Flattening the Curve: Learning the lessons of world history to mitigate societal crises

The world is experiencing myriad crises, from global climate change to a major pandemic to runaway inequality, mass impoverishment, and rising sectarian violence. Such crises are not new, but have been recurrent features of past societies. Although these periods have typically led to massive loss of life, the failure of critical institutions, and even complete societal collapse, lessons can be learned from societies that managed to avoid the more devastating and destructive outcomes. Here, we present a preliminary analysis of outcomes from periods of crisis in 50 historical societies and examine closely four cases of averted crisis in world history, highlighting common features. A key observation is that the structural-demographic cycles that give rise to societal crises typically incorporate a ‘gilded age’ during which more future-minded governance could avert future crises. To accomplish more forward-thinking public policy, capable not just of ‘flattening the curve’, but of actually breaking the cycle that produces societal crises in the first place, we argue that systematic quantitative analysis of patterns in world history is a necessary first step.

Parks over Pasture: Enclosing the Commons in Postbellum New Orleans

This article examines the enclosure of the de facto commons that surrounded New Orleans during the final decades of the nineteenth century and argues that public parks were crucial tools deployed by civic elites on behalf of that initiative. As the regulatory efforts of reform-minded mayor Joseph A. Shakspeare failed to eliminate the persistent “cattle nuisance” that emanated from the undeveloped suburbs, he turned to parks as a means of fundamentally transforming the character of the land. By physically enclosing large swathes of acreage, conditioning the public to be urban subjects, and associating the area with leisure rather than agrarian production, the parks made it possible for the city’s modernizers to push dairy farmers out of the area and initiate a process of residential development. By examining this strategic use of greenspace in Gilded Age-era New Orleans, this article seeks to shed new light on the ways in which the urban environment was manipulated in service of the broader New South movement.