Plagues
Dan Snow's History Hit
History Hit
4.7 • 13.7K Ratings
🗓️ 25 November 2022
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From a plague in Athens during the Peloponnesian War in 430 BCE, to another in 540 that wiped out half the population of the Roman empire, down through the Black Death in the Middle Ages and on through the 1918 flu epidemic (which killed between 50 and 100 million people) and this century's deadly SARS outbreak, plagues have been a much more relentless fact of life than many realise.
Brian Michael Jenkins is one of the leading authorities on U.S. national security and an advisor to governments, presidents and CEOs. Brain joins Dan to discuss the legacy of epidemics— which is not only one of the lives lost but also of devastated economies, social disorder, and severe political repercussions.
This episode was produced by Hannah Ward and edited by Dougal Patmore.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, |
| 0:00.6 | folks, Dan Snow here. |
| 0:01.6 | I am throwing a party to celebrate 10 years of Dan Snow's history hit. |
| 0:06.1 | I'd love for you to be there. |
| 0:07.5 | Join me for a very special live recording of the podcast in London, |
| 0:10.4 | in England on the 12th of September to celebrate the 10 years. |
| 0:14.1 | You can find out more about it and get tickets with the link in the show notes. |
| 0:17.6 | Look forward to seeing you there. |
| 0:29.4 | Hey everyone, welcome Dan Snow's history. A couple of years ago, as COVID-19 was reaching its peak, Zenith. Well, I don't know if it was reaching its peak anyway, as it seemed to be |
| 0:33.8 | reaching its peak in their global shutdowns were occurring. We talked a lot about |
| 0:37.5 | pandemics of the past. We talked about the 19th century, Asiatic Dissentries like cholera. We talked |
| 0:43.6 | about the Black Death, of course. We may have mentioned the Justinian Plague in the sixth |
| 0:48.3 | century, which proved pretty devastating across the Persian and Roman empires in the Mediterranean and the |
| 0:56.2 | Near East. And then of course we talked about, well, we talked a lot about great influenza of |
| 1:00.3 | 1918, 19, and previous ways of influenza. And interestingly, as Boris Johnson was in |
| 1:05.2 | intensive care fighting for his life, we think with COVID-19, we talked about how David Lloyd |
| 1:10.1 | George was completely debilitated |
| 1:12.7 | by influenza in 1918. And in fact, I think Lord Salisbury as well in a previous way of |
| 1:18.8 | influenza. So British Prime Ministers have had a tough time in these pandemics. They're on the front |
| 1:23.3 | line. Anyway, you can go back and listen to all those podcasts if you want it. History Hit TV, of course, |
| 1:28.9 | the best audio and video history channel on planet Earth. But on this podcast, I'm linking |
| 1:34.1 | them all up, learning what we can from the history of these pandemics. An American writer and |
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