Pick Your Poison: Climate, Disease, and Human Disaster from the Middle Ages to Today
Channel: AskHistorians
Date: 2020-09-16

What makes a disaster: the event itself or the way humans respond? This panel addresses that pressing question through case studies of disasters and the methodologies that historians use to study them.

What makes something a disaster? The trigger itself...or the way that people respond? This panel flips our understanding of pandemics and other disasters upside down by emphasizing the importance of human reactions above the science--especially any lessons we might learn from the sometimes-horrific results of human encounter with cataclysm.
Learn more about this panel, and find data visualizations, at: https://www.askhistorians.com/pick-your-poison
This panel includes a live Q+A with the panelists: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ituzk7/pick_your_poison_climate_disease_and_human/

Featured in this panel are:

"The Importance of Epidemics for Social History", by Christopher Rose
"The Anti-Jewish Riots in the First Castilian Civil War", by Daria Berman
"Computing Cholera: Topic Modelling Catalogue Entries for the Correspondence of the General Board of Health (1848-1871)", by Chris Day
"Galt margr óverðr þessa ófriðar: The Samalas Eruption, Unusual Weather, and the end of the Icelandic Commonwealth", by Adam Bierstedt

Moderated by Stephanie Carlson
Captioning courtesy of Hannah Friedman

This panel is part of the AskHistorians 2020 Digital Conference. For more Conference content, please go to: https://www.askhistorians.com/2020-digital-conference