The Contagion of Liberty
The Contagion of Liberty

Author: Andrew M. Wehrman

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2022-12-06

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1421444674

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Now an LA Times Book Prize finalist: a timely and fascinating account of the raucous public demand for smallpox inoculation during the American Revolution and the origin of vaccination in the United States. Finalist of the LA Times Book Prize for History by the LA Times The Revolutionary War broke out during a smallpox epidemic, and in response, General George Washington ordered the inoculation of the Continental Army. But Washington did not have to convince fearful colonists to protect themselves against smallpox—they were the ones demanding it. In The Contagion of Liberty, Andrew M. Wehrman describes a revolution within a revolution, where the violent insistence for freedom from disease ultimately helped American colonists achieve independence from Great Britain. Inoculation, a shocking procedure introduced to America by an enslaved African, became the most sought-after medical procedure of the eighteenth century. The difficulty lay in providing it to all Americans and not just the fortunate few. Across the colonies, poor Americans rioted for equal access to medicine, while cities and towns shut down for quarantines. In Marblehead, Massachusetts, sailors burned down an expensive private hospital just weeks after the Boston Tea Party. This thought-provoking history offers a new dimension to our understanding of both the American Revolution and the origins of public health in the United States. The miraculous discovery of vaccination in the early 1800s posed new challenges that upended the revolutionaries' dream of disease eradication, and Wehrman reveals that the quintessentially American rejection of universal health care systems has deeper roots than previously known. During a time when some of the loudest voices in the United States are those clamoring against efforts to vaccinate, this richly documented book will appeal to anyone interested in the history of medicine and politics, or who has questioned government action (or lack thereof) during a pandemic.

Revolutionary Contagion and International Politics
Revolutionary Contagion and International Politics

Author: Chad E. Nelson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-08-18

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 0197601944

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A unique theory of what happens when leaders fear a revolution abroad will spread to their own country and how that affects international relations. When do leaders fear that a revolution elsewhere will spread to their own polities, and what are the international effects of this fear? In Revolutionary Contagion, Chad E. Nelson develops and tests a theory that explains how states react to ideological-driven revolutions that have occurred in other nations. To do this, he analyzes four key revolutionary movements over two centuries-liberalism, communism, fascism, and Islamism. He further explains that the key to understanding the response to revolutions lies in focusing on the extent to which leaders fear upheaval in their own countries. According to the theory, Nelson argues, fear of contagion is driven more by the characteristics of the host rather than the activities of the infecting agents. In other words, leaders will fear revolutionary contagion when they have significant revolutionary opposition movements that have an ideological affinity with the revolutionary state. A powerful theory of the profound effects revolutions have on international relations, this book shows why one simply cannot make sense of international politics--including patterns of alliances and wars--in certain situations without considering the fear of contagion.

Revolutionary Contagion
Revolutionary Contagion

Author: Saumitra Jha

Publisher:

Published: 2023

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13:

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We compare political mobilization and support for democratic values during the French Revolution among the home bailliages and among individual members of French regiments sent with the Comte de Rochambeau to fight alongside American revolutionaries (1781-83), to others also assigned there who failed to arrive due to logistical failures and British blockade. We provide evidence for revolutionary contagion: bailliages with 10% more Rochambeau veterans were 6.4% more likely to submit grievances to the King that were Most Strongly Democratic" in 1789. They mobilize political clubs earlier, are more likely to engage in revolt and as individuals were more likely to show loyalty to moderate democratic revolutionary reforms both within the army and the National Assembly. Other veterans mobilize too, but less so and not for democratic principles. Similarly, exposure to Enlightenment ideas has limited effects absent American veterans. We interpret these results as reflecting the complementarity between exposure to democratic ideas and organizational skills of veterans in generating contagion between two of the world's great revolutions.

Revolutionary Contagion and International Politics
Revolutionary Contagion and International Politics

Author: Chad E. Nelson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-08-10

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 0197601928

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A unique theory of what happens when leaders fear a revolution abroad will spread to their own country and how that affects international relations. When do leaders fear that a revolution elsewhere will spread to their own polities, and what are the international effects of this fear? In Revolutionary Contagion, Chad E. Nelson develops and tests a theory that explains how states react to ideological-driven revolutions that have occurred in other nations. To do this, he analyzes four key revolutionary movements over two centuries-liberalism, communism, fascism, and Islamism. He further explains that the key to understanding the response to revolutions lies in focusing on the extent to which leaders fear upheaval in their own countries. According to the theory, Nelson argues, fear of contagion is driven more by the characteristics of the host rather than the activities of the infecting agents. In other words, leaders will fear revolutionary contagion when they have significant revolutionary opposition movements that have an ideological affinity with the revolutionary state. A powerful theory of the profound effects revolutions have on international relations, this book shows why one simply cannot make sense of international politics--including patterns of alliances and wars--in certain situations without considering the fear of contagion.

Thought Contagion
Thought Contagion

Author: Aaron Lynch

Publisher:

Published: 2008-08-06

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0786725648

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Fans of Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Bennet, and Richard Dawkins (as well as science buffs and readers of Wired Magazine) will revel in Aaron Lynch’s groundbreaking examination of memetics--the new study of how ideas and beliefs spread. What characterizes a meme is its capacity for displacing rival ideas and beliefs in an evolutionary drama that determines and changes the way people think. Exactly how do ideas spread, and what are the factors that make them genuine thought contagions? Why, for instance, do some beliefs spread throughout society, while others dwindle to extinction? What drives those intensely held beliefs that spawn ideological and political debates such as views on abortion and opinions about sex and sexuality?By drawing on examples from everyday life, Lynch develops a conceptual basis for understanding memetics. Memes evolve by natural selection in a process similar to that of Genes in evolutionary biology. What makes an idea a potent meme is how effectively it out-propagates other ideas. In memetic evolution, the "fittest ideas” are not always the truest or the most helpful, but the ones best at self replication.Thus, crash diets spread not because of lasting benefit, but by alternating episodes of dramatic weight loss and slow regain. Each sudden thinning provokes onlookers to ask, "How did you do it?” thereby manipulating them to experiment with the diet and in turn, spread it again. The faster the pounds return, the more often these people enter that disseminating phase, all of which favors outbreaks of the most pathogenic diets. Like a software virus traveling on the Internet or a flu strain passing through a city, thought contagions proliferate by programming for their own propagation. Lynch argues that certain beliefs spread like viruses and evolve like microbes, as mutant strains vie for more adherents and more hosts. In its most revolutionary aspect, memetics asks not how people accumulate ideas, but how ideas accumulate people. Readers of this intriguing theory will be amazed to discover that many popular beliefs about family, sex, politics, religion, health, and war have succeeded by their "fitness” as thought contagions.

The Common Wind
The Common Wind

Author: Julius S. Scott

Publisher: Verso Books

Published: 2018-11-27

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1788732472

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Winner of the 2019 Stone Book Award, Museum of African American History A remarkable intellectual history of the slave revolts that made the modern revolutionary era The Common Wind is a gripping and colorful account of the intercontinental networks that tied together the free and enslaved masses of the New World. Having delved deep into the gray obscurity of official eighteenth-century records in Spanish, English, and French, Julius S. Scott has written a powerful “history from below.” Scott follows the spread of “rumors of emancipation” and the people behind them, bringing to life the protagonists in the slave revolution.By tracking the colliding worlds of buccaneers, military deserters, and maroon communards from Venezuela to Virginia, Scott records the transmission of contagious mutinies and insurrections in unparalleled detail, providing readers with an intellectual history of the enslaved. Though The Common Wind is credited with having “opened up the Black Atlantic with a rigor and a commitment to the power of written words,” the manuscript remained unpublished for thirty-two years. Now, after receiving wide acclaim from leading historians of slavery and the New World, it has been published by Verso for the first time, with a foreword by the academic and author Marcus Rediker.

The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies
The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies

Author: Tracy C. Davis

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2008-11-13

Total Pages: 361

ISBN-13: 1139828185

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Since the turn of the century, Performance Studies has emerged as an increasingly vibrant discipline. Its concerns - embodiment, ethical research and social change - are held in common with many other fields, however a unique combination of methods and applications is used in exploration of the discipline. Bridging live art practices - theatre, performance art and dance - with technological media, and social sciences with humanities, it is truly hybrid and experimental in its techniques. This Companion brings together specially commissioned essays from leading scholars who reflect on their own experiences in Performance Studies and the possibilities this offers to representations of identity, self-and-other, and communities. Theories which have been absorbed into the field are applied to compelling topics in current academic, artistic and community settings. The collection is designed to reflect the diversity of outlooks and provide a guide for students as well as scholars seeking a perspective on research trends.

Revolutionary Medicine
Revolutionary Medicine

Author: Jeanne E Abrams

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2013-09-13

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 081475936X

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An engaging history of the role that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin played in the origins of public health in America. Before the advent of modern antibiotics, one’s life could be abruptly shattered by contagion and death, and debility from infectious diseases and epidemics was commonplace for early Americans, regardless of social status. Concerns over health affected the Founding Fathers and their families as it did slaves, merchants, immigrants, and everyone else in North America. As both victims of illness and national leaders, the Founders occupied a unique position regarding the development of public health in America. Historian Jeanne E. Abrams’s Revolutionary Medicine refocuses the study of the lives of George and Martha Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John and Abigail Adams, and James and Dolley Madison away from politics to the perspective of sickness, health, and medicine. For the Founders, republican ideals fostered a reciprocal connection between individual health and the “health” of the nation. Studying the encounters of these American Founders with illness and disease, as well as their viewpoints about good health, not only provides a richer and more nuanced insight into their lives, but also opens a window into the practice of medicine in the eighteenth century, which is at once intimate, personal, and first hand. Today’s American public health initiatives have their roots in the work of America’s Founders, for they recognized early on that government had compelling reasons to shoulder some new responsibilities with respect to ensuring the health and well-being of its citizenry—beginning the conversation about the country’s state of medicine and public healthcare that continues to be a work in progress.

The Contagion Next Time
The Contagion Next Time

Author: Sandro Galea

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 0197576427

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A better and healthier time to be alive than ever -- An unhealthy country -- An unhealthy world -- Who we are, the foundational forces -- Where we live, work, and play -- Politics, power, and money -- Compassion -- Social, racial, and economic justice -- Health as a public good -- Understanding what matters most -- Working in complexity and doubt -- Humility and informing the public conversation.

The Artificial Intelligence Contagion
The Artificial Intelligence Contagion

Author: David Barnhizer

Publisher: SCB Distributors

Published: 2019-05-01

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 0999874780

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Artificial Intelligence/Robotics: Have we opened a Pandora's Box? As AI/robotics eliminates jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels—underfunded or non-existent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction without comparable job creation—will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence as we fight over shrinking resources. “Ambitious, deeply researched, and far reaching in its scope and conclusions, Contagion is actually several books in one. Its summary of what AI is and will likely become is a standalone revelation. It also offers a critique of socio-economic ripple effects that verge on dystopian, and essays and “case studies” of specific sectors or regions, notably a chapter on China’s fusion of AI and social control.” JEFF LONG, New York Times Best-selling Author “A sobering look at the far-reaching impact that artificial intelligence may have on the economy, the workforce, democracy and all of humanity. The Artificial Intelligence Contagion is a bellwether for anyone seeking to comprehend the global disruption coming our way.” —DAVID COOPER, President and Technologist , Massive Designs “We see in the rush to develop AI the arrogance of the human species. Often buried by the exuberance over what AI might do is the massive dislocation it can cause. David and Daniel Barnhizer masterfully lead us through the societal challenges AI poses and offer possible solutions that will enable us to survive the AI contagion.” —KENNETH A. GRADY, Member, Advisory Boards, Elevate Services, Inc., MDR Lab, and LARI Ltd. This may be "the scariest book ever".