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Cholera, Stormy Seas, and Survival: A Family Story

Louis and dorothea sophia wellendorf

A guest post by David Brook

David Brook is retired from the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources where he was director of the Division of Historical Resources. He has also written two books on the history of historic preservation in North Carolina.

Before modern vaccines and antibiotics, generations of Americans were routinely plagued by contagions including yellow fever, typhus, measles, and diphtheria. Cholera, however, topped them all in sheer terror. Caused by a bacterium not identified until 1884, cholera is a horrible intestinal disease, spread through contaminated food and water. With a short incubation period, cholera kills through severe dehydration. Untreated victims can die within hours of onset. In the 19th century, crowded immigrant communities were especially hard hit.

The coronavirus pandemic brings to mind the impact of cholera on the life of my great-great grandfather, Ludwig “Louis” Wellendorf (1831-1899). Louis was from Bresewitz, a small town on the Baltic Sea near Rostock, in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Germany. According to family lore, he had participated in the failed Revolution of 1848, and fled to Denmark to hide for a time. Continue reading “Cholera, Stormy Seas, and Survival: A Family Story”

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April History News: Anzac Day. . . All about Zinn. . . Kennedy Censored Talk Radio

Anzac Day: Australia and New Zealand remember the Gallipoli tragedy of 1915. Howie Tanzman explains.

President Kennedy censored right-wing radio. In the Cato Policy Report.

Melted ice patch in Norway reveals artifacts from travels in Roman times and  the Middle Ages. In the Smithsonian. 

VE-Day in Europe, not so joyous: ‘Some extraordinary vigil over a corpse.’ BBC’s History Extra explains.

Countering Howard Zinn’s ‘tendentious, simplistic, and relentlessly negative view of the American past.’ Wilfred McClay reviews Mary Grabar’s critique.

Saving the chimney sweeps: Anton Howes tells us about an Industrial Revolution innovator who has not received his due.

Why did plague doctors wear masks with beaks? The BBC’s History Extra  explains.

Continue reading “April History News: Anzac Day. . . All about Zinn. . . Kennedy Censored Talk Radio”

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The Marketing Genius of T. R. Malthus

Thomas Robert Malthus has had a very long run. Issuing his first essay on population in 1798, he has persuaded millions of people that the world is threatened by overpopulation.

“The effect of Malthusianism was immediate and dramatic,” writes historian Gertrude Himmelfarb. “For half a century social attitudes and policies were decisively shaped by the new turn of thought.”[1] And the impact continues.

Until November I had never read Malthus’s essay.[2] To my surprise, it is a delightful essay—-clearly written, easy to read, a relatively short book. (Subsequent editions were more ponderous, I understand.)

Malthus is thoughtful and civil—deferential toward Adam Smith in spite of a disagreement and polite toward the two men whose arguments he demolished, William Godwin and Nicolas de Condorcet. The essay is full of plain-spoken metaphors (using examples such as watches and telescopes)[3] and full of common sense.

The strange thing is this: Not only was his claim about population vs. food production wrong, as we now know from 120 years of experience, his argument for it was just armchair theorizing. Continue reading “The Marketing Genius of T. R. Malthus”

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March News about History

Malthus didn’t foresee the different population paths countries would take, writes Thomas Grennes in Regulation. 

What history can tell us about epidemics. On History Today.

Phil Magness discusses the eugenics leanings of John Maynard Keynes. On AIER.

Dame Vera Lynn, who rallied Britain in World War II with her singing, issues new video to encourage Britain now. She is 103.

Anton Howes tells the history of an eighteenth-century surgeon who required handwashing of his patients. It worked, but the policy  stopped with him.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project makes a ‘small but crucial concession’ to criticism. Phil Magness discusses at AIER.

‘What Pepys’s plague diaries can teach us about coronavirus.’ By Gavin Mortimer in the (U.K.) Spectator.

A historian puts plagues and panics into perspective. Victor Davis Hanson in City Journal.

Sunlight, fresh air, and hand-made face masks reduced 1918 deaths from the flu, writes Richard Hobday.

Continue reading “March News about History”

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You and I Are What History Is About

It’s not a comfortable time for our country right now. For some reason, perhaps due to our enforced confinement, my husband and I started remembering family stories—our own family histories, good, bad, indifferent. Stories in which personalities peek through the misty past.

I’d love for you to share such stories, those that you like to tell but may not have an audience for, especially if you have exhausted the patience of children and grandchildren. To me these stories bring the past alive. Here are two of mine:

First story:

My great-grandfather’s parents came from Ireland in 1837 and farmed in Ohio. (I always praise the potato because without it they [and thus I] would probably not have been born, and they were lucky to miss the horrible famine of 1847). Their son John was born in 1847 in Ohio. Like many countrymen, the family moved west around 1860. They reached St. Louis, where they were to wait for a boat to take them up the Mississippi to Wisconsin. The family briefly dispersed, with plans to meet at the port. But John, then aged 14, never arrived. Continue reading “You and I Are What History Is About”