The big questions don’t get much bigger. After the Lisbon earthquake killed thousands, philosopher Voltaire took aim at Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and skewered his view that God is good.
Sure, there were no Zoom calls or ventilators. But thanks to a prolific diarist, we can see some striking similarities, from daily death counts to quack remedies.
Bhaktapur suffered 300 deaths, 2,000 wounded and over 30,000 houses damaged in the 2015 earthquake. Heritage restoration has become crucial to community recovery.
In the 1790s, penal reformers rebuilt America’s squalid jails as airy, hygienic places meant to keep residents – and by extension society – healthy. Now they’re hotbeds of COVID-19. What went wrong?
Emmanuel Véron, Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales (Inalco) and Emmanuel Lincot, Institut catholique de Paris (ICP)
China is seeking to present itself as a model in the fight against the coronavirus – even if it means rewriting the history of the crisis and discrediting the governance of liberal democracies.
From the bird masks of plague doctors and large voluminous skirts to hat pins and face masks, this video provides a quick tour through the history of protective fashion.
Rebecca Tippett, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The 2020 census will now count some groups differently than it has in the past. That could make a difference in the final count – affecting which states receive funding and congressional seats.