Cholera revolts: a class struggle we may not like

Few have studied cholera revolts comparatively, and certainly not over the vast terrain from Asiatic Russia to Quebec or across time from the first European cholera wave of the 1830s to the twentieth century. Scholars have instead concentrated on the first European cholera wave in the 1830s and have tended to explain cholera’s social violence within the political contexts of individual nations, despite these riots raging across vast differences in political landscapes from Czarist Russia to New York City but with similar fears and conspiracy theories of elites inventing cholera to cull populations of the poor. Moreover, the history of cholera’s social toxins runs against present generalizations on why epidemics spawn blame and violence against others. Cholera riots continued, and in Italy and Russia became geographically more widespread, vicious, and destructive long after the disease had lost its mystery. The article then poses the question of why historians on the left have not studied the class struggles provoked by cholera, with riots of 10,000, murdering state officials and doctors, destroying hospitals, town halls, and in the case of Donetsk, an entire city. Finally, the article draws parallels between Europe’s cholera experiences and those in West Africa with Ebola in 2014

Historical parallels, Ebola virus disease and cholera: understanding community distrust and social violence with epidemics

In the three West African countries most affected by the recent Ebola virus disease (EVD) outbreak, resistance to public health measures contributed to the startling speed and persistence of this epidemic in the region. But how do we explain this resistance, and how have people in these communities understood their actions? By comparing these recent events to historical precedents during Cholera outbreaks in Europe in the 19th century we show that these events have not been new to history or unique to Africa. Community resistance must be analysed in context and go beyond simple single-variable determinants. Knowledge and respect of the cultures and beliefs of the afflicted is essential for dealing with threatening disease outbreaks and their potential social violence

The Process of Occupational Sex-Typing

Samuel Cohn’s critical study of two Victorian British firms represents a radically new examination of women’s work. By contrasting the Post Office, which was the first employer to use female clerks instead of males, and the Great Western Railway, one of the last employers to make this change, Cohn identifies the organizational and economic limits to female employment. The Process of Occupational Sex-Typing challenges traditional accounts of clerical feminization that invoke cultural restrictions on women’s work, human capital theory, discrimination by co-workers, and the de-skilling of jobs. Further, Cohn puts forward an alternative theory of occupational sex-typing that emphasizes the high cost of male labor, differences between organizations in their ability to tolerate discrimination, the latent contradictions within internal labor markets, and competition to women from other sources of cheap labor

The topography of medieval popular protest

Assumptions about the topography of popular revolt have been essential in constructing sociological and historical models that demarcate a ‘pre-modern’ from the ‘modern’ period. In Charles Tilly’s words, the ‘repertoires of collective action’ before the mid-nineteenth century were ‘parochial, particular, and bifurcated’, while afterwards, they became ‘cosmopolitan, autonomous, and modular’ (2008). By relying on primary sources across the Italian peninsula, France, Flanders and Britain and for the early modern period across German-speaking regions into Russia, this article shows that the plethora of late medieval revolts were rarely, if ever, confined to a neighbourhood or bounded by local religious congregations or family ties. Instead, they were citywide and north of the Alps fused alliances with the peasantry and other cities. With popular protest pushing eastward in the early modern period, these long-distant dimensions became more extensive, crossing linguistic boundaries and thousands of kilometres. In addition, this article raises new questions, such as why peasants and urban rebels in Italy, in contrast to northern Europe, resisted cross-mural alliances, and to what extent late medieval popular insurrection differed from those of the early modern period. The article ends with a call for new models to understand these differences

La peste negra en Florencia = the Black Death and Florence

Abstract available from publisher's website

Ligated complement receptors do not activate the arachidonic acid cascade in resident peritoneal macrophages

Receptors for IgG stimulate the release of approximately 20% of cellular arachidonic acid (20:4) from murine resident peritoneal macrophages. In contrast, C3 receptors do not trigger the secretion of any 20:4 in excess of that released constitutively from the cells. Since the ability of C3 receptors to promote phagocytosis is regulated, we compared resting macrophages, whose C3 receptors do not promote phagocytosis of C3-coated particles, and lymphokine-treated cells, whose receptors do promote ingestion. Despite their ability to promote phagocytosis, the C3 receptor of lymphokine-treated macrophages remain unable to initiate release of 20:4. We speculate that the intracellular signals that initiate phagocytosis are distinct from those that initiate release of 20:4

THE EFFECT OF POLY-L-LYSINE ON THE UPTAKE OF REOVIRUS DOUBLE-STRANDED RNA IN MACROPHAGES IN VITRO

The effect of polycations on cultured mouse peitoneal macrophages has been examined. Polycations, at concentrations greater than 5 µg/ml, are toxic for macrophages) as measured by failure of the cells to exclude vital dyes. At toxic concentrations polycations bind in large amounts to nuclei and endoplasmic reticulum, while at nontoxic levels polycations bind selectively to the cell surface. Nontoxic concentrations of polycations stimulate binding of reovirus double-stranded (ds) RNA to the macrophages by forming polycation-dsRNA complexes either in the medium or at the cell surface. These complexes enter the cell in endocytic vacuoles and are concentrated in secondary lysosomes. Despite exposure to the acid hydrolases within this cell compartment, the dsRNA and the polycation (poly-L-lysine) are conserved in a macromolecular form within the vacuolar system. The mechanism(s) by which the uptake of infectious nucleic acids and the induction of interferon by dsRNA are stimulated by polycations are discussed

The dramaturgy of epidemics

My essay focuses on Charles Rosenberg's provocative and enduring ideal type of epidemic drama in three acts, which he assembled from a vast knowledge of disease history that stretched from the end of the seventeenth century to his then-present pandemic, HIV/AIDS of the 1980s. Reaching back to the Plague of Athens, my essay elaborates on Rosenberg's dramaturgy by questioning whether blame, division, and collective violence were so universal or even the dominant "acts" of epidemics not only before the nineteenth century but to the present. Instead, with certain pandemics such as yellow fever in the Deep South or the Great Influenza of 1918–20, unity, mass volunteerism, and self-abnegation played leading roles. Finally, not all epidemics ended "with a whimper" as attested by the long early modern history of plague. These often concluded literally with a bang: lavish planning of festivals of thanksgiving, choreographed with processions, innumerable banners, commissions of paintings, ex-voto churches, trumpets, tambourines, artillery fire, and fireworks