SPIRIT OF 1848: A CALL FOR ABSTRACTS – APHA 2020 (San Francisco, CA: Oct 24-28, 2020)
SPIRIT OF 1848 THEME:
“Political power & the people’s health: countering structural violence & promoting health justice”
*** due date for abstracts for sessions an OPEN CALL: February 20, 2020***
The official theme for APHA 2020: “Creating the Healthiest Nation: Preventing Violence.” We in the Spirit of 1848 take the next step and put the focus on POLITICAL POWER & THE PEOPLE’S HEALTH: COUNTERING STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE & PROMOTING HEALTH JUSTICE.
Motivating our theme is recognition is that:
(1) It is essential to address the structural systems that foster violence -- for whose benefit, at whose cost – at multiple levels, ranging from state-sanctioned use of force by the military and police to interpersonal violence (in public, at home) to self-harm, with expressions of such violence ranging from physical to cultural and psychological
(2) It is essential to distinguish between use of force to dominate, exploit, and oppress, as opposed to use of force for self-defense and self-preservation, with the uses, respectively, of coercive force and of self-defense taking place at multiple levels (e.g., national, community, household, individual).
(3) APHA 2020 will take place just a week before the US 2020 elections, thus putting the spotlight on links between political power & the people’s health – and, related, the urgency of progressive mobilizing for the vote and fighting against voter suppression (see, for example, the new series in The Guardian, launched on Nov 7, 2019, re: The fight to vote ).
-- And also: once again, we continue to note with concern the latent nationalism lurking in the phrasing of the APHA general theme of “creating the healthiest nation” which has appeared as the prefix to each annual meeting’s specific theme for the past few years – and we once again ask: why not instead have the goal be: “creating the healthiest world”!
Our 5 scientific sessions and our Spirit of 1848 labor/business meeting will be in the following slots:
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Spirit of 1848 sessions (APHA 2020) – by day, name, and time, and whether an OPEN CALL for abstracts or SOLICITED ONLY |
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Monday, Oct 26, 2020
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Activist session |
8:30 am to 10 am |
SOLICITED ONLY |
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Social history of public health |
10:30 am to 12 noon |
SOLICITED ONLY |
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Politics of public health data |
3:00 pm to 4:30 pm |
OPEN CALL |
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Tuesday, Oct 27, 2020 |
Progressive pedagogy |
8:30 am to 10:00 am |
OPEN CALL |
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Integrative session |
10:30 am to 12 noon |
SOLICITED ONLY |
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Student poster session |
1:00 pm to 3:00 pm |
OPEN CALL |
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Labor/business meeting |
6:30 pm to 8:00 pm |
N/A |
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Our new policy, effective this year, is: for each session we will we encourage submissions that bring a critical Indigenous lens, drawing on Indigenous theories, knowledge, and methods, to the specific topic that is the focus of each session.
Below we provide: (1) the specific instructions for each session, and (2) the APHA instructions about preparing abstracts, with regard to word limits, membership & registration requirements, and information required to enable the session in which a presentation is included to qualify for continuing education credits.
Instructions for what we are seeking for each session (listed in chronological order) are as follows:
• Activist session (Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 8:30 am to 10:00 am)
Title: “Organizing against structural injustice & for health justice.”
-- Note: all abstracts for this session will be SOLICITED (due: April 13, 2020).
The activist session will focus on “Organizing against structural injustice & for health justice,” drawing on case examples from the San Francisco Bay Area (where the APHA conference will take place). Possible topics include activist work that links health equity and:
(1) anti-eviction organizing;
(2) prison abolition organizing;
(3) harm reduction organizing;
(4) transformative justice & restorative justice organizing;
(5) decolonial organizing;
(6) activist health journalism;
(7) confronting growing attacks on science in the context of the climate crisis;
(8) countering voter suppression and mobilize marginalized voters to engage politically, including at the ballot box;
(9) countering structural violence.
Spirit of 1848 Coordinating Committee members Catherine Cubbin (email: ccubbin@austin.utexas.edu), Rebekka Lee (email: rlee@hsph.harvard.edu), and Jerzy Eisenberg-Guyot (email: jerzy.eisenbergguyot@gmail.com) will take the lead on organizing this invited session.
Per our new policy, we will encourage submissions that bring a critical Indigenous lens, drawing on Indigenous theories, knowledge, and methods.
• Social history of public health (Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 10:30 am to 12 noon)
Title: “Critical Historical Perspectives on the Struggles Against Violence in the Bay Area and Beyond: Hypercapitalism, Genocide, Racism, and Liberation from 1848 to 2020”
-- Note: all abstracts for this session will be SOLICITED (due: April 13, 2020).
We are mindful of the fact that the year 1848, while ushering in movements for democracy and the peoples’ health, also marked the beginning of the California gold rush that greatly accelerated the ongoing genocide of settler colonists against the indigenous people of California. This year further marked the beginning of large-scale Chinese immigration to California – a process fraught with brutal labor exploitation, stark health inequities, and blatant racial discrimination. As the conference is being held on stolen land where these crimes and abuses occurred, we believe it is important to first acknowledge these facts and embrace them as relevant topics for our session, which addresses collective efforts to survive and counter structural violence in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond, from 1848 to 2020.
These dark threads of California history weave through the Bay Area in disparate ways, but they are tied together by the themes of structural violence, collective resistance/survival, and liberation. Accordingly, for this session we seek to solicit abstracts of critical historical work highlighting collective strategies among indigenous peoples, racial minorities, and other marginalized groups to navigate historical traumas and different forms of structural violence and build strategies of collective resilience to advance the greater struggles of people for health justice and true democratic representation. This work can address a variety of types of structural violence: organized violence carried out by state or quasi-state entities to “clear” land for settlers or industries; efforts by private enterprise/capitalist actors, to oppress, suppress, or eliminate groups that may oppose their interests; or other, novel forms of violence fueled by hypercapitalism and its imperative for endless and rapid growth at the expense of human needs and lives. Further, it may involve a variety of tactics, from systematic labor abuses or policies focused on expulsion of people from their dwellings, encampments, and communities, to outright genocide. The work must also address a variety of strategies for collective resistance/resilience/survival, from organized action to works of art or performance to counter-histories. Finally, it can involve case studies from contexts both inside and outside of Alta California that are relevant to this particular historical context.
Examples of presentation topics may include:
A) The U.S. genocide of Indigenous peoples, their cultures, and their control over land and water in California, and the indigenous strategies of survival and resilience (including the 1969 American Indian occupation of Alcatraz). (See Madley, B., An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846-1873. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016))B) The historical links between the U.S. gun industry and state-supported violence, from the U.S. takeover of California in the 1840s to the Mexican drug wars of the 21st century (See Delay, B. “How Not to Arm a State: American Guns and the Crisis of Governance in Mexico, Nineteenth and Twenty-First Centuries,” Southern California Quarterly 95, No. 1 (Spring 2013), 5-23)
C) The history of the Black Panthers (esp. in Oakland, CA) and the fight for health equity and against medical discrimination, (see Nelson, A., Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight Against Medical Discrimination, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011; Martin W., and Bloom, J., eds., Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party, University of California Press, 2013, 2016); or the Black Panthers’ work with gay activists to collectively resist police brutality. (See Leighton, J., “All of Us Are Unapprehended Felons": Gay Liberation, the Black Panther Party, and Intercommunal Efforts Against Police Brutality in the Bay Area,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 52, No. 3, 2019, 860-885.)
D) The effort to recover the stories of Chinese railroad workers in California to address the historical trauma of exploitive, abusive labor without citizenship rights within the Chinese-American community and heal from collective historical trauma. (See the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America Project at Stanford University website, https://web.stanford.edu/group/chineserailroad/cgi-bin/website/).
Presenters may be joined by a discussant who can make connections between the different case studies and link them to the larger Spirit of 1848 theme, “Political Power & the People’s Health: Countering Structural Violence & Promoting Health Justice.”
Critical historical analysis of these cases as they relate to health justice may provide insights relevant to current collective struggles for reparations and reconciliation, and against different forms of structural violence in the Bay Area and beyond. The overall aim of the session will be to draw upon case studies and examples in order to understand, illuminate and inspire contemporary movements to protect and empower people to survive, resist, and overcome various forms of violent oppression in order to achieve health justice.
-- This session will be developed by the history subcommittee: Marian Moser Jones (email: moserj@umd.edu), Anne-Emanuelle Birn, (email: ae.birn@utoronto.ca), Luis Aviles (luis.aviles3@upr.edu).
-- Note: all abstracts for this session will be SOLICITED. Per our new policy, we will invite submissions that bring a critical Indigenous lens, drawing on Indigenous theories, knowledge, and methods.
• Politics of public health data (Mon, Oct 26, 2020, 2:30 pm to 4:00 pm)
Title: “Public health data & structural violence: from big data and countering algorithmic bias to confronting state and corporate surveillance”
-- Note: presentations for this session will be drawn primarily from abstracts submitted in response to the OPEN CALL for abstracts (Due: Thurs, Feb 20, 2020), supplemented by solicited abstracts as warranted.
This session seeks to feature conceptual and empirical presentations of analyses (whether quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods) that are context-aware and historically-informed. Possible foci for presentations, all in relation to issues of health justice, might be:
(1) conceptual framing of complexities of data collection in relation to measuring and quantifying the adverse health impacts of structural violence in its many forms;
(2) uses of Big Data to counter structural violence by the state, as per how Black Data Matters is using big data to take on documenting police violence for accountability;
(3) uses of Big Data to bring new light to analyzing health justice issues for “small” populations, e.g., American Indians and Alaska Natives;
(4) critical analysis of the non-neutrality of algorithms and their role in entrenching health inequities, especially in relation to social services, health care, education, and the carceral state;
(5) critical analysis of who owns the data and the erasures of privacy – by state and corporate surveillance, drones, devices that monitor people’s health and their every move, phone call, email, twitter exchange, and more;
(6) public health threats associated with doxing, and with challenging on-line hate speech and violence;
(7) coding and misclassification of deaths (in the US and elsewhere) due to violence, including after police brutality and after military actions, plus underreporting of deaths in other countries after US and other military invasions;
(8) the politics that undercut accurate monitoring of, research on, and interventions to address gun violence; and
(9) analyses that link federal and state policies affecting voting rights, voter suppression, and political representation (e.g., gerrymandering) to health outcomes.
Per our new policy, we encourage submissions that bring a critical Indigenous lens, drawing on Indigenous theories, knowledge, and methods.
If you have any questions, please contact the session organizers, who are Spirit of 1848 Coordinating Committee members Zinzi Bailey (email: zinzib@gmail.com), Catherine Cubbin (email: ccubbin@austin.utexas.edu), Craig Dearfield (email: craig.dearfield@gmail.com), and Nancy Krieger (email: nkrieger@hsph.harvard.edu).
• Progressive pedagogy (Tues, Oct 27, 2020, 8:30 am to 10:00 am)
Title: “Pedagogies for Survivance: Addressing Structural Violence in its Many Forms.”
-- Note: presentations for this session will be primarily drawn from abstracts submitted in response to the OPEN CALL for abstracts (Due: Thurs, Feb 20, 2020), supplemented by solicited abstracts as warranted.
This session will have an OPEN CALL for abstracts for practical presentations that focus on pedagogy that enhances capacity for teaching and organizing for survivance, or active resistance against dominance, victimry, and structural violence. This includes the pedagogies that are being (re)developed through decolonizing epistemologies and other ways of re-framing knowledge and voice. We call for work that shows how such pedagogy can be carried out, in both: (1) diverse academic settings, e.g., universities and colleges (including community colleges), health professional schools (public health, nursing, medical, dental, veterinary, etc), high schools, and elementary schools, and (2) training programs for community and workplace activists, organizations, and members. We welcome student-led presentations focused on how to bring such pedagogy into their educational programs.
Possible topics, all with a focus on health justice, might include:
(1) courses about anti-militarism and public health;
(2) courses about settler-colonialism and its impact on health inequities & Indigenous health;
(3) critical analysis about the health equity impacts of the presence of police in schools;
(4) teaching about structural violence and its health impacts via the theatre of oppressed;
(5) critical analysis of how inadequate policies about discrimination and sexual harassment in schools harm students & pedagogy;
(6) critical analysis of how people seeking to teach about structural violence & health justice have been blocked from teaching such courses; and
(7) teaching about people’s political power, voting rights, voter suppression, and their implications for health equity.
Per our new policy, we encourage submissions that bring a critical Indigenous lens, drawing on Indigenous theories, knowledge, and methods.
If you have any questions, please contact the session organizers, who are Spirit of 1848 Coordinating Committee members Vanessa Simonds (email: vanessa.simonds@montana.edu), Lisa Moore (email: lisadee@sfsu.edu), Rebekka Lee (email: rlee@hsph.harvard.edu), and Nylca Muñoz (email: nylcamunoz@gmail.com).
• Integrative (Tues, Oct 27, 2020, 10:30 am to 12 noon)
Title: “US Census 2020, Political Power & Resources: Health Equity Implications of New Policy of Differential Privacy, especially for small populations and census tract data”
-- Note: all abstracts for this session will be SOLICITED (due: April 13, 2020).
Recognizing the profound role of the US census in providing the population counts for redistricting, and thus the allocation of power, as well as the allocation of resources (via funding formula for programs that rely on census counts), the intent of this session will be to bring public health professionals, researchers, advocates, activists, and policy analysts up-to-date regarding a MAJOR change affecting public use of the 2020 census data. At issue is the new policy of differential privacy (see: https://www.census.gov/about/policies/privacy/statistical_safeguards/disclosure-avoidance-2020-census.html ).
-- In brief, the US Census has determined that it can no longer protect people’s privacy by releasing data as it has in the past, given increased capacity to use non-census big data resources to identify individuals even in aggregated census data. The public use data accordingly will have controlled statistical “noise” introduced to protect people’s privacy, in a way that preserves accuracy at higher levels of geography. A trade-off, however, is that this means there will be less accurate data on small population and small areas (e.g., census tracts) – with implications for denominators, contextual measures based on census data, and survey sampling frames, especially for health equity research that is place-based and focuses on population sub-groups (i.e., not just the total population), however divided (e.g., by race/ethnicity, by income level, etc).
-- The public health and health equity implications of the shift to differential privacy (which commences with the US 2020 decennial census, with a target date of 2025 for implementation with American Community Survey data) are under-researched and little known. Controversies exist over what the impacts will be (see, for example: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/01/can-set-equations-keep-us-census-data-private & also https://ipums.org/changes-to-census-bureau-data-products ).
-- The aim of this session accordingly will be to bring together relevant US Census officials, data scientists, and health equity analysts to generate awareness of the shift to differential privacy and what it may mean for public health monitoring and action to advance health justice. Per our new policy, we will invite submissions that bring a critical Indigenous lens, drawing on Indigenous theories, knowledge, and methods.
If you have any questions, please contact the session organizer, Spirit of 1848 Coordinating Committee member Nancy Krieger (email: nkrieger@hsph.harvard.edu)
• Student poster session: social justice & public health (Tues, Oct 27, 2020, 1:00–2:00 pm)
For the APHA 2020, the Spirit of 1848 Social Justice & Public Health Student Poster Session is having an *OPEN CALL FOR ABSTRACTS* for posters that highlight the intersection between social justice and public health from a historical, theoretical, epidemiological, ethnographic, and/or methodological perspective.
This session will have an OPEN CALL for submissions by students (undergraduate and graduate). Submissions can include, but are not limited to, work concerned with the Spirit of 1848’s focus for APHA 2020, “Political power & the people’s health: countering structural violence & promoting health justice.” The submitted work can address one or more of the many interlocking types of justice at issue, e.g., racial justice, Indigenous justice, economic justice, gender justice, queer justice, environmental justice, climate justice, reproductive justice, healing justice, restorative justice, electoral justice, etc. We are interested in submissions not only from public health and health professions students, but also from students in schools & programs across the social sciences, humanities, and other professions. See, for example, abstracts selected in prior years: 2019, 2018, and 2017
Abstracts are due Thurs, Feb 20, 2020; all relevant instructions can be found at the APHA abstract submission website; see: http://www.apha.org/events-and-meetings/annual
Note: to address the on-going problem of student uncertainty about funding, which has led to students with accepted posters withdrawing their submissions, we will (1) accept the top 10 abstracts; (2) create an ordered waitlist of potentially-acceptable abstracts that were not initially accepted; and (3) reject abstracts that are not focused on issues of social justice and public health or are not of acceptable quality. If any accepted abstracts are withdrawn, we will replace them with an abstract from the waitlist.
For any questions about this session or advice on abstract submission, please contact Spirit of 1848 Student Poster Coordinating Committee members Jerzy Eisenberg-Guyot (jerzy@uw.edu), Nylca Muñoz (nylca.munoz@upr.edu), and Monique Hosein (monique_hosein@berkeley.edu).
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APHA ABSTRACT REQUIREMENTS & CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDITS:
NOTE: it is important that our Spirit of 1848 sessions be approved for CE credits, so that public health & clinical professionals can get CE credits in sessions focused on the links between social justice & public health! – so please be sure to read these instructions carefully!!!
1) APHA ABSTRACT REQUIREMENTS
2) CONTINUING EDUCATION CREDITS
APHA values the ability to provide continuing education credit to physicians, nurses, health educators, veterinarians, and those certified in public health at its annual meeting. Please complete all required information when submitting an abstract so members can claim credit for attending your session. These credits are necessary for members to keep their licenses and credentials.
For a session to be eligible for Continuing Education Credit, each presenter must provide:
-- Examples of Acceptable Biographical Qualification Statement:
“I have been the principal or co-principal of multiple federally funded grants focusing on the epidemiology of drug abuse, HIV prevention and co-occurring mental and drug use disorders. Among my scientific interests has been the development of strategies for preventing HIV and STDs in out-of-treatment drug users.”
“I am qualified because I have conducted research in the area of maternal and child health for the past 20 years and have given multiple presentations on this subject.”
Please note that I am the Principle Investigator of this study is NOT an acceptable qualification statement. Nor it is acceptable to state: “I am qualified because I am a professor at XYZ University.”
Contact Mighty Fine at mighty.fine@apha.org if you have any questions concerning continuing education credit. Please contact the program planner for all other questions.
**** ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ABOUT THE SPIRIT OF 1848 SESSIONS WHICH HAVE AN OPEN CALL FOR ABSTRACTS IS PROVIDED BELOW *****
MORE INFORMATION ABOUT THE SPIRIT OF 1848
& HOW TO BECOME A MEMBER AND SUBSCRIBE TO OUR LISTSERVE:
For additional information about the Spirit of 1848, including our mission statement and why our name is “Spirit of 1848,”please see below--and also please visit our website, where you can learn more about our Caucus and see past sessions that we have organized at APHA: http://www.spiritof1848.org/
And, if you are a dues-paying APHA member:
A) at our website you can sign up on our form to state your affiliation with our Caucus
https://harvard.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_86XQ5KQvFCgCpFP(& for more explanation about why we need this information, see: http://spiritof1848.org/listserv.htm)
B) you can also modify your APHA member profile to show you consider yourself to be affiliated with our Caucus
1) login in at: http://apha.org/
2) click on the bottom part of where your name shows up, which will reveal the “menu” for options
3) click on “update profile”
4) click on the tab for “communities”
5) scroll down to “caucuses,” go to “Spirit of 1848,” and choose the option for “current participant”!
(note: selecting a Caucus affiliation does NOT count against the choice of 2 Section affiliations)
Lastly, if you are interested in subscribing to our email bulletin board, we welcome posting on social justice & public health that provide:
a) information (e.g. about conferences or job announcements or publications relevant to and making explicit links between social justice & public health), and
b) substantive queries or comments directly addressing issues relevant to and making explicit links between social justice and public health.
If your posting is only about social justice/political issues, or only about public health issues, and does not explicitly connect issues of social justice & public health, please do not post it on this listserv.
Please note that the listserv does not accept attachments. For petitions, please post only the text, accompanied by the explicit instruction not to reply to the listserv but to reply to you directly with signatures.
Community email addresses:
Post message: spiritof1848@yahoogroups.com
Subscribe: spiritof1848-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Unsubscribe: spiritof1848-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
List owner: spiritof1848-owner@yahoogroups.com
Web page: www.spiritof1848.org
To subscribe or un-subscribe send an e-mail to the address specified above with the word "subscribe" or "unsubscribe" in the subject line. To change to digest mode (one daily e-mail containing the day's postings), you need to access your account via the YahooGroups website and select the digest option under "Message Delivery."
For more information, please see the Spiritof1848 Listserv Semi-Regular Reminder or e-mail the list owner.
SPIRIT OF 1848 MISSION STATEMENT
November 2002
The Spirit of 1848: A Network linking Politics, Passion, and Public Health
Purpose and Structure
The Spirit of 1848 is a network of people concerned about social inequalities in health. Our purpose is to spur new connections among the many of us involved in different areas of public health, who are working on diverse public health issues (whether as researchers, practitioners, teachers, activists, or all of the above), and live scattered across diverse regions of the United States and other countries. In doing so, we hope to help counter the fragmentation that many of us face: within and between disciplines, within and between work on particular diseases or health problems, and within and between different organizations geared to specific issues or social groups. By making connections, we can overcome some of the isolation that we feel and find others with whom we can develop our thoughts, strategize, and enhance efforts to eliminate social inequalities in health.
Our common focus is that we are all working, in one way or another, to understand and change how social divisions based on social class, race/ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, and age affect the public's health. As an activist and scholarly network, we have established four committees to conduct our work:
1) Public Health Data: this committee will focus on how and why we measure and study social inequalities in health, and develop projects to influence the collection of data in US vital statistics, health surveys, and disease registries.
2) Curriculum: this committee will focus on how public health and other health professionals and students are trained, and will gather and share information about (and possibly develop) courses and materials to spur critical thinking about social inequalities in health, in their present and historical context.
3) E-Networking: this committee will focus on networking and communication within the Spirit of 1848, using e-mail, web page, newsletters, and occasional mailings; it also coordinates the newly established student poster session.
4) History: this committee is in liaison with the Sigerist Circle, an already established organization of public health and medical historians who use critical theory (Marxian, feminist, post-colonial, and otherwise) to illuminate the history of public health and how we have arrived where we are today; its presence in the Spirit of 1848 will help to ensure that our network's projects are grounded in this sense of history, complexity, and context.
Work among these committees will be coordinated by our Coordinating Committee, which consists of chair/co-chairs and the chairs/co-chairs of each of the four sub-committees. To ensure accountability, all public activities sponsored by the Spirit of 1848 (e.g., public statements, mailings, sessions at conferences, other public actions) will be organized by these committees and approved by the Coordinating Committee (which will communicate on at least a monthly basis). Annual meetings of the network (so that we can actually see each other and talk together) will take place at the yearly American Public Health Association meetings. Finally, please note that we are NOT a dues-paying membership organization. Instead, we are an activist, volunteer network: you become part of the Spirit of 1848 by working on one of our projects, through one of our committees--and we invite you to join in!
NB: for additional information the Spirit of 1848 and our choice of name, see:
--Coordinating Committee of Spirit of 1848 (Krieger N, Zapata C, Murrain M, Barnett E, Parsons PE, Birn AE). Spirit of 1848: a network linking politics, passion, and public health. Critical Public Health 1998; 8:97-103.
--Krieger N, Birn AE. A vision of social justice as the foundation of public health: commemorating 150 years of the spirit of 1848. Am J Public Health 1998; 88:1603-6.
Community email addresses:
Post message: spiritof1848@yahoogroups.com
Subscribe: spiritof1848-subscribe@yahoogroups.com
Unsubscribe: spiritof1848-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com
List owner: spiritof1848-owner@yahoogroups.com
Web page: www.spiritof1848.org
First issued: Fall 1994; revised: November 2001; November 2001; November 2002
************** Selected notable events in and around 1848 *****************
1840-1847: Louis Rene Villermé publishes the first major study of workers' health in France, A Description of the Physical and Moral State of Workers Employed in Cotton, Linen, and Silk Mills (1840) and Flora Tristan, based in France, publishes her London Journal: A Survey of London Life in the 1830s (1840), a pathbreaking account of the extreme poverty and poor health of its working classes; in England, Edwin Chadwick publishes General Report on Sanitary Conditions of the Laboring Population in Great Britain (1842); first child labor laws in the Britain and the United States (1842); end of the Second Seminole War (1842); prison reform movement in the United States initiated by Dorothea Dix (1843); Frederick Engels publishes The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844); John Griscom publishes The Sanitary Condition of the Laboring Population of New York with Suggestions for Its Improvement (1845); Irish famine (1845-1848); start of US-Mexican war (1846); Frederick Douglass founds The North Star, an anti-slavery newspaper (1847); Southwood Smith publishes An Address to the Working Classes of the United Kingdom on their Duty in the Present State of the Sanitary Question (1847)
1848:
World-wide cholera epidemic
Uprisings in Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Sicily, Milan, Naples, Parma, Rome, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest, and Dakar; start of Second Sikh war against British in India
In the midst of the 1848 revolution in Germany, Rudolf Virchow founds the medical journal Medical Reform (Die Medizinische Reform), and publishes his classic "Report on the Typhus Epidemic in Upper Silesia," in which he concludes that preserving health and preventing disease requires "full and unlimited democracy"
Revolution in France, abdication of Louis Philippe, worker uprising in Paris, and founding of The Second Republic, which creates a public health advisory committee attached to the Ministry of Agriculture and Commerce and establishes network of local public health councils
First Public Health Act in Britain, which creates a General Board of Health, empowered to establish local boards of health to deal with the water supply, sewerage, cemeteries, and control of "offensive trades," and also to conduct surveys of sanitary conditions
The newly formed American Medical Association sets up a Public Hygiene Committee to address public health issues
First Women's Rights Convention in the United States, at Seneca Falls
Seneca Nation of Indians makes and adopts its Constitution for elected government
Henry Thoreau publishes Civil Disobedience, to protest paying taxes to support the United State's war against Mexico
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels publish The Communist Manifesto
1849-1854: Elizabeth Blackwell sets up the New York Dispensary for Poor Women and Children (1849); John Snow publishes On the Mode of Communication of Cholera (1849); Lemuel Shattuck publishes Report of the Sanitary Commission of Massachusetts (1850); founding of the London Epidemiological Society (1850); Indian Wars in the southwest and far west (1849-1892); Compromise of 1850 retains slavery in the United States and Fugitive Slave Act passed; Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); Sojourner Truth delivers her "Ain't I a Woman" speech at the Fourth Seneca Fall convention (1853); John Snow removes the handle of the Broad Street Pump to stop the cholera epidemic in London (1854)
Ready?
Nancy Krieger, PhD
Dept of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
677 Huntington Avenue, Kresge 717
Boston, MA 02115
Phone: 617-432-1571
Fax: 617-432-3123
nkrieger@hsph.harvard.edu