![]() ![]() For example, the shortage of labor it created helped bring about the end of serfdom and create a free peasantry that could bargain for wages, so that death and freedom marched together. This enormous biological crisis also prompted fundamental social and cultural changes. Communities throughout Europe lost half their populations, and it took more than 100 years to recover. The pandemic commonly known as the Black Death devastated Asia, Europe and North Africa between 13, shaping human history for centuries. ![]() This realization can help us cope with these difficult days. When we consider the changes, both short and long term, that the coronavirus may bring for us, we should remember that the world we know today was shaped by the pandemics of the past. If history illustrates the effect of pandemics on whole communities, then literature gives us a more intimate view. In this time, the humanities, and history and literature in particular, offer important insights into how people have dealt with the trauma of pandemics in the past, and how to make sense of a world now in many ways beyond our control. What does it mean to be human during a major biological crisis like the coronavirus pandemic? To see all of our economic, social and cultural achievements and challenges suddenly take a back seat to the sheer physical fact of disease, contagion and death? What can the humanities - the study of what it means to be human - offer to help us survive such trauma? By Tyler Stovall for San Francisco Chronicle ![]()
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