the beginning of the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE is another such example. Though removed from our current situation by many centuries, its symptoms and the effects it had on the population of Athens have been meticulously recorded by the general and historian Thucydides, giving us the opportunity to compare his account to our own experiences today. The disease may be different, and the image he portrays may be more violent and desperate than our own, but nonetheless we can see similarities in how these two separate societies have reacted to unforeseen hardships. In this comparison, we can come to understand at once our own good fortune at going through a pandemic with the support of modern technology and medicine as well as how universal our reactions are to this type of suffering, thereby making it natural rather than shameful. Humanity has faced a great deal of diversity before, and COVID-19 will likely prove to be no different.

Pandemics have profoundly shaped societal, economic, and labour dynamics throughout human history, acting as critical turning points for modern labour practices and worker's rights. This articles examines the impact of the three most transformative pandemics throughout history - the Black Death, Spanish Flu, and COVID-19 and looks into their impacts on labour systems and societal structures. The Black Death started the decline of the feudal system and enabled labourers to demand higher wages and improved work conditions due to labour shortages. The Spanish Flu acted as a catalyst to bring women into the labour force and narrowing the gender gap and fostering the early suffragette movements. Most recently, COVID-19 exposed vulnerabilities in global labor systems, highlighting the inequalities for frontline workers, while also advancing remote work opportunities as a viable option for greater inclusivity in the work place. By analyzing these pandemics's effects on labour rights, gender equality and workplace dynamics, this paper analyzes the resilience of socieites in working through crises to transform the economic and social framework of the Western world.

China was not been isolated from the Spanish flu which begun in 1918. According to the reports on the influenza epidemic in China from 1918 to 1920 in the Shun Pao(, Shanghai Daily), the plague was rampant in China three times, involving at least three cities including Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai, and more than 14 provinces including Heilongjiang, Jilin, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Guangdong. Among them, the first wave of epidemic reports were mainly in June and July 1918, the disease was relatively mild. The second wave outbroke on October to November, with aggravating symptoms and a significant increase in the number of patients and deaths, Ningbo, Shaoxing, Jiaxing in Zhejiang Province were the worst, and Beijing, Anhui, Henan, Hunan, Shanghai and other places were also serious. The third wave occurred in the spring of 1919, Shanghai, with more reports. In previous works on the 1918 pandemic, there are few descriptions about the epidemic in China, therefore, the reports on the 1918-1920 pandemic in Shun Pao are important historical data supplement to the most deadly natural disaster in human history.

Has solar variability caused climate change that affected human culture?

In the history of medicine, the 1918 influenza pandemic (otherwise known as the Spanish flu) occupies a curious place. For decades, historians have claimed that this event reshaped human history, but then somehow disappeared, leaving little historical trace. They have also claimed that this forgetting is particularly evident in the Global South, which experienced the worst devastation. If the Spanish flu has been forgotten, what would its memorialization look like? The first part of this essay outlines the dangers of presuming a proper mode of remembering. The second part proposes an alternative: what if we take the absence of memorialization not as a lack demanding intervention but as a conceptual insight? Finally, this essay clarifies the implications of this refusal to identify the Global South as a zone of exceptional abjection—of human lives as well as of historical accounting—for our practices of remembering COVID-19.

This chapter aims to shed light on some of the darkest events in human history, which later turned into tourism spots. This study examines the historical context, consequences, and underlying factors that contributed to their occurrence by analyzing widely recognized and deeply impactful events. The methodology involves an extensive literature review of research papers, articles, and books published on dark tourism. Genocide, the Holocaust, assassinations, incarcerations, catastrophes, ethnic cleansing, and World War II are covered in the chapter. The chapter shows human brutality, bigotry, and the perils of unbridled authority. They demonstrate the repercussions of hatred, discrimination, human rights violations, and the influence of political ideology and social instability. Over the past decade, history’s darkest events have emerged as a concept of dark tourism, attracting numerous people worldwide. Dark tourism is visiting natural and recreated areas of death, horror, cruelty, or depravity that have disturbed the public conscience. Dark tourism shows our passion for facing and understanding our darkest past. This tourism highlights the delicate balance between curiosity, respect, and the ethical challenges associated with visiting sites of tragedy and suffering. This chapter serves as a reminder of the atrocities throughout history, urging us to learn from the past and strive for a brighter future.

The Natural and Unnatural Histories of Patricio Guzmán Graig Uhlin (bio) The opening moments of The Pearl Button, the 2015 film from Chilean documentary filmmaker Patricio Guzmán, frame a small block of quartz in close-up. The director's voice-over draws attention to a droplet of water encased inside the mineral unearthed in the Atacama Desert. The trapped water is an estimated three thousand years old. Guzmán offers no commentary beyond these factual observations before the opening credits appear, but this brief prologue introduces the film's extended attention to traces of the past as they are preserved by nonhuman nature. The difficulty and necessity of engaging with the past is a longstanding concern of Guzmán's exilic documentary filmmaking. In films such as Chile, Obstinate Memory (1997), The Pinochet Case (2001), and Salvador Allende (2004), Guzmán returns to the democratic election of the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1970 and his subsequent overthrow in a United States–financed coup d'état in 1973, which installed the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. These historical events also provide the basis for the director's three-part The Battle of Chile (1975–79), a documentation of Allende's nationalization agenda and the internal strife resulting from it. Guzmán's postdictatorship documentaries confront the national trauma of the Pinochet regime, and they emphasize the importance of sustaining collective memory in the face of its erasure. Accordingly, Guzmán draws on various strategies of remembrance, including personal testimony from survivors and historical records via photography and film. The Pearl Button and the film that preceded it, Nostalgia for the Light (2011), extend Guzmán's cinematic engagement with the fragments of memory to the historical traces preserved by natural elements. These elements—for Guzmán, [End Page 40] primarily earth and water—function as historical agents, and his films consider how nonhuman nature shapes the legibility of the past. In this regard, Guzmán's block of quartz is a media object—that is, an act of mediation that encloses, and thereby transmits, a trace of the past. Mediation is not an operation unique to technological media, as the natural elements, in their ceaseless interactions, continually mediate (act as a medium) for each other. As Sean Cubitt Notes, while human communication marks out meaningful distinctions within this "background hum," mediation itself "precedes the separation of the human and the environmental," which is to say, "precedes all separations, all distinctions, all thingliness, objects, and objectivity."1 Guzmán's block of quartz is itself an inscription of the past, an impression formed by the interaction of natural elements, and the political project of his recent documentaries is rooted in their attentiveness to and exploration of these nonhuman modes of mediation. Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed that from the vantage point of the climate crisis, the separation between human history and natural history is an untenable divide.2 The recognition that humanity acts as a geological force dispels the assumption that the environment is too large in scale and changes at a pace too slowly for human actions to affect it. Natural history is not the stable backdrop to human events. The entanglement of natural history and human history, rather, bridges the gap between temporal scales, placing, as Chakrabarty writes, "the geological now of the Anthropocene," designating a new geological epoch that acknowledges humanity's climatic influences, in contact "with the now of human history."3 Nostalgia for the Light and The Pearl Button confront the problem of scale in narrating history. Of the former film, Nilo Couret argues that it understands nostalgia as a movement across time scales. "Toggling between the human, the geologic, and the cosmic," Nostalgia for the Light mediates historical events by emplotting them along spatiotemporal coordinates that traverse these scales.4 Couret writes, "Guzmán alternates between the small detail that unfolds in time and the unfathomable vastness enfolding in time, carrying an event forward and backward in a string of possible and impossible connections across space and time."5 Like Nostalgia for the Light, The Pearl Button places the national history of Chile in relation to nonhuman temporal and spatial dimensions. The Pinochet...

The Blank Mirror of Death:Protest as Self-Creation in Contemporary Fantasy Nancy Huse (bio) Attention to language usually shapes any discussion of fantasy as a literary genre. The parallel worlds and impossible creatures always carry new names; the animals talk in order to signal a transformation of reality; labels combine to produce new categories: a Cucumber King, a Moominmamma somehow bizarre and yet familiar. Recent understandings of language are reflected in contemporary fantasy, particularly in fantasy written in post-war Europe, where the study and writing of children's books have often reflected self-consciously a philosophical and pedagogical climate in which issues of freedom and control are debated. In Sweden, for instance, prominent critics of children's literature such as Sonja Svensson, director of the Swedish Institute for Children's Books, and Vivi Edström, professor of children's literature at the University of Stockholm, commonly incorporate social criteria into their evaluation of children's books,1 while in the Federal Republic of Germany, the Institute for Children's Literature Research at the University of Frankfurt encourages political analyses of children's literature (Fetz 41). The idea of language as a potentially freeing power that can be stifled in a society that does not allow real human community provides a thematic and structural focus for describing four disparate yet contemporaneous writers—Tove Jansson, Astrid Lindgren, Christine Nöstlinger, and Michael Ende. While all four writers clearly reflect twentieth-century concerns, their visions derive from the ancient fantasy tradition involving the dream of an ordered world and meaningful life. All four exploit fantasy both as escapism and as a vehicle for social messages by developing individualistic word play that is rooted in a social identity. Escapism becomes the means to erase false distinctions between the self and others; the retreat into private worlds by means of unique language actually ends in placing emphasis on the world of human relatedness and the desirability and possibility of its transformation. These four writers are linked by their achievements as authors of contemporary fantasy for children who recognize that language can be tautological and that that is ultimately unacceptable to socially conscious human beings. Together they span the past-war years, Jansson and Lindgren as relatively acclaimed Swedish-language writers and Nöstlinger and Ende as more recent popular authors who do not always satisfy literary [End Page 28] critics' aesthetic or political criteria in Germany. While in some ways they comprise a group partly because they are available in English translation, their very diversity illustrates the point that contemporary fantasy is participating in a quest for meaning occasioned by postmodern tolerance of ambiguity and contradiction. As Kathryn Hume remarks about such writers, "They work with full awareness of the void, and do not fall back on old answers or faith" (49). In so doing, these writers offer children the multiple perspectives needed for development. Each writer's canon centers on issues of freedom: Lindgren wrote the Pippi Longstocking books, for example, in a pedagogical context advocating children's liberation, Jansson examines the threat to both freedom and stability posed by forces out of our control, Nöstlinger responds to memories of the Hitler era, and Ende's stories involve the need for creative play as a basis for human community. Thus, it is clear that they deal with philosophical themes and historical events which define personhood in our century. Such writers pose interesting problems for Anglo-American critics, since our critical discourse (e.g., the work of Northrop Frye often applied to children's books) helps to support the notion that the world is orderly and unthreatening to the thinking individual. "That the structure of the psyche is historical . . . is as difficult for us to grasp as that the senses are not themselves natural organs but rather the results of a long process of differentiation within human history" (Jameson 62). Literary theory, including Marxism, feminism, and structuralism, drives home the point that the self is a social construct. As much as we might struggle to separate "the self" from others, and to emphasize its uniqueness, we must confront the fact that our very perceptions of reality are affected by our history, our...

Although the spread and severity of the Spanish Flu pandemic in 1918 have been much more significant than the numbers of COVID-19 so far,[1] no one is able to affirm that the current crisis is nearing its end, and it is plausible to expect that it will overcome the "mother of all pandemics" and become the greatest pandemic event in human history. Such a fear is valid for the whole planet, but even more for Brazil. An observer attentive to the Brazilian scenario today, March 15, 2021, can assume exactly the reverse of the reality we would like to see: the country is considered a new global epicenter of the disease, having recorded rising curves of cases and deaths, and recently reached more than 2 thousand daily deaths.[2]

On a faraway spring morning, in a remote corner of the Roman empire, soldiers crucified a Galilean Jew known as Jesus of Nazareth. No doubt the ruling authorities believed he would be quickly forgotten, a mere blip in history, one of many hundreds they had crucified. Yet, almost two thousand years later, Jesus is widely recognised as one of the most important persons who has ever lived; many would say the most important person.

The article deals with the interconnections between the title and context of Michail Shishkin’s novel “The Capture of Izmail”. Such concepts as “chronotopos”, “truth”, “time”, “moment of time” and “historical trauma” are examined in interrelation, too. A precedent text, “The Capture of Izmail” is looked upon symbolically, like a huge historical deception. Instead of relying on well-known historical landmarks or widely reported cataclysms, Shishkin puts forward a new set of patterns; citing A. Etkind, this is “not a history of events, but a history of humans and texts in their mutual interaction”, – that is, an approach qualified in American literary theory as the new historicism.In the novel’s context, the fact of Izmail’s capture designates a new vector of history understanding, both private and common. When a photographer uses cliché “Say cheese!”, the person is supposed to smile, and this alleged smile appears as a symbol of falsehood which became a norm both in society and in history. According to Shishkin, time should be counted by its moments consisting of personal facts, names and places. Perhaps, that is the way to get rid of historical traumas and, applying Etkind’s metaphor about “the crooked grief”, to straighten it so that the grief would be merged into a “solid state”. Russia, Shishkin seems to believe, stands in need to apply this very approach to history understanding.