MOVING TO FRONT FROM YESTERDAY--COMMENTS NOW OPEN FOR OTHER SUGGESTIONS
Dr. Roger Albin (Michigan) writes:
As you publicized the Snowden podcast and as many of your audience are probably compulsive readers looking for useful and engaging reading material, the following may be of interest:
Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome – which deals extensively with the impacts of epidemic disease on the later Roman Empire.
JR MacNeill’s Mosquito Empire – disease impacts in the history of the Western Hemisphere.
Elizabeth Fenn’s Pox Americana – on the Smallpox epidemic roughly coincident with the American Revolution and its considerable consequences.
Charles Mann’s more popular books on the impacts of the European invasion of the Western Hemisphere contain a lot of relevant material on one of the most consequential processes in modern history.
As Harper makes abundantly clear in his fine book, epidemic disease often interacted with climate fluctuations. Two excellent books that deal with the impacts of climate fluctuations and epidemic disease:
Geoffrey Parker’s Global Crisis – a comprehensive overview of the misnamed Little Ice Age centered on the 17th century.
John Brooke’s Climate Change and the Course of Global History – a remarkably ambitious overview.
