Crisis, Uncertainty, and History: Trajectories and Experiences of Accelerated Change
Historians study trajectories of change through time. We are concerned with the pace and causes of change and we are concerned with its experiential impact and societal outcomes. And sometimes change accelerates, in a swirl of dynamic interactions that take us by surprise, leading us out of routines into unfamiliar spaces.
The CHR presented a two-year series on the problem of crisis in history. This series was launched in the spring of 2020 by the sudden challenges and uncertainties in our recent and ongoing experience with the Covid-19 pandemic: our opening conversations revolved around the sudden impact of epidemic disease but soon broadened out into a consideration of the more general nature of crisis. Since our first conversations the explosive sequence of events unfolding with the death of George Floyd, the 2020 election, global fires and floods attributed to anthropogenic climate warming, and most recently the victory of the Taliban in Afghanistan have made our inquiry into the dynamics of crisis all the more pressing. We hope that with this series the public and academy will want to engage in an assessment of our longer moment of crisis, and to situate in into a sequence of conditions, impacts, and consequences: what we might call the “before, during, and after” of the events of 2020-2021. We hope that our presentations over these two years helped with this assessment of these recent experiences, as well as those of people in moments of crisis in times past.
CHR-Crisis Steering Committee:
Sara Butler, History, CHR Director
John Brooke, History, Series Chair
Joan Cashin, History
Jeffrey Cohen, Anthropology
Amy Fairchild, Dean of Public Health
Anthony Kaldellis, Classics
Peter Mansoor, History
Dorothy Noyes, English and Comparative Studies
Chris Otter, History
Paul Reitter, Germanic Languages and Literatures
Tina Sessa, History
Jennifer Siegel, History
Sarah Van Beurden, History
Ying Zhang, History