Pillar route
Health and medicine
How disease, hospitals, public health systems, medicine, and care shape survival, control, and the politics of the body.
Health and medicine
Public health, hospitals, workforce flows, reproductive politics, and the fight over who gets care.
- movement
Science and technology
The history of scientific knowledge, machines, computation, medicine, and invention.
technologyscienceeconomyculture - economic system
The welfare state
How modern states took on protection from want, disease, and old age, from Bismarck's social insurance and Britain's Poor Law through Beveridge, the New Deal, the NHS, and Kenyatta's African Socialism.
societyeconomypolitics - society
The care drain: recruiting the world's health workers
Poorer countries train the doctors and nurses that richer ones then hire, so origin countries subsidize rich-world health systems. The WHO's voluntary Code is the debated response.
societyeconomypoliticsdiplomacy - politics
The World Health Organization: power, failure, and the funding leash
The UN health body from smallpox to its funding leash, its failures over Ebola and COVID, and the US withdrawal. Donor-capture and world-government claims are attributed, not asserted.
politicsdiplomacyscienceeconomy - nation
South America: from the Inca to independence
A continent's history: the Andean civilizations from Caral to the vast Inca empire; the Spanish and Portuguese conquest, Pizarro and the fall of the Inca, and the disease that emptied the land...
politicswarsocietyeconomy - movement
Eugenics and forced sterilization in America
The American eugenics machine: the sterilization laws from Indiana 1907, the Supreme Court's Buck v. Bell blessing of 'three generations of imbeciles', the Nazi borrowing of the California model...
societypoliticssciencewar - movement
The oppression of Native Americans
Centuries of dispossession made national policy: the Indian Removal Act and the Trail of Tears, the massacres from Sand Creek to Wounded Knee, the reservation and allotment system...
politicswarsocietyeconomy - movement
The oppression of Mexican Americans
The long record of violence and exclusion against Mexican Americans: the border-era lynchings and the Bisbee Deportation, the 1930s Mexican Repatriation that expelled up to a million people, US citizens included...
societypoliticseconomywar - pillar
The pillars of modern power
The load-bearing power blocks of modern society, read off the data itself: money and finance; state, law, and coercion; military and security; production and labor; land and resources; infrastructure and logistics...
pillarpoliticseconomysociety - movement
Eugenics and scientific racism
The rise and fall of eugenics and racial pseudoscience: from Galton and the racial theorists through sterilization laws and the Nazi programs to the postwar reckoning.
sciencesocietypoliticstechnology