Barbara Wertheim Tuchman was an American historian and author. She won the Pulitzer Prize twice, for The Guns of August (1962), a best-selling history of the prelude to and the first month of World War I, and Stilwell and the American Experience in China (1971), a biography of General Joseph Stilwell.
The 1918–1920 flu pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza epidemic or by the common misnomer Spanish flu, was an exceptionally deadly global influenza pandemic caused by the H1N1 influenza A virus. The earliest documented case was March 1918 in the state of Kansas in the United States, with further cases recorded in France, Germany and the United Kingdom in April. Two years later, nearly a third of the global population, or an estimated 500 million people, had been infected in four successive waves. Estimates of deaths range from 17 million to 50 million, and possibly as high as 100 million, making it one of the deadliest pandemics in history.
Constance Elaine Trimmer Willis, commonly known as Connie Willis, is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. She has won eleven Hugo Awards and seven Nebula Awards for particular works—more major SF awards than any other writer—most recently the "Best Novel" Hugo and Nebula Awards for Blackout/All Clear (2010). She was inducted by the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2009 and the Science Fiction Writers of America named her its 28th SFWA Grand Master in 2011.
To Say Nothing of the Dog: or, How We Found the Bishop's Bird Stump at Last is a 1997 comic science fiction novel by Connie Willis. It uses the same setting, including time-traveling historians, which Willis explored in Fire Watch (1982),Doomsday Book (1992), and Blackout/All Clear (2010).
Edward Winslow Bryant Jr. was an American science fiction and horror writer sometimes associated with the Dangerous Visions series of anthologies that bolstered The New Wave. At the time of his death, he resided in North Denver.
Fire Watch is a book of short stories by Connie Willis, first published in 1984, that touches on time travel, nuclear war, the end of the world, and cornball humour.
Rosa Cuthbert Guy was a Trinidad-born American writer who grew up in the New York metropolitan area. Her family had immigrated and she was orphaned when young. Raised in foster homes, she later was acclaimed for her books of fiction for adults and young people that stressed supportive relationships.
"Journey to the Past" is a song written by lyricist Lynn Ahrens and composer Stephen Flaherty for the animated musical film Anastasia (1997). Originally recorded for the film by American actress and singer Liz Callaway in her title role as the singing voice of Anastasia – who is going by her nickname "Anya" at the time – the song expresses the character's desire to follow sparse clues about her past in the hopes of learning more about her family and who she is. The third song written and recorded for the film, Ahrens and Flaherty conceived "Journey to the Past" as a means of expressing the different emotions Anya feels while she prepares to venture out on her own for the first time. Accompanying a musical sequence during which Anya travels from her Russian orphanage to St. Petersburg, the song incorporates the film's central themes about home, love and family.
Hualing Nieh Engle, née Nieh Hua-ling, is a Chinese novelist, fiction writer, and poet. She is a professor emerita at the University of Iowa.
"Fire Watch" is a science fiction novelette by American writer Connie Willis. The story, first published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine in February 1982, involves a time-traveling historian who goes back to the Blitz in London, to participate in the fire lookout at St. Paul's Cathedral.
Deborah Willis is a contemporary African-American artist, photographer, curator of photography, photographic historian, author, and educator. Among her awards and honors, she is a 2000 MacArthur Fellow. She is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts of New York University.
Blackout and All Clear are the two volumes that constitute a 2010 science fiction novel by American author Connie Willis. Blackout was published February 2, 2010 by Spectra. The second part, the conclusion All Clear, was released as a separate book on October 19, 2010. The diptych won the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Novel, the 2011 Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, and the 2011 Hugo Award for Best Novel. These two volumes are the most recent of four books and a short story that Willis has written involving time travel from Oxford during the mid-21st century, all of which won multiple awards.
Rhoda Dolores Le Poer Power, was a pioneer English broadcaster and children's writer. The highly regarded set of stories that make up Redcap Runs Away (1952) are set in the Middle Ages and told by a runaway minstrel boy.
The social history of viruses describes the influence of viruses and viral infections on human history. Epidemics caused by viruses began when human behaviour changed during the Neolithic period, around 12,000 years ago, when humans developed more densely populated agricultural communities. This allowed viruses to spread rapidly and subsequently to become endemic. Viruses of plants and livestock also increased, and as humans became dependent on agriculture and farming, diseases such as potyviruses of potatoes and rinderpest of cattle had devastating consequences.
In epidemiology, a virgin soil epidemic is an epidemic in which populations that previously were in isolation from a pathogen are immunologically unprepared upon contact with the novel pathogen. Virgin soil epidemics have occurred with European colonization, particularly when European explorers and colonists brought diseases to lands they conquered in the Americas, Australia and Pacific Islands.
Howard Markel is an American physician and medical historian. At the end of 2023, Markel retired from the University of Michigan Medical School, where he served as the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the University's Center for the History of Medicine. He was also a professor of psychiatry, health management and policy, history, and pediatrics and communicable diseases. Markel writes extensively on major topics and figures in the history of medicine and public health.
In 1510, an acute respiratory disease emerged in Asia before spreading through North Africa and Europe during the first chronicled, inter-regional flu pandemic generally recognized by medical historians and epidemiologists. Influenza-like illnesses had been documented in Europe since at least Charlemagne, with 1357's outbreak the first to be called influenza, but the 1510 flu pandemic is the first to be pathologically described following communication advances brought about by the printing press. Flu became more widely referred to as coqueluche and coccolucio in France and Sicily during this pandemic, variations of which became the most popular names for flu in early modern Europe. The pandemic caused significant disruption in government, church, and society with near-universal infection and a mortality rate of around 1%.
In 1557, a pandemic strain of influenza emerged in Asia, then spread to Africa, Europe, and eventually the Americas. This flu was highly infectious and presented with intense, occasionally lethal symptoms. Medical historians like Thomas Short, Lazare Rivière and Charles Creighton gathered descriptions of catarrhal fevers recognized as influenza by modern physicians attacking populations with the greatest intensity between 1557 and 1559. The 1557 flu saw governments, for possibly the first time, inviting physicians to instill bureaucratic organization into epidemic responses. It is also the first pandemic where influenza is pathologically linked to miscarriages, given its first English names, and is reliably recorded as having spread globally. Influenza caused higher burial rates, near-universal infection, and economic turmoil as it returned in repeated waves.
Lone Simonsen is a Danish epidemiologist and professor of population health sciences. Since the beginning of 2020, she has been the director of PandemiX, an interdisciplinary pandemic research center at Roskilde University. In 2023 PandemiX was established as a Center of Excellence funded by the Danish National Research Foundation.
