Browsing by Author "Ewing, E. Thomas"

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    1918 Spanish Flu
    Ewing, E. Thomas; Hausman, Bernice L.; Ramakrishnan, Naren (2013-10-02)
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    Challenging Stories: Exploring the Intersections between Health and the Humanities
    Ewing, E. Thomas; Ganguly, Priyanka (Virginia Tech Publishing, 2024-09)
    Challenging Stories explores experiences of demanding health conditions and attitudes in response to them, across historical and contemporary contexts. This collection of original scholarship brings an interdisciplinary perspective to topics such as maternal health, care for aging adults, births by midwives, family planning, infectious disease outbreaks, biosafety health protocols, blood transfusions, and plant-based health practices. The case studies explored in each chapter contribute to a deeper and richer understanding of how challenging stories are embedded in an appreciation of community and individual health. With contributions by Emily Beck, Chuan Hao (Alex) Chen, Martha L. Espinosa, E. Thomas Ewing, Macey Flood, Priyanka Ganguly, Kimberly V. Jones, Gianna May Sanchez, Samin Rashidbeigi, Jeffrey S. Reznick, Frank Vitale IV, and Magdalena Zegarra Chiappori.
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    An Epidemiology of Information: Data Mining the 1918 Influenza Epidemic Project Report
    Hausman, Bernice L.; Pencek, Bruce; Ramakrishnan, Naren; Eysenbach, Gunther; Ewing, E. Thomas; Kerr, Kathleen; Gad, Samah (2014-04-07)
    This project research report describes the results of four case studies undertaken as part of Virginia Tech’s “An Epidemiology of Information: Data Mining the 1918 Flu Pandemic,” which was funded through the Digging into Data Challenge of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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    'For the Hills of Santa Fe': The Texan Santa Fe Expedition of 1841 and the Southwest Market Economy
    Saionz, Matthew K. (Virginia Tech, 2011-05-03)
    This thesis examines the ill-fated Texan Santa Fe Expedition of 1841 to analyze the state of a lucrative market network in the Southwest. Cut off from Santa Fe, the hub of the network, Texas struggled economically as an independent nation. Commercially isolated and dealing with near- worthless paper money, Texans hoped that trade with the people of Santa Fe would divert wealth into their nation. To justify the expedition, Anglo-Texans used the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny and turned the trek into a liberation mission. Moreover, Texans desired an overland route to Santa Fe to attract merchants to their otherwise inactive ports. Texans invested much into the expedition both economically and culturally; however, the Texan Santa Fe Expedition ended in utter failure and convinced many Texans that annexation to the United States was the wiser path to take.
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    From postcard to book cover: illustrating connections between medical history and digital humanities
    Ewing, E. Thomas; Randall, Katherine; Reznick, Jeffrey S. (2019-10)
    This article illustrates the value and impact of collaboration among scholars, archivists, and librarians working across universities and government institutions, and how changes in medium-from a born-physical photograph and printed postcard to a digital reproduction to a simultaneously born-digital and printed book- create new possibilities for scholarly analysis, interpretation, and dissemination, which in turn suggest future directions for research and engagement across fields of inquiry. In doing so, this article argues that history matters by illuminating past networks that, through humanistic inquiry, continue to connect people, ideas, and institutions in the present and into the future.
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    How did we get here: what are droplets and aerosols and how far do they go? A historical perspective on the transmission of respiratory infectious diseases
    Randall, Katherine; Ewing, E. Thomas; Marr, Linsey C.; Jiminez, J. L.; Bourouiba, Lydia (Royal Society, 2021-10-12)
    The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed major gaps in our understanding of the transmission of viruses through the air. These gaps slowed recognition of airborne transmission of the disease, contributed to muddled public health policies and impeded clear messaging on how best to slow transmission of COVID-19. In particular, current recommendations have been based on four tenets: (i) respiratory disease transmission routes can be viewed mostly in a binary manner of ‘droplets’ versus ‘aerosols’; (ii) this dichotomy depends on droplet size alone; (iii) the cut-off size between these routes of transmission is 5 µm; and (iv) there is a dichotomy in the distance at which transmission by each route is relevant. Yet, a relationship between these assertions is not supported by current scientific knowledge. Here, we revisit the historical foundation of these notions, and how they became entangled from the 1800s to today, with a complex interplay among various fields of science and medicine. This journey into the past highlights potential solutions for better collaboration and integration of scientific results into practice for building a more resilient society with more sound, far-sighted and effective public health policies.
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    Ignited Curiosity and Failed Dreams: Nineteenth-Century Masculine Fears of Females in Guy de Maupassant's 'Une Aventure Parisienne'and 'Le Signe'
    Barden, Abbey R. (Virginia Tech, 2006-04-17)
    Guy de Maupassant's short stories "Une Aventure Parisienne" and "Le Signe" tell the tales of two female protagonists caught by curiosity. In "Une Aventure Parisienne," a notary's wife (the petite provinciale) leaves her home and ventures to Paris in search of an affair with a celebrity. After finding one and sleeping with him, the petite provinciale becomes disillusioned with her fantasy: she returns home deflated from the realization that her celebrity snores and drools just as her husband does. The high-society protagonist in "Le Signe," Madame de Grangerie, is also disenchanted with her interest in imitating the gesture of a prostitute she notices across the street. When faced with a male client she frantically gives in to what she has offered. Needing to reaffirm her identity as an "honnête femme," she solicits advice from her friend on what to do if the client returns. While both protagonists do not face legal punishment for their affairs, they do confront personal consequences. The petite provinciale's dreams about celebrities burst and Madame de Grangerie's reputation appears at risk. Maupassant not only comments on feminine curiosity and adultery, but also on the internal effects such actions could potentially have on women of his time. In this thesis I argue that even though both protagonists act on their curiosities and flirt with private/public boundaries, the petite provinciale and Madame de Grangerie are ultimately presented through masculinized lenses. I also show how discursive nineteenth-century traditions of a limited view of female sexuality are reconstructed in Maupassant's tales.
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    Inez Holmes, Nurse and Veteran
    Wilkerson, Kiana; Randall, Katherine; Ewing, E. Thomas (National Library of Medicine, 2021-11-11)
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    La Grippe or Russian Influenza: Mortality Statistics During the 1890 Epidemic in Indiana
    Ewing, E. Thomas (Wiley, 2019-02-12)
    Background The Russian influenza, which began in late 1889, has long been recognized as a major global epidemic yet available statistical evidence for morbidity and mortality has not been fully examined using historical and epidemiological tools. This study of cases and deaths in Indiana during the extended time period associated with the Russian influenza is the first scholarly effort to determine the number of victims from this influenza outbreak across a broad regional case study in the US. Methods The sources for this study include historical records from the US Census, Annual Reports from the Indiana State Board of Health, and death notices published in newspapers. The available evidence is analyzed using historical and epidemiological methods to determine the consistency of reporting categories, the accuracy of death records, and the applicability of contemporary categories for measuring mortality. Results In the 3 years during and following the outbreak of “Russian influenza” in January 1890 in the state of Indiana, approximately 3200 died specifically of this disease while a total of 11 700 died of influenza and other respiratory diseases. These results confirm that extremely widespread influenza contributed to higher than normal death rates by causing additional deaths in related categories, especially pneumonia and other respiratory diseases. Conclusions More reliable and thorough analysis of morbidity and mortality during the Russian influenza based on systematic and critical review of local, regional, and national statistics can inform contemporary understanding of the long‐term history of influenza epidemics.
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    Making the American Aristocracy: Women, Cultural Capital, and High Society in New York City, 1870-1900
    Bibby, Emily Katherine (Virginia Tech, 2009-06-10)
    For over three decades, during the height of Gilded Age economic extravagance, the women of New York High Society maintained an elite social identity by possessing, displaying, and cultivating cultural capital. Particularly, High Society women sought to exclude the Nouveaux Riches who, after amassing vast fortunes in industry or trade, came to New York City in search of social position. High Society women distinguished themselves from these social climbers by obeying restrictive codes of speech, body language, and dress that were the manifestations of their cultural capital. However, in a country founded upon an ethos of egalitarianism, exclusivity could not be maintained for long. Mass-circulated media, visual artwork, and etiquette manuals celebrated the Society woman's cultural capital, but simultaneously popularized it, making it accessible to the upwardly mobile. By imitating the representations of High Society life that they saw in newspapers, magazines, and the sketches of Charles Dana Gibson, Nouveau Riche social climbers and even aspirant middle and working class women bridged many of the barriers that Society women sought to impose.
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    Marshall Plan Films and Americanization
    Noble, Evan S. (Virginia Tech, 2006-04-24)
    George Marshall's speech to an audience at Harvard University in June of 1947 announced a plan that eventually made its way through the United States congress and took the form of the European Recovery Plan (ERP). The ERP distributed roughly thirteen billion dollars in aid to sixteen European countries. The ECA grew out of this program as the managerial arm of the ERP. The ECA's propaganda campaign included pamphlets, posters, radio broadcasts, traveling puppet shows, and finally 250 films created between 1949-1953. Marshall Plan Films discussed productivity, multilateral trade, and labor unions. For Marshall Planners these issues were the key to both revitalizing the European economy, and creating a self sustaining Europe. In film, Europeans could see not only the modernizing techniques, building projects, and examples of Marshall Plan, but they were treated to visions of the American lifestyle as well. This study is an attempt to explicate the meanings and messages in the Marshall Plan Filmography. The Marshall Plan launched a massive propaganda campaign in an attempt to reformat the ideals of Europeans. The Plan was ostensibly an attempt to combat Communism as well as to re-vamp the economy of Europe. However, the films presented American ideals as something to aspire to: not only in business, but also in living everyday life. By stressing consumption over conservation and massive production over craftsmanship, the films told Europeans what America thought was best for them, and what would be beneficial for their future. Marshall Planners effectively sought to make Europe into a new, more American, place to live.
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    Open Access Week 2020 Keynote: Counting what counts in recruitment, promotion and tenure
    Gadd, Elizabeth; Ewing, E. Thomas; Finkielstein, Carla V.; Gill, Bikrum Singh; Johnson, Sylvester; Walters, Tyler (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2020-10-20)
    Open Access Week 2020 keynote speaker, Elizabeth (Lizzie) Gadd, Research Policy Manager (Publications) at Loughborough University in the UK, gives a talk about how what we reward through recruitment, promotion and tenure processes is not always what we actually value about research activity. The talk explores how we can pursue value-led evaluations - and how we can persuade senior leaders of their benefits. The keynote talk is followed by a panel discussion with faculty members at Virginia Tech: Thomas Ewing (Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research and Professor of History), Carla Finkielstein (Associate Professor of Biological Sciences), Bikrum Gill (Assistant Professor of Political Science), and Sylvester Johnson (Professor and Director of the Center for Humanities. The panel is moderated by Tyler Walters (Dean, University Libraries). The slides from this presentation are in Loughborough University's repository under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
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    Producing Popularity: The Success in France of the Comics Series "Astérix le Gaulois"
    Dandridge, Eliza Bourque (Virginia Tech, 2008-04-30)
    This study examines the rise in popularity of the French comics series "Astérix le Gaulois" through a production-of-culture lens in an effort to uncover how industry evolution and organization, protectionist legislation, marketing, advertising, branding, and consecration by the media worked interdependently to catapult Astérix, the series' protagonist, into stardom by the middle of the 1960s. In so doing, this study forcefully argues that elements external to the text itself greatly facilitated, and in some ways determined, the series' quick and dramatic rise in popularity in France by 1966. The predominance of American and Belgian comics into the 1950s and the moral turn towards all things "100 % français" enabled the success of Pilote, the French-language, French-themed magazine launched in 1959 and in which "Astérix" first appeared. By the early 1960s, Pilote's faithful readership helped make the publication of "Astérix" in album format a resounding success. Simultaneous radio exposure and extensive product merchandising further promoted "Astérix" to a new, vast, and diverse comics market comprised of children and adults alike. Media consecration marked the final step in Astérix's meteoric rise in popularity in France. Institutionalization of the comics series by the national press during the 1960s transformed Astérix into an emblem of national importance, created celebrities out of the series' co-creators, and even helped legitimize bande dessinée, or comics, as a French cultural form worthy of "serious" consideration.
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    Reporting, Recording, and Remembering the 1918 Influenza Epidemic
    Reznick, Jeffrey S.; Ewing, E. Thomas; Bristow, Nancy; Morens, David M. (National Library of Medicine, 2020-04-29)
    A public research symposium involving Virginia Tech students studying the history of data in social context through individual and collaborative primary-source research at the National Library of Medicine and elsewhere, and as part of their course Topics in the History of Data in Social Context, being taught by Dr. E. Thomas Ewing, Virginia Tech Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Research Professor. During the symposium, the students will present their research on various aspects of the 1918 pandemic, including newspaper reporting at the peak of the epidemic (late September to early November 1918), contemporary social distancing policies and procedures, and how contemporaries determined that the epidemic was ending, and how they remembered the remarkable experience of this intense, but brief, crisis in community health. Discussants will include Dr. Nancy Bristow of the University of Puget Sound and author of American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic (Oxford University Press, 2012), among others to be announced. Reporting, Recording, and Remembering the 1918 Influenza Epidemic is sponsored by the NLM History of Medicine Division in cooperation with the National Endowment for the Humanities Office of Digital Humanities—as part of the ongoing NLM/NEH partnership to collaborate on research, education, and career initiatives. This program also advances the NLM 2017-2027 strategic plan emphasizing data-driven discovery, enhanced stakeholder engagement, and the role of libraries and archives in providing trusted information.
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    Revealing Data: Mortality in Mexico City During the 1890 Influenza Epidemic
    Ewing, E. Thomas; Murphy, Sydney (National Library of Medicine, 2023-08-06)
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    Should Women Vote?
    Ewing, E. Thomas; Gumbert, Heather L.; Hicks, David; Lehr, Jane L.; Nelson, Amy; Stephens, Robert P. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)
    History Practice: Using Cartoons to Teach the Suffrage Campaign in European History
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    Stories from the Great War: VPI in WWI
    Fralin, Scott; Newcomb, Daniel C.; Ewing, E. Thomas (Virginia Tech, 2017-04-04)
    Exhibit focusing on the role of Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI) students and alumni who served in World War I. “Stories from the Great War: VPI Men in the Service of Their Country, 1917-1918” tells the stories of nine VPI alumni who fought on the battlefields of the Western Front during the last months of World War I. Between April 1917 and November 1918, around 1,000 students and alumni from Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI) served their country during World War One. VPI students and alumni were among some of the first soldiers to arrive in France during the spring of 1918, almost a year after the United States declared war on Germany. “VPI men” fought in all three major American offensives on the Western Front in France- the Aisne-Marne Offensive, the Battle of St. Mihiel, and the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. 2017/04/04 - 2017/05/15
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    "Swear this flag to live, for this flag to die": Flag Imagery in Constructing the Narrative of the Civil War and the Transformation of American Nationalism
    Vanover, Eric Thomas (Virginia Tech, 2010-04-24)
    The Civil War transformed nationalism in American society and created a notion of national identity closely tied to flag iconography. Flag symbolism developed as the prominent visualization of nationalism in American culture during and after the Civil War. The flags of the Civil War - namely the American flag, the Confederate national flag, and the Confederate Battle Cross - grew into iconic images within American communities. Their status as symbols of nationalism, patriotism, and an American historical past often advocated by newspapers, individual citizens, and the soldiers of the war themselves, initiated an American tradition of flag iconography for the purpose of nationalism unforeseen in American culture before the war. After the war, the issues of reconciliation and of what context the war would be placed in American history also became influenced by flag imagery. With the potential for post-war bitterness and lengthened disunity, the American flag offered a symbol that allowed Americans to remember the war as the deeds of patriotic citizens and as part of a continuous American national narrative. In doing so, the American flag became the iconic symbol of American nationalism.