On Monday, Harvard University Press publishes The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945, by University Professor John McNeill and Dr. Peter Engelke (PhD, 2011), a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council. Out in paperback, The Great Acceleration ​examines humanity's booming nonrenewable energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions in the current age of population growth, increased standards of living, and significant ecological disruption.

"Peter and I aim to clarify the concept of the Anthropocene for historians and at the same time deepen the acquaintance of natural scientists already grappling with the Anthropocene with the human history that created the Anthropocene," McNeill said this week. "We also hope to convince historians of the logic of the term 'The Great Acceleration' as a way to understand modern history. It is a term that has some traction in global environmental change circles, but not yet among historians."

On Friday, April 1, 2016, The Graduate Center at the City University of New York hosts a one-day workshop on Medicine and Knowledge in the Middle East. The third panel of the workshop, 'Environments of Other Wars', features the work of Dr. Chris Gratien (PhD, 2015) on “Year of the Mosquito: Displacement and Disease in the Ottoman Empire during WWI” and doctoral candidate Graham Pitts on “War as the Vector of Malaria in Twentieth-Century Lebanon”. Their panel will be moderated by Professor Alan Mikhail of Yale University.

The workshop will take place in Room C198 of the CUNY Graduate Center, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. with a break for lunch. RSVP to Seçil Yılmaz (syilmaz@gradcenter.cuny.edu) to confirm attendance. All workshop participants are asked to read the papers in advance of the meeting.

Full details of the workshop are available here

Following up on his article in TIME last week, University Professor John McNeill published an article for AHA Today on the American experience of Aedes aegypti, the species of mosquito at the heart of the ongoing Zika virus crisis. Published below is an excerpt from his article.

The Zika virus currently spreading throughout the Americas is the latest of several dangerous pathogens communicated from person to person by a mosquito called Aedes aegypti. Other species from the genus Aedes might be competent vectors (i.e. transmitters or carriers) as well, but so far the evidence fingers aegypti as the main culprit.

Before 1492, Aedes aegypti did not live in the Americas. It came from West Africa as part of the Columbian Exchange, probably in the context of the transatlantic slave trade. It gradually colonized those parts of the Americas that suited its feeding and breeding requirements, and for centuries served as the primary vector for yellow fever and dengue, viruses that are cousins of Zika.

Read the rest of Prof. McNeill's article at AHA Today.

John McNeill is the author of, most recently, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010).

This week, University Professor John McNeill published an article in TIME via the History News Network on the history of mosquito-borne diseases in the Americas. Published below is an excerpt from his article.

Mosquito-borne viruses, over the last few centuries, have shaped the social and political history of the Americas. Since late 2015, millions of mosquitoes, mainly Aedes aegypti but perhaps also Ae. albopictus have been spreading the Zika virus in South and Central America. Zika belongs to a formidable family of mosquito-borne viruses, which, over the last few centuries, has shaped the social and political history of the Americas. Zika is following in distinguished footsteps. Dengue, also transmitted chiefly by Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, long affected tropical Africa and Asia. Sometime in the last 500 years (no one can say just when) it stowed away on ships and crossed the Atlantic to the Americas. Some dengue strains arrived only recently, in the 1970s and 1980s, via air traffic. Yellow fever, for which Aedes aegypti also serve as the primary vector, is African in origin. It leapt the Atlantic no later than 1647. No one knows precisely how these viruses and their mosquito vector crossed to the Americas, but the likeliest hypothesis is that they hitched a ride on some of the many thousands of slave ships that crossed the Atlantic. Dengue and yellow fever started to alter history in the Americas from the 1690s.

Read the rest of Prof. McNeill's article at TIME or the History News Network.

John McNeill is the author of Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (2010).