BiblioVault - Books about Crisis

Ohio under COVID

Lessons from America's Heartland in Crisis

Katherine Sorrels, Vanessa Carbonell, Danielle Bessett, Lora Arduser, Edward Wallace, and Michelle L. McGowan, Editors

University of Michigan Press, 2023

In early March of 2020, Americans watched with uncertain terror as the novel coronavirus pandemic unfolded. One week later, Ohio announced its first confirmed cases. Just one year later, the state had over a million cases and 18,000 Ohioans had died. What happened in that first pandemic year is not only a story of a public health disaster, but also a story of social disparities and moral dilemmas, of lives and livelihoods turned upside down, and of institutions and safety nets stretched to their limits.

Ohio under COVID tells the human story of COVID in Ohio, America’s bellwether state. Scholars and practitioners examine the pandemic response from multiple angles, and contributors from numerous walks of life offer moving first-person reflections. Two themes emerge again and again: how the pandemic revealed a deep tension between individual autonomy and the collective good, and how it exacerbated social inequalities in a state divided along social, economic, and political lines. Chapters address topics such as mask mandates, ableism, prisons, food insecurity, access to reproductive health care, and the need for more Black doctors. The book concludes with an interview with Dr. Amy Acton, the state’s top public health official at the time COVID hit Ohio. Ohio under COVID captures the devastating impact of the pandemic, both in the public discord it has unearthed and in the unfair burdens it has placed on the groups least equipped to bear them.

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Opportunity in Crisis

Cantonese Migrants and the State in Late Qing China

Steven B. Miles

Harvard University Press

Opportunity in Crisis explores the history of late Qing Cantonese migration along the West River basin during war and reconstruction and the impact of those developments on the relationship between state and local elites on the Guangxi frontier. By situating Cantonese upriver and overseas migration within the same framework, Steven Miles reconceives the late Qing as an age of Cantonese diasporic expansion rather than one of state decline.

The book opens with crisis: rising levels of violence targeting Cantonese riverine commerce, much of it fomented by a geographically mobile Cantonese underclass. Miles then narrates the ensuing history of a Cantonese rebel regime established in Guangxi in the wake of the Taiping uprising. Subsequent chapters discuss opportunities created by this crisis and its aftermath and demonstrate important continuities and changes across the mid-century divide. With the reassertion of Qing control, Cantonese commercial networks in Guangxi expanded dramatically and became an increasingly important source of state revenue. Through its reliance on Hunanese and Cantonese to reconquer Guangxi, the Qing state allowed these diasporic cohorts more flexibility in colonizing the provincial administration and examination apparatus, helping to recreate a single polity on the eve of China’s transition from empire to nation-state.

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Ornament as Crisis

Architecture, Design, and Modernity in Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers"

Sarah McGaughey

Northwestern University Press, 2016

Ornament as Crisis explores the ways in which the novels of Hermann Broch’s Sleepwalkers (Schlafwandler) trilogy participate in and employ the history of architecture and architectural theory.

Beginning with the visual and architectural experiences of the figures in each novel, Sarah McGaughey analyzes the role of architecture in the trilogy as a whole, while discussing work by Broch’s contemporaries on architecture. She argues that The Sleepwalkers allows us to better understand how literature responds and contributes to social, theoretical, and spatial concepts of architecture. Ornament as Crisis guides readers through the spaces of Broch’s mdernist masterpiece and the architectural debates of his time.

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Overripe Economy

American Capitalism and the Crisis of Democracy

Alan Nasser

Pluto Press, 2018

Capitalism is in crisis. Overripe Economy uses a historical view to explain how we got here and why. Taking readers through the history of American capitalism--from the ruthless competition of the nineteenth century to the maturation of industrial capitalism in the early part of the twentieth and on into today’s finance-ridden decline--Alan Nasser lays out here in damning detail why the persistent austerity of financialized capitalism is the inevitable outcome of the evolution of the American economy. Capitalism, he argues, ultimately presents us with two alternatives: persistent austerity, declining democracy, and a privatized state, or a polity and economy characterized by genuine economic democracy.

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