Jonathan Gienapp’s lecture, titled “Electing the U.S. President: The Electoral College,” focused on the origins of the Electoral College and attempts to reform it.

“January 6, 2021, was the day that Congress counted and certified the state electoral votes for the 2020 U.S. presidential election. It was the final step in the complex process laid out by the Constitution by which the president of the United States is formally chosen. This final step is usually not very dramatic – a mere formality – but of course that was not the case this past year.

“Understanding what Congress was even doing on January 6 before the Capitol was besieged invites us to ponder the Electoral College – the peculiar and much-criticized mechanism by which the United States chooses its president. Virtually no other modern democracy relies on a system like this one. Why, then, was the Electoral College devised in the first place? And, given all the criticism it has received through the years, why does it remain with us to this day?

“The answers to these questions can be surprising, since the history of the Electoral College is so often clouded by myths.

“This is especially true of the institution’s origins. Why did the Constitution’s authors choose this particular system for electing the president? The most important thing to appreciate is that they chose the Electoral College not because it was the most desirable option, but because it was the least undesirable. The leading alternatives – legislative selection by Congress or a national popular vote – were met with powerful objections. If Congress elected the president, it was feared that the latter would become the puppet of the former, nullifying any hope of executive independence. When it came to a national popular vote, meanwhile, there were worries that, at a time when information moved slowly, especially across such a large nation, voters would be familiar only with the candidates from their home states and thus tend to choose them. There were also grave concerns that the people would be seduced by demagogues. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention chose the Electoral College less because of its virtues than because of its competitors’ perceived shortcomings.

“The Electoral College has always been an oddity. Since it was first used, it has been criticized. For most of the 20th century, there was bipartisan support to reform it. But, more recently, reform has become a partisan issue.

“The late 1960s and early 1970s was a high watermark for Electoral College reform. A constitutional amendment to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote was approved by the House of Representatives by an overwhelming margin, but was subsequently blocked by Southerners in the Senate. This opposition was rooted in race. For decades, white Southerners had systematically disenfranchised African Americans, yet because electoral votes were apportioned based on population, not total voters, Southern states did not sacrifice any political power. Had the Electoral College been replaced by a national popular vote, however, the Southern states would have lost the political power they had come to enjoy.

“This failed attempt to abolish the Electoral College – only the most prominent of many stretching over two centuries – illustrates a vital point. The Electoral College remains with us today for one simple reason: because the U.S. Constitution is so difficult to amend.

“It is important to understand the origins of the Electoral College in light of the ongoing debate over whether to reform it. More often than not, defenders of the Electoral College rely on inaccurate history, falsely claiming that it was designed to work as it does today. Democracy is predicated on public debate, and that debate should ultimately turn on the merits of the question, not historical myths.”

Jonathan Gienapp is an assistant professor of history in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His scholarship focuses on the constitutional, political and legal history of the early United States. His book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press, Belknap, 2018), rethinks the conventional story of American constitutional creation by exploring how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of the document’s existence.

Image: National Guard members stand behind a construction crew as they assemble wire barricades surrounding the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 7, 2021, in Washington, D.C. A pro-Trump mob stormed and desecrated the building the day before as Congress held a joint session to ratify President-elect Joe Biden’s 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

Jonathan Gienapp’s lecture, titled “Electing the U.S. President: The Electoral College,” focused on the origins of the Electoral College and attempts to reform it.

“January 6, 2021, was the day that Congress counted and certified the state electoral votes for the 2020 U.S. presidential election. It was the final step in the complex process laid out by the Constitution by which the president of the United States is formally chosen. This final step is usually not very dramatic – a mere formality – but of course that was not the case this past year.

“Understanding what Congress was even doing on January 6 before the Capitol was besieged invites us to ponder the Electoral College – the peculiar and much-criticized mechanism by which the United States chooses its president. Virtually no other modern democracy relies on a system like this one. Why, then, was the Electoral College devised in the first place? And, given all the criticism it has received through the years, why does it remain with us to this day?

“The answers to these questions can be surprising, since the history of the Electoral College is so often clouded by myths.

“This is especially true of the institution’s origins. Why did the Constitution’s authors choose this particular system for electing the president? The most important thing to appreciate is that they chose the Electoral College not because it was the most desirable option, but because it was the least undesirable. The leading alternatives – legislative selection by Congress or a national popular vote – were met with powerful objections. If Congress elected the president, it was feared that the latter would become the puppet of the former, nullifying any hope of executive independence. When it came to a national popular vote, meanwhile, there were worries that, at a time when information moved slowly, especially across such a large nation, voters would be familiar only with the candidates from their home states and thus tend to choose them. There were also grave concerns that the people would be seduced by demagogues. The delegates to the Constitutional Convention chose the Electoral College less because of its virtues than because of its competitors’ perceived shortcomings.

“The Electoral College has always been an oddity. Since it was first used, it has been criticized. For most of the 20th century, there was bipartisan support to reform it. But, more recently, reform has become a partisan issue.

“The late 1960s and early 1970s was a high watermark for Electoral College reform. A constitutional amendment to replace the Electoral College with a national popular vote was approved by the House of Representatives by an overwhelming margin, but was subsequently blocked by Southerners in the Senate. This opposition was rooted in race. For decades, white Southerners had systematically disenfranchised African Americans, yet because electoral votes were apportioned based on population, not total voters, Southern states did not sacrifice any political power. Had the Electoral College been replaced by a national popular vote, however, the Southern states would have lost the political power they had come to enjoy.

“This failed attempt to abolish the Electoral College – only the most prominent of many stretching over two centuries – illustrates a vital point. The Electoral College remains with us today for one simple reason: because the U.S. Constitution is so difficult to amend.

“It is important to understand the origins of the Electoral College in light of the ongoing debate over whether to reform it. More often than not, defenders of the Electoral College rely on inaccurate history, falsely claiming that it was designed to work as it does today. Democracy is predicated on public debate, and that debate should ultimately turn on the merits of the question, not historical myths.”

Jonathan Gienapp is an assistant professor of history in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His scholarship focuses on the constitutional, political and legal history of the early United States. His book, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Harvard University Press, Belknap, 2018), rethinks the conventional story of American constitutional creation by exploring how and why founding-era Americans’ understanding of their Constitution transformed in the earliest years of the document’s existence.

Image: National Guard members stand behind a construction crew as they assemble wire barricades surrounding the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 7, 2021, in Washington, D.C. A pro-Trump mob stormed and desecrated the building the day before as Congress held a joint session to ratify President-elect Joe Biden’s 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump. (Photo by Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images)

“I took the theme of the course as an opportunity to shine light on two issues that have fallen out of the spotlight due to COVID, climate change and other more pressing news stories: One is Hong Kong, where many are right to worry that the PRC (People’s Republic of China) is not honoring agreements that were put in place many decades ago in preparation for the reversion of Hong Kong to mainland China. The other involves the still-unfolding story of mass detention and persecution of Uyghur Muslims and other Muslim minority peoples in China.

“History doesn’t merely provide a ‘perspective’ on these issues. In both cases, history is the issue.

“In order to understand what is taking place in Hong Kong, even in a rudimentary fashion, you have to go back to the opening decade of the 1800s. For example, you need to know why it was that Hong Kong became a British colony and when and how a lease was put in place that embroiled Hong Kong in a legal and economic agreement that was meant to last 99 years, and why the reversion of Hong Kong happened the exact year it did (1997, the year the lease was up). You need to know what promises Beijing had made to the Hong Kong government and its citizens in the decades leading up to reversion, notably that the ‘the socialist system and socialist policies shall not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and that Hong Kong’s previous capitalist system and life-style shall remain unchanged for 50 years’ (meaning the year 2047).

“These episodes from the 1800s and the 1900s are present with us now. The same is true of the crisis in northwest China, in Xinjiang. Unless you understand the basics of Chinese history of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and the various Chinese regimes of the 20th century, there can be no understanding of why Uyghurs and this region constitute such a preoccupation, such a source of anxiety, for Beijing. One thousand miles away, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is roughly four times the size of California, the largest province-level administrative unit in the People’s Republic of China, accounting for 16 percent of its entire land mass. This vast territory, sparsely populated by Uyghur Muslims and a variety of other non-Han Chinese groups, was conquered and brought into the political orbit of Beijing only very recently in history. Imperial wars of the Qing dynasty – which came at extreme cost in blood and silver – extended from the 1690s to the end of the 18th century, by which point the empire had reached its largest size ever.

“Following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, every subsequent Chinese regime has been expending vast sums of energy, money and blood to maintain the northwest, whose geopolitical significance has never waned. Mao Zedong himself said as much. ‘We say China is a country vast in territory, rich in resources and large in population,’ he wrote in 1956. ‘As a matter of fact, it is the Han nationality whose population is large and the minority nationalities whose territory is vast and whose resources are rich.’

“In my view, history is best understood not primarily as the study of the past but as a methodology. History is a repertoire of techniques of analysis, interpretation, comparison, explanation. Ways of asking questions. Of marshaling sources. Of telling stories about what we find. One can write the history of ancient worlds, to be sure. But one can also do a history of five minutes ago. Of yesterday. Of this year.”

Mullaney is a professor of history in the School of Humanities and Sciences and the author of The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) and Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (UC Press, 2010), and principal editor of Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority (UC Press, 2012).

Image: Uyghur woman passes painted Communist Party of China flag on the wall on June 27, 2017, in Urumqi, China. (Photo by Wang HE/Getty Images)

“I took the theme of the course as an opportunity to shine light on two issues that have fallen out of the spotlight due to COVID, climate change and other more pressing news stories: One is Hong Kong, where many are right to worry that the PRC (People’s Republic of China) is not honoring agreements that were put in place many decades ago in preparation for the reversion of Hong Kong to mainland China. The other involves the still-unfolding story of mass detention and persecution of Uyghur Muslims and other Muslim minority peoples in China.

“History doesn’t merely provide a ‘perspective’ on these issues. In both cases, history is the issue.

“In order to understand what is taking place in Hong Kong, even in a rudimentary fashion, you have to go back to the opening decade of the 1800s. For example, you need to know why it was that Hong Kong became a British colony and when and how a lease was put in place that embroiled Hong Kong in a legal and economic agreement that was meant to last 99 years, and why the reversion of Hong Kong happened the exact year it did (1997, the year the lease was up). You need to know what promises Beijing had made to the Hong Kong government and its citizens in the decades leading up to reversion, notably that the ‘the socialist system and socialist policies shall not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and that Hong Kong’s previous capitalist system and life-style shall remain unchanged for 50 years’ (meaning the year 2047).

“These episodes from the 1800s and the 1900s are present with us now. The same is true of the crisis in northwest China, in Xinjiang. Unless you understand the basics of Chinese history of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) and the various Chinese regimes of the 20th century, there can be no understanding of why Uyghurs and this region constitute such a preoccupation, such a source of anxiety, for Beijing. One thousand miles away, the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region is roughly four times the size of California, the largest province-level administrative unit in the People’s Republic of China, accounting for 16 percent of its entire land mass. This vast territory, sparsely populated by Uyghur Muslims and a variety of other non-Han Chinese groups, was conquered and brought into the political orbit of Beijing only very recently in history. Imperial wars of the Qing dynasty – which came at extreme cost in blood and silver – extended from the 1690s to the end of the 18th century, by which point the empire had reached its largest size ever.

“Following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911, every subsequent Chinese regime has been expending vast sums of energy, money and blood to maintain the northwest, whose geopolitical significance has never waned. Mao Zedong himself said as much. ‘We say China is a country vast in territory, rich in resources and large in population,’ he wrote in 1956. ‘As a matter of fact, it is the Han nationality whose population is large and the minority nationalities whose territory is vast and whose resources are rich.’

“In my view, history is best understood not primarily as the study of the past but as a methodology. History is a repertoire of techniques of analysis, interpretation, comparison, explanation. Ways of asking questions. Of marshaling sources. Of telling stories about what we find. One can write the history of ancient worlds, to be sure. But one can also do a history of five minutes ago. Of yesterday. Of this year.”

Mullaney is a professor of history in the School of Humanities and Sciences and the author of The Chinese Typewriter: A History (MIT Press, 2017) and Coming to Terms with the Nation: Ethnic Classification in Modern China (UC Press, 2010), and principal editor of Critical Han Studies: The History, Representation and Identity of China’s Majority (UC Press, 2012).

Image: Uyghur woman passes painted Communist Party of China flag on the wall on June 27, 2017, in Urumqi, China. (Photo by Wang HE/Getty Images)

James Campbell’s lecture, “Monumental Questions,” sought to provide some historical context for understanding the current controversy over Civil War monuments. What political purpose do monuments and memorials serve? What stories do they tell and what stories do they neglect or actively suppress? Why are we arguing today about monuments erected a century ago?

“There is an infinitude of places in which historical memory is produced and contested – not only in historical monographs and textbooks, but also in historic homes, museums, movies and pretty much every speech delivered by a politician. Monuments and memorials are an obvious example. In erecting a monument, one generation is not simply instructing future generations about what happened in the past; it is also telling them what parts of the past matter, what experiences and stories should be remembered and honored and what can safely be ignored or forgotten.

“The Civil War monuments and memorials that proliferated across the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are a case in point. Even with some of the recent removals, there are still well over a thousand of them still standing. One of the things that I emphasized to students in my lecture was that these monuments were not erected in the immediate aftermath of the war, but more than a quarter-century later. The vast majority appeared between 1890 and 1915. This was also the period that saw the consolidation of the Jim Crow regime, including legal segregation, systematic disfranchisement of Black voters and the terror of lynching. That is not a mere chronological coincidence.

“If you look at some of the dedication speeches delivered at the time, it’s very clear that the monument-building movement was part of a much broader political project – just as the movement to remove those monuments today is part of a much broader political project. Whether recent changes in the memorial landscape, in the ways in which we memorialize our collective past, will lead to the creation of a more just and inclusive politics in the present remains to be seen.”

Campbell is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His research focuses on African American history and the legacy of slavery in America. He also examines the ways in which societies tell stories about their pasts. He is co-editor of Slavery and the University – Histories and Legacies (The University of Georgia Press, 2019) and Race, Nation, and Empire in American History (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 

Image: Black Lives Matter activists occupy the traffic circle underneath the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, now covered in graffiti, on June 13, 2020, at Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

James Campbell’s lecture, “Monumental Questions,” sought to provide some historical context for understanding the current controversy over Civil War monuments. What political purpose do monuments and memorials serve? What stories do they tell and what stories do they neglect or actively suppress? Why are we arguing today about monuments erected a century ago?

“There is an infinitude of places in which historical memory is produced and contested – not only in historical monographs and textbooks, but also in historic homes, museums, movies and pretty much every speech delivered by a politician. Monuments and memorials are an obvious example. In erecting a monument, one generation is not simply instructing future generations about what happened in the past; it is also telling them what parts of the past matter, what experiences and stories should be remembered and honored and what can safely be ignored or forgotten.

“The Civil War monuments and memorials that proliferated across the South in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are a case in point. Even with some of the recent removals, there are still well over a thousand of them still standing. One of the things that I emphasized to students in my lecture was that these monuments were not erected in the immediate aftermath of the war, but more than a quarter-century later. The vast majority appeared between 1890 and 1915. This was also the period that saw the consolidation of the Jim Crow regime, including legal segregation, systematic disfranchisement of Black voters and the terror of lynching. That is not a mere chronological coincidence.

“If you look at some of the dedication speeches delivered at the time, it’s very clear that the monument-building movement was part of a much broader political project – just as the movement to remove those monuments today is part of a much broader political project. Whether recent changes in the memorial landscape, in the ways in which we memorialize our collective past, will lead to the creation of a more just and inclusive politics in the present remains to be seen.”

Campbell is the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History in the School of Humanities and Sciences. His research focuses on African American history and the legacy of slavery in America. He also examines the ways in which societies tell stories about their pasts. He is co-editor of Slavery and the University – Histories and Legacies (The University of Georgia Press, 2019) and Race, Nation, and Empire in American History (University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 

Image: Black Lives Matter activists occupy the traffic circle underneath the statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, now covered in graffiti, on June 13, 2020, at Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia. (Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

Gordon Chang delivered a lecture titled “Anti-Asian Violence in America” that examined the long history of anti-Asian hate crime in the United States.

“This course aimed to give historical background to some of the major events of the year. Very importantly, to me, was the terrible upsurge in anti-Asian violence that swept the country, with thousands of reported incidents of attacks on people who appeared to be Chinese or of Asian ancestry. Victims were verbally harassed, physically assaulted, and in some cases killed, as with the horrific killing of six Asian American women and others in Atlanta in the spring.

“Many in the public were shocked by these events of anti-Asian hatred. What was surprising to me was that people were actually surprised by the violence directed against people who are so-called the “model minority.”

“In my lecture, I posed the question, how did the model minority become the model target in 2021?

“I talked a little bit about the scope of the violence directed against persons of Asian ancestry and the long history of anti-Asian hatred in the country.

“The history of the current moment of anti-Asian violence is a long-standing pattern of hatred against Asians in America that goes back to the mid-19th century when people from China began to arrive in some numbers to the United States and encountered horrible violence directed against them.

“Every Chinese community in the West from the 1860s through the 1880s was violently assaulted. Hundreds of persons of Chinese descent were murdered in California. Residents were driven out, their quarters destroyed, their belongings torched – forced out, never to return. The Chinese were not the only ones to suffer this kind of violence; other Asian ethnicities encountered similar hostility: Filipinos, Koreans and Japanese, as we saw during World War II. Asians were seen as a hated, perpetual foreigner.

“I talked about the 1871 attack on the Chinese in Los Angeles, where 19 Chinese were shot, lynched and mutilated. In 1885, 28 Chinese were victims of a massacre in Rock Springs, Wyoming. In 1887, 35 Chinese were butchered in Hells Canyon, Oregon.

“Students in the class were shocked by this history.

“One result of recent anti-Asian violence has been the awakening of many communities to their own terrible histories. In just the past several months, the cities of Antioch and San Jose have issued apologies for the violent deeds that occurred in those communities in the 19th century. There is some sense of trying to seek reconciliation, or certainly a reckoning, of this dark, ugly past with our present.

“If we look at this history, we can have a better appreciation of the long history of suffering, but also of the contribution of Asians to the country. I think people can develop a different view of those living in the present. Asians have not been peripheral to the country but have been an integral part of the positive and tragic history of the country, particularly the American West.”

Chang is the senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education and the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities. His scholarship examines the historical connections between race and ethnicity in America. He has written and continues to publish in the areas of U.S. diplomacy, America-China relations, the Chinese diaspora, Asian American history and global history. His most recent books have examined the history of Chinese railroad workers in 19th-century America.

Image: During a nationwide day of action to rally against anti-Asian violence, supporters of the Asian American community hold signs in the Flushing neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York City on March 27, 2021. (Photo by Emaz/VIEWpress)

Gordon Chang delivered a lecture titled “Anti-Asian Violence in America” that examined the long history of anti-Asian hate crime in the United States.

“This course aimed to give historical background to some of the major events of the year. Very importantly, to me, was the terrible upsurge in anti-Asian violence that swept the country, with thousands of reported incidents of attacks on people who appeared to be Chinese or of Asian ancestry. Victims were verbally harassed, physically assaulted, and in some cases killed, as with the horrific killing of six Asian American women and others in Atlanta in the spring.

“Many in the public were shocked by these events of anti-Asian hatred. What was surprising to me was that people were actually surprised by the violence directed against people who are so-called the “model minority.”

“In my lecture, I posed the question, how did the model minority become the model target in 2021?

“I talked a little bit about the scope of the violence directed against persons of Asian ancestry and the long history of anti-Asian hatred in the country.

“The history of the current moment of anti-Asian violence is a long-standing pattern of hatred against Asians in America that goes back to the mid-19th century when people from China began to arrive in some numbers to the United States and encountered horrible violence directed against them.

“Every Chinese community in the West from the 1860s through the 1880s was violently assaulted. Hundreds of persons of Chinese descent were murdered in California. Residents were driven out, their quarters destroyed, their belongings torched – forced out, never to return. The Chinese were not the only ones to suffer this kind of violence; other Asian ethnicities encountered similar hostility: Filipinos, Koreans and Japanese, as we saw during World War II. Asians were seen as a hated, perpetual foreigner.

“I talked about the 1871 attack on the Chinese in Los Angeles, where 19 Chinese were shot, lynched and mutilated. In 1885, 28 Chinese were victims of a massacre in Rock Springs, Wyoming. In 1887, 35 Chinese were butchered in Hells Canyon, Oregon.

“Students in the class were shocked by this history.

“One result of recent anti-Asian violence has been the awakening of many communities to their own terrible histories. In just the past several months, the cities of Antioch and San Jose have issued apologies for the violent deeds that occurred in those communities in the 19th century. There is some sense of trying to seek reconciliation, or certainly a reckoning, of this dark, ugly past with our present.

“If we look at this history, we can have a better appreciation of the long history of suffering, but also of the contribution of Asians to the country. I think people can develop a different view of those living in the present. Asians have not been peripheral to the country but have been an integral part of the positive and tragic history of the country, particularly the American West.”

Chang is the senior associate vice provost for undergraduate education and the Olive H. Palmer Professor in Humanities. His scholarship examines the historical connections between race and ethnicity in America. He has written and continues to publish in the areas of U.S. diplomacy, America-China relations, the Chinese diaspora, Asian American history and global history. His most recent books have examined the history of Chinese railroad workers in 19th-century America.

Image: During a nationwide day of action to rally against anti-Asian violence, supporters of the Asian American community hold signs in the Flushing neighborhood in the Queens borough of New York City on March 27, 2021. (Photo by Emaz/VIEWpress)

Partha Shil delivered a lecture titled “Laboring Lives and the Pandemic in South Asia, c. 2020-21,” about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Indian working classes and the urban poor over the last two years.

“We grow up with assumptions woven into our language, assumptions that shape how we understand and narrate our present and our past. For instance, terms like ‘home’ or ‘shelter in place’ assume the presence of or access to a stable ‘home’ or a ‘shelter’ – an assumption that the urban poor in large parts of the world cannot make. The blindness woven in the language of policymakers became evident during the pandemic when governments implemented lockdowns and asked people to stay at home. On March 24, 2020, the Indian government implemented a 21-day lockdown with less than four hours of notice. This lockdown was extended many times. As the country shut down, its workforce found itself shut out. The middle classes retreated into their homes, while the working poor of Indian cities realized that their precarious livelihoods could barely keep them going beyond a few weeks. As their ability to pay rents for their city dwellings and their ability to afford food dwindled or disappeared, the city became an impossible space to survive in. For the poor, there was literally no shelter in place.

“The urban poor of India were left with no choice but to return to their village homes, homes that they had left behind in order to find better prospects in the cities. This took a dramatic form when millions of Indian workers started to flee the cities in the middle of the lockdown. Some were lucky enough to find rides home. But as transportation shut down, many found themselves walking on foot hundreds of miles to reach their villages. This exodus soon turned into a humanitarian crisis as migrant workers suffered unspeakable hardships en route. Some made it back. Some died on the way, either out of exhaustion or in tragic accidents.

“When labor historians of India witnessed this horror in news reports, they could immediately identify in it the activation of a long-term pattern of labor migration which has served as a subsistence strategy of the poor. The urban poor in India were returning to their villages because that is how capital had always acquired cheap labor in the cities – by keeping the village alive.

“How did this come to be? The existing scholarship in Indian labor history gives us the following account.

“Since the 19th century, Indian cities have relied on migrant workers for industrial enterprises and a range of menial services that middle classes have come to expect as part of urban life. These migrant workers have toiled for paltry wages in the factories, workshops and households of these cities. Even though a supplement to their dwindling agrarian incomes, migrant workers’ urban wages were never enough for them to become permanent city-dwellers. Workers had to keep their rural links alive as a fallback option during unemployment or sickness. When in distress in the city, workers would return to their villages, to whatever little plots of land they still had or to agrarian labor, to survive. This rural link was in turn used by the urban employer to continue to pay fewer wages under the pretext that migrant workers were never invested in long-term residence in cities. Capital could leech off the migrant status of workers. The pandemic and the exodus of migrant workers from the cities was one of those exceptional calamities when the anatomy of this oppression was revealed in all its bare form.

“This lecture was an attempt to help students understand the pandemic from the perspective of the laboring poor. Their mass exodus might have come across as an undoing of lockdown protocols or their attachment to their village hearths might come across as evidence of their incomplete urbanization and traditionalism. But on closer historical scrutiny, what we witnessed were the ways in which Indian workers have sought to survive the specific form of capitalism in modern India, one that requires them to survive by keeping both the city and the village alive.”

Shil is an assistant professor of history and works in the field of modern South Asian history. He specializes in the history of 19th- and early-20th-century Eastern India, in particular histories of labor and state formation.

Image: Indians travel in a bullock cart outside a deserted railway station, as India remains under an unprecedented extended lockdown over the highly contagious coronavirus (COVID-19) on May 11, 2020, in New Delhi, India. (Photo by Yawar Nazir/Getty Images)

Partha Shil delivered a lecture titled “Laboring Lives and the Pandemic in South Asia, c. 2020-21,” about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Indian working classes and the urban poor over the last two years.

“We grow up with assumptions woven into our language, assumptions that shape how we understand and narrate our present and our past. For instance, terms like ‘home’ or ‘shelter in place’ assume the presence of or access to a stable ‘home’ or a ‘shelter’ – an assumption that the urban poor in large parts of the world cannot make. The blindness woven in the language of policymakers became evident during the pandemic when governments implemented lockdowns and asked people to stay at home. On March 24, 2020, the Indian government implemented a 21-day lockdown with less than four hours of notice. This lockdown was extended many times. As the country shut down, its workforce found itself shut out. The middle classes retreated into their homes, while the working poor of Indian cities realized that their precarious livelihoods could barely keep them going beyond a few weeks. As their ability to pay rents for their city dwellings and their ability to afford food dwindled or disappeared, the city became an impossible space to survive in. For the poor, there was literally no shelter in place.

“The urban poor of India were left with no choice but to return to their village homes, homes that they had left behind in order to find better prospects in the cities. This took a dramatic form when millions of Indian workers started to flee the cities in the middle of the lockdown. Some were lucky enough to find rides home. But as transportation shut down, many found themselves walking on foot hundreds of miles to reach their villages. This exodus soon turned into a humanitarian crisis as migrant workers suffered unspeakable hardships en route. Some made it back. Some died on the way, either out of exhaustion or in tragic accidents.

“When labor historians of India witnessed this horror in news reports, they could immediately identify in it the activation of a long-term pattern of labor migration which has served as a subsistence strategy of the poor. The urban poor in India were returning to their villages because that is how capital had always acquired cheap labor in the cities – by keeping the village alive.

“How did this come to be? The existing scholarship in Indian labor history gives us the following account.

“Since the 19th century, Indian cities have relied on migrant workers for industrial enterprises and a range of menial services that middle classes have come to expect as part of urban life. These migrant workers have toiled for paltry wages in the factories, workshops and households of these cities. Even though a supplement to their dwindling agrarian incomes, migrant workers’ urban wages were never enough for them to become permanent city-dwellers. Workers had to keep their rural links alive as a fallback option during unemployment or sickness. When in distress in the city, workers would return to their villages, to whatever little plots of land they still had or to agrarian labor, to survive. This rural link was in turn used by the urban employer to continue to pay fewer wages under the pretext that migrant workers were never invested in long-term residence in cities. Capital could leech off the migrant status of workers. The pandemic and the exodus of migrant workers from the cities was one of those exceptional calamities when the anatomy of this oppression was revealed in all its bare form.

“This lecture was an attempt to help students understand the pandemic from the perspective of the laboring poor. Their mass exodus might have come across as an undoing of lockdown protocols or their attachment to their village hearths might come across as evidence of their incomplete urbanization and traditionalism. But on closer historical scrutiny, what we witnessed were the ways in which Indian workers have sought to survive the specific form of capitalism in modern India, one that requires them to survive by keeping both the city and the village alive.”

Shil is an assistant professor of history and works in the field of modern South Asian history. He specializes in the history of 19th- and early-20th-century Eastern India, in particular histories of labor and state formation.

Image: Indians travel in a bullock cart outside a deserted railway station, as India remains under an unprecedented extended lockdown over the highly contagious coronavirus (COVID-19) on May 11, 2020, in New Delhi, India. (Photo by Yawar Nazir/Getty Images)

Robert Crews delivered a lecture titled “The Year the Afghan War Ended?” that used history to show how despite the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, conflict in the country is far from over.

“The dominant narrative in the U.S. is that the Afghan war is over. But for Afghan society, the war is hardly over – it’s just entered a new phase.

“It’s easy to think of Afghanistan as a place that’s far from us, alien and wholly different. It’s hard to think about the ways in which we have a shared legacy, but it’s a place that has been very much part of our past. Thinking about the war is so important because we have had so many Americans who have made enormous sacrifices there.

“My aim is to put Afghans at the center of the story and invite Stanford students to put themselves in their shoes and consider what American power means, what its consequences are, and to question the dominant narrative which suggests that the Afghan war is over.

“I think it’s kind of a revelation for our generation of students who have no memory of Sept. 11, 2001, and who have received a particular narrative from popular culture about American power, to think about how they fit into this wider world.

“For those of us who have been studying Afghan politics, we are trying to make sense of the new challenges that are facing the country now under Taliban rule, starting with the dire challenge of reviving the health care system, avoiding a mass famine and dealing with the displacement of millions across the planet.

“A look at the history of the Taliban shows that they are very committed to a whole set of norms which they are not going to budge on, such as their gendered policies toward women, their intolerance toward any kind of religious pluralism and their antagonism toward non-Pashtun people who are not allied with them ideologically.

“The return of the Taliban means that a lot of what many Afghans had hoped to make of the society will no longer be possible.

“Many Afghans see August 2021 as a turning point in which all the struggles that they had attempted to realize in building a pluralistic, civil society – including the possibility of women working outside the home and pursuing an education beyond adolescence – have all been extinguished for half the population.

“I often begin my conversation with students about Afghanistan by sharing examples of youth culture there, particularly Afghan hip-hop, as a way to show connections they have in common. Students recognize the same rhythms, the same lyrics and a universal story of love and disillusionment, the struggle to fight and not give up. We see Afghan men, women and children speaking about their own lives in a way that I can’t reproduce. In the classroom, it’s very effective.

“Through music, film, literature and art, we capture the imagination, which is something universal. It is shared; it transcends boundaries. Crossing these disciplinary boundaries is the first step toward developing historical thinking, which can help us understand the dramatic turn of events in Afghanistan and what that means for our own questioning about what our ethical responsibilities are.

“This is a pivotal moment in global politics and is something that we are all going to be studying for long into the future. Because the war is not really over. It isn’t really over for any of us as we confront problems on a global scale, including a displaced population – some of whom will join us here in California.

“What’s happening in Afghanistan belongs in our everyday conversations and at Stanford – in the dormitory, in the cafeteria, in the classroom – because this generation is going to inherit a long list of controversies and challenges that they will have to face.”

Crews is a professor of history and is the author of Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation (Harvard University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2012) and The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2009). He is also editor in chief of Afghanistan, an academic journal that takes a cross-cultural, humanities-oriented approach to the study of Afghanistan and its surrounding regions.

Image: A defaced image of women in a mural in the city of Nimroz, western Afghanistan. The Taliban regained control of Afghanistan and its capital, Kabul, in mid-August of this year, almost 20 years after they were ousted from power by a U.S.-led coalition in 2001. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Robert Crews delivered a lecture titled “The Year the Afghan War Ended?” that used history to show how despite the U.S. withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan in August 2021, conflict in the country is far from over.

“The dominant narrative in the U.S. is that the Afghan war is over. But for Afghan society, the war is hardly over – it’s just entered a new phase.

“It’s easy to think of Afghanistan as a place that’s far from us, alien and wholly different. It’s hard to think about the ways in which we have a shared legacy, but it’s a place that has been very much part of our past. Thinking about the war is so important because we have had so many Americans who have made enormous sacrifices there.

“My aim is to put Afghans at the center of the story and invite Stanford students to put themselves in their shoes and consider what American power means, what its consequences are, and to question the dominant narrative which suggests that the Afghan war is over.

“I think it’s kind of a revelation for our generation of students who have no memory of Sept. 11, 2001, and who have received a particular narrative from popular culture about American power, to think about how they fit into this wider world.

“For those of us who have been studying Afghan politics, we are trying to make sense of the new challenges that are facing the country now under Taliban rule, starting with the dire challenge of reviving the health care system, avoiding a mass famine and dealing with the displacement of millions across the planet.

“A look at the history of the Taliban shows that they are very committed to a whole set of norms which they are not going to budge on, such as their gendered policies toward women, their intolerance toward any kind of religious pluralism and their antagonism toward non-Pashtun people who are not allied with them ideologically.

“The return of the Taliban means that a lot of what many Afghans had hoped to make of the society will no longer be possible.

“Many Afghans see August 2021 as a turning point in which all the struggles that they had attempted to realize in building a pluralistic, civil society – including the possibility of women working outside the home and pursuing an education beyond adolescence – have all been extinguished for half the population.

“I often begin my conversation with students about Afghanistan by sharing examples of youth culture there, particularly Afghan hip-hop, as a way to show connections they have in common. Students recognize the same rhythms, the same lyrics and a universal story of love and disillusionment, the struggle to fight and not give up. We see Afghan men, women and children speaking about their own lives in a way that I can’t reproduce. In the classroom, it’s very effective.

“Through music, film, literature and art, we capture the imagination, which is something universal. It is shared; it transcends boundaries. Crossing these disciplinary boundaries is the first step toward developing historical thinking, which can help us understand the dramatic turn of events in Afghanistan and what that means for our own questioning about what our ethical responsibilities are.

“This is a pivotal moment in global politics and is something that we are all going to be studying for long into the future. Because the war is not really over. It isn’t really over for any of us as we confront problems on a global scale, including a displaced population – some of whom will join us here in California.

“What’s happening in Afghanistan belongs in our everyday conversations and at Stanford – in the dormitory, in the cafeteria, in the classroom – because this generation is going to inherit a long list of controversies and challenges that they will have to face.”

Crews is a professor of history and is the author of Afghan Modern: The History of a Global Nation (Harvard University Press, 2015) and co-editor of Under the Drones: Modern Lives in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Borderlands (Harvard University Press, 2012) and The Taliban and the Crisis of Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2009). He is also editor in chief of Afghanistan, an academic journal that takes a cross-cultural, humanities-oriented approach to the study of Afghanistan and its surrounding regions.

Image: A defaced image of women in a mural in the city of Nimroz, western Afghanistan. The Taliban regained control of Afghanistan and its capital, Kabul, in mid-August of this year, almost 20 years after they were ousted from power by a U.S.-led coalition in 2001. (Photo by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images)

Nancy Kollmann, along with Amir Weiner, delivered a lecture called “Russia’s Love Affair with Authoritarianism: From Ivan the Terrible to Putin.” Kollmann focused on the origins of Russia’s authoritarian and autocratic rule to show students how Putin follows in this long tradition.

“I tried to give students a way to think about history in complex terms of causality, and to think about change and continuity, and not think that anything was predetermined.

“We posed to students the problem of Russia having had a centralized government over centuries and how Putin rules in that way. I explained the larger structural and institutional reasons why, from the early centuries, Russia rules centrally. It starts with climate and geography. Moscow is located in a harsh climate where agriculture is productive at only a subsistence level; Russians supplemented with hunting, but all in all it was a resource-poor environment, very thinly settled, always on the edge. For the state to get the resources to fulfill its ambitions of power, it needed to amass more territory to get more people to tax and perhaps natural resources, such as furs from Siberia.

“The adjacent lands were populated with many different kinds of people, societies and cultures, languages and histories. East into Siberia they encountered native tribes with animist religions and some Buddhists and Muslims as well; south to the steppe were Turkic-speaking nomads who were Islamic; moving west into Ukraine and Belarus they encountered Catholics, Lutherans, Jews and a wide variety of languages. Given their lack of manpower, the easiest way to rule a continental empire with so much diversity was to take a twofold approach: They expropriated the resources that they wanted and enforced military control, and otherwise let them be. They ‘tolerated’ difference. Everyone kept their languages, religions, identities and cultures.

“I showed students these structural realities, but I argued it is not inevitable that an authoritarian regime results out of it. Geography is not destiny; people make choices and the 19th and 20th centuries were full of new ideas, new social mobility, new economic changes that did provide alternatives to rule. There is always a tension between the material conditions and social institutions that shape the world a person is born into and how the individual responds to it. That is the question we posed when we turned to Vladimir Putin.

“He is a product of the Soviet Union, which was shaped on the old Russian Empire in terms of central government and tolerating diversity of peoples. It also had, of course, a powerful ideological framework that shaped Putin’s worldview.

“How Putin rules is a combination of his own personality, his own experiences and the structures of history that shaped the world he grew up in. As a product of the Soviet system, he believes that centralized control over all of that big space is exactly what Russia should be doing – it’s consistent with the country’s past. At the same time, he brings many modern sensibilities, particularly modern ways of control that were not possible before the 20th and 21st centuries.

“We took the span of centuries of history to try to get the students to think historically, and to think in an open-ended way about history. I pointed their attention to the power of material factors like geography and climate, and enduring strength of institutions like tsarist autocracy and centralized bureaucratic rule. But we also argued that individuals shape the history they are born into. We wanted to leave the students pondering the balance of all these factors.”

Kollmann is the William H. Bonsall Professor in History in the School of Humanities and Sciences and the author of The Russian Empire 1450-1801 (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Her research examines the question of how politics worked in an autocracy, and she is interested in how early modern states, particularly empires, tried to create social cohesion and stability through ritual, ideology, law and violence.

Image: St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, Russia. (Photo by Savushkin/Getty Images)

Nancy Kollmann, along with Amir Weiner, delivered a lecture called “Russia’s Love Affair with Authoritarianism: From Ivan the Terrible to Putin.” Kollmann focused on the origins of Russia’s authoritarian and autocratic rule to show students how Putin follows in this long tradition.

“I tried to give students a way to think about history in complex terms of causality, and to think about change and continuity, and not think that anything was predetermined.

“We posed to students the problem of Russia having had a centralized government over centuries and how Putin rules in that way. I explained the larger structural and institutional reasons why, from the early centuries, Russia rules centrally. It starts with climate and geography. Moscow is located in a harsh climate where agriculture is productive at only a subsistence level; Russians supplemented with hunting, but all in all it was a resource-poor environment, very thinly settled, always on the edge. For the state to get the resources to fulfill its ambitions of power, it needed to amass more territory to get more people to tax and perhaps natural resources, such as furs from Siberia.

“The adjacent lands were populated with many different kinds of people, societies and cultures, languages and histories. East into Siberia they encountered native tribes with animist religions and some Buddhists and Muslims as well; south to the steppe were Turkic-speaking nomads who were Islamic; moving west into Ukraine and Belarus they encountered Catholics, Lutherans, Jews and a wide variety of languages. Given their lack of manpower, the easiest way to rule a continental empire with so much diversity was to take a twofold approach: They expropriated the resources that they wanted and enforced military control, and otherwise let them be. They ‘tolerated’ difference. Everyone kept their languages, religions, identities and cultures.

“I showed students these structural realities, but I argued it is not inevitable that an authoritarian regime results out of it. Geography is not destiny; people make choices and the 19th and 20th centuries were full of new ideas, new social mobility, new economic changes that did provide alternatives to rule. There is always a tension between the material conditions and social institutions that shape the world a person is born into and how the individual responds to it. That is the question we posed when we turned to Vladimir Putin.

“He is a product of the Soviet Union, which was shaped on the old Russian Empire in terms of central government and tolerating diversity of peoples. It also had, of course, a powerful ideological framework that shaped Putin’s worldview.

“How Putin rules is a combination of his own personality, his own experiences and the structures of history that shaped the world he grew up in. As a product of the Soviet system, he believes that centralized control over all of that big space is exactly what Russia should be doing – it’s consistent with the country’s past. At the same time, he brings many modern sensibilities, particularly modern ways of control that were not possible before the 20th and 21st centuries.

“We took the span of centuries of history to try to get the students to think historically, and to think in an open-ended way about history. I pointed their attention to the power of material factors like geography and climate, and enduring strength of institutions like tsarist autocracy and centralized bureaucratic rule. But we also argued that individuals shape the history they are born into. We wanted to leave the students pondering the balance of all these factors.”

Kollmann is the William H. Bonsall Professor in History in the School of Humanities and Sciences and the author of The Russian Empire 1450-1801 (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2012). Her research examines the question of how politics worked in an autocracy, and she is interested in how early modern states, particularly empires, tried to create social cohesion and stability through ritual, ideology, law and violence.

Image: St. Basil’s Cathedral, Moscow, Russia. (Photo by Savushkin/Getty Images)

Amir Weiner, along with Nancy Kollmann, delivered a lecture called “Russia’s Love Affair with Authoritarianism: From Ivan the Terrible to Putin.” Weiner focused on the Communist era and how the collapse of the Soviet Union shaped Russian politics today and its president, Vladimir Putin.

“As Nancy and I delivered the lecture, I realized we were talking to people who were born 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For them, Communism may be dead, but for hundreds of millions of people who reside on former Soviet territory and coping with its multiple legacies, it’s a very real matter.

“The Communist totalitarian order of single-party dictatorship, command economy and state terror continue to exert major influence on the political culture and institutions of the Russian Federation. This was the system Vladimir Putin was born into, and even if he acknowledges its weaknesses, its alleged achievements outweigh its faults.

“The collapse of the Soviet Union left a tremendous sense of loss and humiliation on the present-day Russian elite and population. The experience of watching a superpower reduced overnight to a dysfunctional regional power with nuclear weapons, outmoded economy and huge demographic and territorial losses gave rise to a vengeful agenda and a strong desire to restore the lost glory without fundamental reforms.

“What we see today is a system of patronal presidentialism, built on three pillars inherited from the Soviet past. First, fake politics, fake elections, fake parties. There are no viable autonomous institutions in present-day Russia. All institutions are prone to intervention by the perpetually elected president, through his political police, the FSB, the successor of the infamous KGB. Hence, the quip that ‘during the Soviet era, the state had security services; today the security services have a state’ has a strong touch of reality.

“Second, a system of informal networks and friendships that allow access to resources and power with total lack of transparency or regard to written laws. Political power and wealth mingle; close associates of Putin pay for huge pet projects, like the Olympic Games, in exchange for immunity and control of economic assets.

“Third, selective, brutal and brazen terror. Political opponents are killed or imprisoned on bogus charges. Just look at the killing of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader, who was shot in 2015 some 100 meters from the Kremlin. Imagine Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell getting shot, execution-style, 100 yards from the White House. Or the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a critic of the regime, by polonium-210 in London in 2006, and of Alexei Navalny by Novichok nerve agent last year.

“Most challenging for Putin’s system is the succession dilemma. No one can tell who will succeed Putin. It makes all of us appreciate how crucial it is to have a secure, legitimate and safe succession mechanism.

“I always tell my students that history offers tools for analysis when making decisions; it shows the limitations, circumstances, confinements and the opportunities available in the present. Understanding present-day Russia starts with knowing its history. The British historian, Thomas Carlisle, said that ‘the present is the living sum-total of the whole past.’ That’s maybe a little bit hyped, but not by much. I think that to ignore history is to do so at your own risk.”

Weiner is an associate professor of history who studies totalitarian movements and regimes with a focus on the Soviet polity; population politics; the Second World War; and modern mass violence. He is currently researching the KGB and the Soviet surveillance state.

Image: Russian President Vladimir Putin observes an exhibition prior to his meeting with veterans of World War II in Staraya Russa, Novgorod region, Russia, April 6, 2015. Putin spoke against attempts to redraw history to serve current political needs. (Photo by Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

Amir Weiner, along with Nancy Kollmann, delivered a lecture called “Russia’s Love Affair with Authoritarianism: From Ivan the Terrible to Putin.” Weiner focused on the Communist era and how the collapse of the Soviet Union shaped Russian politics today and its president, Vladimir Putin.

“As Nancy and I delivered the lecture, I realized we were talking to people who were born 10 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union. For them, Communism may be dead, but for hundreds of millions of people who reside on former Soviet territory and coping with its multiple legacies, it’s a very real matter.

“The Communist totalitarian order of single-party dictatorship, command economy and state terror continue to exert major influence on the political culture and institutions of the Russian Federation. This was the system Vladimir Putin was born into, and even if he acknowledges its weaknesses, its alleged achievements outweigh its faults.

“The collapse of the Soviet Union left a tremendous sense of loss and humiliation on the present-day Russian elite and population. The experience of watching a superpower reduced overnight to a dysfunctional regional power with nuclear weapons, outmoded economy and huge demographic and territorial losses gave rise to a vengeful agenda and a strong desire to restore the lost glory without fundamental reforms.

“What we see today is a system of patronal presidentialism, built on three pillars inherited from the Soviet past. First, fake politics, fake elections, fake parties. There are no viable autonomous institutions in present-day Russia. All institutions are prone to intervention by the perpetually elected president, through his political police, the FSB, the successor of the infamous KGB. Hence, the quip that ‘during the Soviet era, the state had security services; today the security services have a state’ has a strong touch of reality.

“Second, a system of informal networks and friendships that allow access to resources and power with total lack of transparency or regard to written laws. Political power and wealth mingle; close associates of Putin pay for huge pet projects, like the Olympic Games, in exchange for immunity and control of economic assets.

“Third, selective, brutal and brazen terror. Political opponents are killed or imprisoned on bogus charges. Just look at the killing of Boris Nemtsov, the opposition leader, who was shot in 2015 some 100 meters from the Kremlin. Imagine Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell getting shot, execution-style, 100 yards from the White House. Or the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, a critic of the regime, by polonium-210 in London in 2006, and of Alexei Navalny by Novichok nerve agent last year.

“Most challenging for Putin’s system is the succession dilemma. No one can tell who will succeed Putin. It makes all of us appreciate how crucial it is to have a secure, legitimate and safe succession mechanism.

“I always tell my students that history offers tools for analysis when making decisions; it shows the limitations, circumstances, confinements and the opportunities available in the present. Understanding present-day Russia starts with knowing its history. The British historian, Thomas Carlisle, said that ‘the present is the living sum-total of the whole past.’ That’s maybe a little bit hyped, but not by much. I think that to ignore history is to do so at your own risk.”

Weiner is an associate professor of history who studies totalitarian movements and regimes with a focus on the Soviet polity; population politics; the Second World War; and modern mass violence. He is currently researching the KGB and the Soviet surveillance state.

Image: Russian President Vladimir Putin observes an exhibition prior to his meeting with veterans of World War II in Staraya Russa, Novgorod region, Russia, April 6, 2015. Putin spoke against attempts to redraw history to serve current political needs. (Photo by Sasha Mordovets/Getty Images)

Paula Findlen delivered a lecture titled “The Plague Generation: Love, Death, Healing and Friendship in a Time of Pandemic” where she discussed The Decameron, a collection of 100 stories written by the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio during the mid-14th century as the bubonic plague ravaged Italy. The book centers around 10 young men and women who leave Florence and go into isolation in the nearby countryside where each evening, they share stories, ranging from comedic, slapstick entertainment to more serious reflections about what it means to be human and one’s moral responsibility in society.

“I wanted to talk about plague because that is the best-documented event from the past of an entire world experiencing pandemic but also reflecting on it in real time.

“The many different perspectives people offer on that historic experience of pandemic, in its global, communal and local versions, is helpful for us to think about the different ways we parse out and understand our own experience of COVID.

“When people today read the introduction to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, this famous set of tales written right after the Black Death in Florence in 1348, they are struck by how many parallels to modern life there are – except for the very important fact that not as many of us are dying during COVID, as people did during the Black Death, where anywhere from one- to two-thirds of the community was eviscerated.

“But that’s not really what Boccaccio wants to write about. He wants to write about what happens to human behavior and the many different ways to respond to the world during a pandemic. One of the fundamental questions for Boccaccio is, what does it mean to be human and how does a pandemic expose the very core of our humanity?

“A pandemic is never one problem. It’s many different problems – not only how to cope with the medical problem, but how to deal collectively with a population experiencing a highly contagious disease.

“You have to have a greater understanding of the human condition, and our relationship to the environment, but also to each other, to actually solve these many problems. It’s not just one problem.

“The Decameron is a kind of moral quarantine where 10 young people – and it’s important that they’re young, because young people are most likely to have the energy and even openness to find new ways to solve the problems of their society when they go back and rebuild after the pandemic. They left Florence with the hope that when they return they are fortified, mentally and psychologically, to withstand its challenges and ready to take on the responsibility of addressing them with creativity and perhaps a greater understanding of the human condition, because, in a way, that’s the antidote to pandemic for Boccaccio – to have citizens ready to assist society’s reemergence.

“Boccaccio wrote about plague not just as an individual crisis, but as a collective problem of this entire society. All of society’s preexisting problems become magnified during a pandemic. Boccaccio realized that engaging these problems was a crucial step in envisioning a post-pandemic future. These are words coming from the middle of the 14th century, but we can recognize that Boccaccio is pinpointing a problem that we’re struggling with ourselves right now.

“A little bit of courage and a lot of common sense, as I like to say, is what I think Boccaccio is trying to offer, while also telling really great, entertaining and rollicking tales about the greed, the love, the passions and the failings of his society, which is of course, what makes The Decameron great literature, not just a plague tale.”

Findlen is the Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and director of the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Findlen authored a review essay, “What Would Boccaccio Say About COVID-19?” about the Florentine humanist’s experience with the Black Death in Renaissance Italy.

Image: Hospital workers in full protective wear standing together in a group embrace. (Photo by xavierarnau/Getty Images)

Paula Findlen delivered a lecture titled “The Plague Generation: Love, Death, Healing and Friendship in a Time of Pandemic” where she discussed The Decameron, a collection of 100 stories written by the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio during the mid-14th century as the bubonic plague ravaged Italy. The book centers around 10 young men and women who leave Florence and go into isolation in the nearby countryside where each evening, they share stories, ranging from comedic, slapstick entertainment to more serious reflections about what it means to be human and one’s moral responsibility in society.

“I wanted to talk about plague because that is the best-documented event from the past of an entire world experiencing pandemic but also reflecting on it in real time.

“The many different perspectives people offer on that historic experience of pandemic, in its global, communal and local versions, is helpful for us to think about the different ways we parse out and understand our own experience of COVID.

“When people today read the introduction to Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, this famous set of tales written right after the Black Death in Florence in 1348, they are struck by how many parallels to modern life there are – except for the very important fact that not as many of us are dying during COVID, as people did during the Black Death, where anywhere from one- to two-thirds of the community was eviscerated.

“But that’s not really what Boccaccio wants to write about. He wants to write about what happens to human behavior and the many different ways to respond to the world during a pandemic. One of the fundamental questions for Boccaccio is, what does it mean to be human and how does a pandemic expose the very core of our humanity?

“A pandemic is never one problem. It’s many different problems – not only how to cope with the medical problem, but how to deal collectively with a population experiencing a highly contagious disease.

“You have to have a greater understanding of the human condition, and our relationship to the environment, but also to each other, to actually solve these many problems. It’s not just one problem.

“The Decameron is a kind of moral quarantine where 10 young people – and it’s important that they’re young, because young people are most likely to have the energy and even openness to find new ways to solve the problems of their society when they go back and rebuild after the pandemic. They left Florence with the hope that when they return they are fortified, mentally and psychologically, to withstand its challenges and ready to take on the responsibility of addressing them with creativity and perhaps a greater understanding of the human condition, because, in a way, that’s the antidote to pandemic for Boccaccio – to have citizens ready to assist society’s reemergence.

“Boccaccio wrote about plague not just as an individual crisis, but as a collective problem of this entire society. All of society’s preexisting problems become magnified during a pandemic. Boccaccio realized that engaging these problems was a crucial step in envisioning a post-pandemic future. These are words coming from the middle of the 14th century, but we can recognize that Boccaccio is pinpointing a problem that we’re struggling with ourselves right now.

“A little bit of courage and a lot of common sense, as I like to say, is what I think Boccaccio is trying to offer, while also telling really great, entertaining and rollicking tales about the greed, the love, the passions and the failings of his society, which is of course, what makes The Decameron great literature, not just a plague tale.”

Findlen is the Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and director of the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. Findlen authored a review essay, “What Would Boccaccio Say About COVID-19?” about the Florentine humanist’s experience with the Black Death in Renaissance Italy.

Image: Hospital workers in full protective wear standing together in a group embrace. (Photo by xavierarnau/Getty Images)

Kathryn Olivarius delivered a lecture titled,  “Public Health as Public Wealth: Yellow Fever, COVID-19 and the Politics of Immunity.” Olivarius examined the individualistic approaches to COVID immunity in parallel to the repeated yellow fever epidemics that killed some 150,000 people between the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Civil War in 1861.

“I think students were surprised to learn that yellow fever was such a huge problem in the 19th-century Deep South. There was no cure or vaccination against yellow fever. Immunity, maybe ironically, was a person’s only sure-fire protection from the virus, and that was only gained by getting sick and surviving it. About half of all people died in the ‘acclimating’ process.

“Back then, people did not understand how yellow fever spread, but public health officials in many cities experimented with sanitation, drainage and, most importantly, quarantine to try and curb epidemics. But New Orleans seldom imposed quarantine. City leaders did not want to damage New Orleans’s commercial prosperity or undercut individual merchants. Politicians did not see it as their duty to keep people safe from yellow fever, but rather help them be successful once they survived it.

“There are strong similarities between this past and with the COVID-19 pandemic today. In the early months of 2020, many politicians, governors – even the president! – railed against lockdown, claiming the economic costs were more terrible than the coronavirus itself. Some said that it was Americans’ ‘patriotic’ duty to willingly face COVID, become immune and get back to work. Of course, pursuing herd immunity in this manner came with social costs – lots of people got sick and many died.

“We’ve also seen that, like in the past, people are conditioned to write themselves out of statistics and believe they are the exception to any rule – that if we got sick with COVID, we would of course be fine. People in antebellum New Orleans said exactly the same thing with regard to yellow fever. Many of them were wrong.

“Another lesson is that pandemics and epidemics do not treat all people equally and that they often make any pre-existing social inequalities worse. Viruses don’t think, but humans do. And the white elites of antebellum New Orleans made choices about the value of immunity that benefitted them at the expense of the masses – especially enslaved people. For example, capitalists only employed or purchased ‘acclimated’ people – that is, yellow fever survivors – essentially demanding that people take on an extreme amount of disease risk to function at the most basic level.

“History matters. It teaches us that humans, and policies, are complicated and that cause and effect is never a simple line. COVID-19 disproportionately impacted poor people, people who are underemployed, people of color and people who are already marginalized in our society. The pandemic didn’t necessarily create new inequalities, but it showed the seams of our society and all the inequalities that were already there and, in some cases, exacerbated them – that’s where history provides a really powerful context for this.

“Today, in a place like Silicon Valley and in a world that is going through this huge pandemic, a humanistic approach is especially important.”

Olivarius is a historian of the 19th-century United States, primarily interested in the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, capitalism and disease. Her forthcoming book, Necropolis: Disease, Power and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, Belknap, 2022) concerns yellow fever, immunity and inequality.

Stanford News Service spoke to Olivarius about some of this work in March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Read more here.

Image: People wearing masks walk near a sign reading “Staying home saves lives” amid the coronavirus pandemic on April 28, 2020, in New York City. (Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)

Kathryn Olivarius delivered a lecture titled,  “Public Health as Public Wealth: Yellow Fever, COVID-19 and the Politics of Immunity.” Olivarius examined the individualistic approaches to COVID immunity in parallel to the repeated yellow fever epidemics that killed some 150,000 people between the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the Civil War in 1861.

“I think students were surprised to learn that yellow fever was such a huge problem in the 19th-century Deep South. There was no cure or vaccination against yellow fever. Immunity, maybe ironically, was a person’s only sure-fire protection from the virus, and that was only gained by getting sick and surviving it. About half of all people died in the ‘acclimating’ process.

“Back then, people did not understand how yellow fever spread, but public health officials in many cities experimented with sanitation, drainage and, most importantly, quarantine to try and curb epidemics. But New Orleans seldom imposed quarantine. City leaders did not want to damage New Orleans’s commercial prosperity or undercut individual merchants. Politicians did not see it as their duty to keep people safe from yellow fever, but rather help them be successful once they survived it.

“There are strong similarities between this past and with the COVID-19 pandemic today. In the early months of 2020, many politicians, governors – even the president! – railed against lockdown, claiming the economic costs were more terrible than the coronavirus itself. Some said that it was Americans’ ‘patriotic’ duty to willingly face COVID, become immune and get back to work. Of course, pursuing herd immunity in this manner came with social costs – lots of people got sick and many died.

“We’ve also seen that, like in the past, people are conditioned to write themselves out of statistics and believe they are the exception to any rule – that if we got sick with COVID, we would of course be fine. People in antebellum New Orleans said exactly the same thing with regard to yellow fever. Many of them were wrong.

“Another lesson is that pandemics and epidemics do not treat all people equally and that they often make any pre-existing social inequalities worse. Viruses don’t think, but humans do. And the white elites of antebellum New Orleans made choices about the value of immunity that benefitted them at the expense of the masses – especially enslaved people. For example, capitalists only employed or purchased ‘acclimated’ people – that is, yellow fever survivors – essentially demanding that people take on an extreme amount of disease risk to function at the most basic level.

“History matters. It teaches us that humans, and policies, are complicated and that cause and effect is never a simple line. COVID-19 disproportionately impacted poor people, people who are underemployed, people of color and people who are already marginalized in our society. The pandemic didn’t necessarily create new inequalities, but it showed the seams of our society and all the inequalities that were already there and, in some cases, exacerbated them – that’s where history provides a really powerful context for this.

“Today, in a place like Silicon Valley and in a world that is going through this huge pandemic, a humanistic approach is especially important.”

Olivarius is a historian of the 19th-century United States, primarily interested in the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, capitalism and disease. Her forthcoming book, Necropolis: Disease, Power and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, Belknap, 2022) concerns yellow fever, immunity and inequality.

Stanford News Service spoke to Olivarius about some of this work in March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdowns. Read more here.

Image: People wearing masks walk near a sign reading “Staying home saves lives” amid the coronavirus pandemic on April 28, 2020, in New York City. (Photo by Alexi Rosenfeld/Getty Images)