Law in the Time of COVID-19

Some people who are stuck at home during a snowstorm like to read about polar exploration, and when they're headed out on long car trips they pick up Steinbeck's Travels with Charley or perhaps the Journals of Lewis and Clark. To support that impulse, we're listing some ebooks available through the University Libraries about past epidemics. And, of course, history might provide lessons for today.

Limiting the list to UW ebooks means leaving out some great books, including the classic Rats, Lice and History, by Hans Zinsser (1935), Michael Willrich's Pox: An American History (2011), David Quammen's Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (2012), and the landmark early history of the AIDS crisis, And the Band Played On, by Randy Shilts (1987). Check your local public library for these and other books.

Graphic: Title page, History of the Plague in London in 1685, an abridgement of Defoe's History of the Plague in London 1665, available to UW users online.