Genetics as a Historicist Discipline?
A brief essay, "Genetics as a Historicist Discipline: A New Player in Disease History," has just been published in Perspectives on History: The Newsmagazine of the American Historical Association: http://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/december-20.... (This is accessible even to readers who are not members of the AHA.) This derives from my work editing the recently published collection: Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, The Medieval Globe 1 (2014), http://www.arc-humanities.org/inaugural-issue.html, which was published open-access thanks to the generosity of the World History Center, University of Pittsburgh.
I argue that "The particular relevance of genetics for the narrative of disease history . . . goes beyond simply confirming the presence of particular pathogens at certain times and places in the past. More profoundly, the new molecular genetics creates an evolutionary history of the pathogen: it shows the historical relationships between different strains, it suggests a general chronology of development, and, most useful to us historians, it grounds those evolutionary narratives in geographical space."
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Monica Green
Professor of History
School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
Box 874302
975 S Myrtle Ave
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-4302
U.S.A.
monica.green@asu.edu
I argue that "The particular relevance of genetics for the narrative of disease history . . . goes beyond simply confirming the presence of particular pathogens at certain times and places in the past. More profoundly, the new molecular genetics creates an evolutionary history of the pathogen: it shows the historical relationships between different strains, it suggests a general chronology of development, and, most useful to us historians, it grounds those evolutionary narratives in geographical space."
--
Monica Green
Professor of History
School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies
Box 874302
975 S Myrtle Ave
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ 85287-4302
U.S.A.
monica.green@asu.edu