H omer’s Iliad — what some consider the origin of European literature — begins with a plague. In the epic, which I was teaching as part of an upper-level Greek course just months ago, the destructive ...

Like any lover of literature, I have turned to books for help in coping with our current crisis. One novel, Albert Camus’s The Plague is frequently mentioned as an outstanding example of “plague ...

The plague sounds like something out of a history book. But the disease—nicknamed the “Black Death” or “Great Pestilence”—that killed more than 25 million people, about a third of Europe, in medieval ...

A spike in gravestones from 1338 in Kyrgyzstan led historian Philip Slavin to theorize that the Black Death may have begun years before it swept through Europe. Inscriptions mentioning “pestilence” ...

After World War I, the pale horse of pestilence galloped unchecked across Europe. How many people died from influenza, typhus, relapsing fever, malaria, typhoid and smallpox was never recorded, but ...