History Lessons

History in a Crisis — Lessons for Covid-19

Writing in the heady days of new antibiotics and immunizations, esteemed microbiologists Macfarlane Burnet and David White predicted in 1972 that “the most likely forecast about the future of infectious diseases is that it will be very dull.” When asked to explain past events, historians are quick to assert the importance of context. If you want to understand how or why something happened, you ...

History Lessons from Bacteria

Microbes have been catapulted into the spotlight again by recent studies showing that uniquely modern phenomena, like jet lag and artificial sweeteners, can affect health by altering the microbiome (Suez et al., 2014; Thaiss et al., 2014). However, even as the nature of our current relationship with bacteria unfolds, DNA sequencing and proteomic approaches are giving us a fascinating glimpse in...

Representing history: on structuring history lessons as design

We report on a design experiment in which history lessons are structured in terms of the design and refinement of visual forms that can afford powerful reasoning about the nature of history as an ongoing, contested socio-cultural construction.

How to live forever: lessons of history.

Conceptualizing the world: Lessons from history

Throughout history, philosophers, scientists, and other scholars have named and organized the salient elements of the world. These efforts have led to conceptualizations that differ widely in both content and form. This paper argues that all conceptualizations are biased, both because they depend on the purposes for which they have been created, and because they are closely tied to the world vi...