Science Books

Plagues and Peoples

No small themes for historian William McNeill: he is a writer of big, sweeping books, from The Rise of the West to The History of the World.

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Health & Medicine

Diseases and Conditions

Plants & Animals

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Plagues and Peoples considers the influence of infectious diseases on the course of history, and McNeill pays special attention to the Black Death of the 13th and 14th centuries, which killed millions across Europe and Asia.

(At one point, writes McNeill, 10,000 people in Constantinople alone were dying each day from the plague.) With the new crop of plagues and epidemics in our own time, McNeill's quiet assertion that "in any effort to understand what lies ahead the role of infectious disease cannot properly be left out of consideration" takes on new significance..

For more information about the title Plagues and Peoples, read the full description at Amazon.com, or see the following related books:

Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies — Explaining what William McNeill called The Rise of the West has become the central problem in the study of global history. In Guns, Germs, and Steel ... > read more

Justinian's Flea: Plague, Empire, and the Birth of Europe — A richly told story of the collision between nature's smallest organism and history's mightiest empire The Emperor Justinian reunified Rome's ... > read more

Killer Germs — Everything readers ever wanted to know about deadly viruses, killer parasites, flesh-eating microbes, and other lifethreatening beasties but were ... > read more

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (P.S.) — A book chronicling one of the worst human disasters in recorded history really has no business being entertaining. But John Kelly's The Great ... > read more

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Author: William H. McNeill

Publisher: Anchor

Date: Feb. 17, 1998

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Transmission Of Tuberculosis Is Linked To Historical Patterns Of Human Migration (September 27, 2005) — Dr. Igor Mokrousov from St. Petersburg's Pasteur Institute and his colleagues have demonstrated that the evolutionary history of the causative agent of tuberculosis (TB) has been shaped by human ... > read more

Justinianic Plague Was Caused by Bacterium Yersinia Pestis, DNA of Skeletal Remains Shows (May 10, 2013) — Ancient DNA analyses of skeletal remains of plague victims from the 6th century AD provide information about the phylogeny and the place of origin of this ... > read more

Researchers Reconstruct Genome of the Black Death; Bacteria Found to Be Ancestor of All Modern Plagues (October 12, 2011) — An international team has sequenced the entire genome of the Black Death, one of the most devastating epidemics in human ... > read more

Medieval Black Death Was Probably Not Bubonic Plague (April 15, 2002) — The Black Death of the 1300s was probably not the modern disease known as bubonic plague, according to a team of anthropologists studying on these 14th century epidemics. ... > read more

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