Author: James Belich Publisher: Princeton University Press ISBN: 0691219168 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 640
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.
Author: Stephen Person Publisher: Bearport Publishing ISBN: 1936088886 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 32
Book Description
On a hot September day in 1924, Jesus Lajun noticed a terrible smell coming from his house in Los Angeles. He went down to his basement and discovered a dead rat, which he picked up and tossed in the trash. A few days later, Lajun came down with a fever and noticed a strange, purple lump on his thigh. Soon Lajun was dead, as was his daughter, several of his neighbors, his ambulance driver, and even the priest who had performed his funeral. All of them died from the same illness! What killed Jesus Lajun and quickly spread with disturbing ease to the people around him? A doctor studying the case soon discovered that it was plague, a deadly disease that’s spread by fleas and rodents—including rats. In Bubonic Plague: The Black Death!, children will learn all about the three forms this disease takes in the human body—bubonic, pneumonic, and septicemic—including how the disease spreads, the worst outbreaks in history, and how doctors have developed effective medicines to combat the illness. Most important, children learn how to avoid catching bubonic plague in the first place!
Author: Barbara Krasner Publisher: Capstone ISBN: 1496644891 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 36
Book Description
The bubonic plague is a disease spread by fleas that live on rats. Outbreaks of the disease killed millions of people. Read this book to learn more about the history of this infectious disease.
Author: David K. Randall Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393609464 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 304
Book Description
A spine-chilling saga of virulent racism, human folly, and the ultimate triumph of scientific progress. For Chinese immigrant Wong Chut King, surviving in San Francisco meant a life in the shadows. His passing on March 6, 1900, would have been unremarkable if a city health officer hadn’t noticed a swollen black lymph node on his groin—a sign of bubonic plague. Empowered by racist pseudoscience, officials rushed to quarantine Chinatown while doctors examined Wong’s tissue for telltale bacteria. If the devastating disease was not contained, San Francisco would become the American epicenter of an outbreak that had already claimed ten million lives worldwide. To local press, railroad barons, and elected officials, such a possibility was inconceivable—or inconvenient. As they mounted a cover-up to obscure the threat, ending the career of one of the most brilliant scientists in the nation in the process, it fell to federal health officer Rupert Blue to save a city that refused to be rescued. Spearheading a relentless crusade for sanitation, Blue and his men patrolled the squalid streets of fast-growing San Francisco, examined gory black buboes, and dissected diseased rats that put the fate of the entire country at risk. In the tradition of Erik Larson and Steven Johnson, Randall spins a spellbinding account of Blue’s race to understand the disease and contain its spread—the only hope of saving San Francisco, and the nation, from a gruesome fate.
Author: Stephen Porter Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited ISBN: 1445656868 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 591
Book Description
The definitive history of the virulent and fatal plague outbreaks that wiped out half of London's populations from the medieval Black Death of the 1340s to the Great Plagues of the seventeenth century.
Author: John Aberth Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 144222391X Category : History Languages : en Pages : 499
Book Description
The Black Death of the late Middle Ages is often described as the greatest natural disaster in the history of humankind. More than fifty million people, half of Europe’s population, died during the first outbreak alone from 1347 to 1353. Plague then returned fifteen more times through to the end of the medieval period in 1500, posing the greatest challenge to physicians ever recorded in the history of the medical profession. This engrossing book provides the only comprehensive history of the medical response to the Black Death over time. Leading historian John Aberth has translated many unknown plague treatises from nine different languages that vividly illustrate the human dimensions of the horrific scourge. He includes doctors’ remarkable personal anecdotes, showing how their battles to combat the disease (which often afflicted them personally) and the scale and scope of the plague led many to question ancient authorities. Dispelling many myths and misconceptions about medicine during the Middle Ages, Aberth shows that plague doctors formulated a unique and far-reaching response as they began to treat plague as a poison, a conception that had far-reaching implications, both in terms of medical treatment and social and cultural responses to the disease in society as a whole.
Author: Norman F. Cantor Publisher: Simon and Schuster ISBN: 1476797749 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 256
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.
Author: Gail Jarrow Publisher: Boyds Mills Press ISBN: 1629795623 Category : Juvenile Nonfiction Languages : en Pages : 201
Book Description
Uncover the true story of America's first plague epidemic in 1900 in this book is perfect to share with young readers looking for a historical perspective of the Covid-19/Coronavirus pandemic that recently gripped the world. In March 1900, San Francisco's health department investigated a strange and horrible death in Chinatown. A man had died of bubonic plague, one of the world's deadliest diseases. But how could that be possible? Acclaimed author and scientific expert Gail Jarrow brings the history of a medical mystery to life in vivid and exciting detail for young readers. She spotlights the public health doctors who desperately fought to end it, the political leaders who tried to keep it hidden, and the brave scientists who uncovered the plague's secrets. This title includes photographs and drawings, a glossary, a timeline, further resources, an author's note, and source notes.
Author: Orhan Pamuk Publisher: Penguin Random House India Private Limited ISBN: 9354927521 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 801
Book Description
It is April 1900, in the Levant, on the imaginary island of Mingheria-the twenty-ninth state of the Ottoman Empire-located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half are Orthodox Greeks, and tension is high between the two. When a plague arrives-brought either by Muslim pilgrims returning from the Mecca or by merchant vessels coming from Alexandria-the island revolts. To stop the epidemic, the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II sends his most accomplished quarantine expert to the island-an Orthodox Christian. Some of the Muslims, including followers of a popular religious sect and its leader Sheikh Hamdullah, refuse to take precautions or respect the quarantine. And then a murder occurs. As the plague continues its rapid spread, the Sultan sends a second doctor to the island, this time a Muslim, and strict quarantine measures are declared. But the incompetence of the island's governor and local administration and the people's refusal to respect the bans doom the quarantine to failure, and the death count continues to rise. Faced with the danger that the plague might spread to the West and to Istanbul, the Sultan bows to international pressure and allows foreign and Ottoman warships to blockade the island. Now the people of Mingheria are on their own, and they must find a way to defeat the plague themselves. Steeped in history and rife with suspense, Nights of Plague is an epic story set more than one hundred years ago, with themes that feel remarkably contemporary.
Author: James Belich
Author: Stephen Person
Author: Barbara Krasner
Author: David K. Randall
Author: Stephen Porter
Author: Carol Benedict
Author: John Aberth
Author: Norman F. Cantor
Author: Gail Jarrow
Author: Orhan Pamuk