William H. McNeill (1917–2016)
Author of Plagues and People
About the Author
William Hardy McNeill was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada on October 31, 1917. He received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree from the University of Chicago. He was drafted in 1941 and served with the Army in Hawaii and the Caribbean and as assistant military attaché to the show more Greek and Yugoslavian governments-in-exile in Cairo, Egypt. After the war, he received a doctorate from Cornell University. He was a history professor at the University of Chicago from 1947 until he retired in 1987. He wrote more than 20 books during his lifetime including Plagues and Peoples; The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000; Arnold J. Toynbee: A Life, Hutchins' University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929-1950; and Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History. The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community won the 1963 National Book Award for history and the Gordon J. Laing Prize of the University of Chicago. He was the co-author of The Human Web: A Bird's-Eye View of World History with his son John Robert McNeill. He also wrote a memoir entitled The Pursuit of Truth: A Historian's Memoir. He was one of the editors of the Readings in World History Series published by Oxford University Press. He died on July 8, 2016 at the age of 98. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Series
Works by William H. McNeill
The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000 (1982) 544 copies, 2 reviews
The Human Condition: An Ecological and Historical View (Bland-Lee lecture series delivered at Clark University, 1979) (1980) 37 copies
Hutchins' University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago, 1929-1950 (Centennial Publications of The University of Chicago Press) (1991) 29 copies
Polyethnicity and National Unity in World History (Donald G. Creighton Lectures, 1985) (1986) 11 copies
World history in maps;: A teachers manual for use with Denoyer-Geppert world history series, (1963) 7 copies
World History 1 copy
世界史 II──人類の結びつきと相互作用の歴史 1 copy
世界史 I ── 人類の結びつきと相互作用の歴史 1 copy
HISTORIA DEL MUNDO 1 copy
戦争の世界史(下) (中公文庫) 1 copy
Associated Works
What If? The World's Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (1999) — Contributor — 1,940 copies, 27 reviews
What If? 2: Eminent Historians Imagine What Might Have Been (2001) — Contributor — 1,091 copies, 11 reviews
Maps of Time : An Introduction to Big History (2004) — Foreword, some editions — 684 copies, 13 reviews
Fundamentalisms and Society: Reclaiming the Sciences, the Family, and Education (The Fundamentalism Project) (1993) — Contributor — 38 copies
The Origins of Business, Money, and Markets (Columbia Business School Publishing) (2011) — Foreword, some editions — 23 copies
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History — Spring 1998 (1998) — Author "Infectious Alternatives" — 17 copies
MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History — Winter 1995 (1994) — Author "Keeping Together in Time" — 11 copies
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society - Fifth Series, Volume 32 (1982) — Contributor, some editions — 7 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Canonical name
- McNeill, William H.
- Legal name
- McNeill, William Hardy
- Birthdate
- 1917-10-31
- Date of death
- 2016-07-08
- Gender
- male
- Education
- Cornell University (Ph.D|1947)
University of Chicago (BA|1938|MA|1939) - Occupations
- historian
professor - Organizations
- University of Chicago
American Historical Association
United States Army (WWII) - Awards and honors
- American Academy of Arts & Sciences (1964)
American Philosophical Society (1977)
National Humanities Medal (2010)
Erasmus Prize (1996)
National Book Award in History and Biography (1964) - Relationships
- McNeill, John T. (father)
McNeill, J. R. (son) - Short biography
- William H. McNeill was born in Vancouver, British Columbia, the son of a Presbyterian minister and historian of Christianity. He graduated from the University of Chicago, where he was editor of the student newspaper, in 1938, and earned a master’s degree with a thesis on Thucydides and Herodotus.
In 1941, during World War II, he was drafted into the U.S. Army. After the war, he earned a doctorate in history at Cornell University and joined the faculty of the University of Chicago, where he remained until his retirement in 1987. - Nationality
- USA
Canada (birth) - Birthplace
- Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
- Places of residence
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
Colebrook, Connecticut, USA - Place of death
- Torrington, Connecticut, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
Civilized diseases. This is the book that first alerted me to the way some germs and viruses have altered human history, much as pigeons have become a part of our daily environment. As we have developed the previously virgin landscape of the world, we have unwittingly unleashed the microbes intent on destroying us. Tit-for-tat. Throw in the 'peoples' element, such as Roman legionnaires turning on their own communities or Mongols burning villages and their occupants into ashes, and one show more wonders why we are still here.
McNeill also looks at how different sectors of humanity handled the constant scourges. While Western Europe became more superstitious, the Moslems were somewhat more enlightened:
When you learn that epidemic disease exists in a county, do not go there; but if it breaks out in the county where you are, do not leave.
Book Season = Winter (when you're shivering with the flu) show less
McNeill also looks at how different sectors of humanity handled the constant scourges. While Western Europe became more superstitious, the Moslems were somewhat more enlightened:
When you learn that epidemic disease exists in a county, do not go there; but if it breaks out in the county where you are, do not leave.
Book Season = Winter (when you're shivering with the flu) show less
Both the best and worst book I could’ve picked in the early days of a global pandemic. It’s impressively concise and thorough, running from the first true humans in Africa up to more modern epidemics such as the Spanish flu and polio, and has an intriguing double-pronged thesis: that diseases are one of the last checks on human population growth, and that social hierarchies have a tendency to evolve social parasites (feudal lords, corporate overlords, etc.). It’s very well laid-out and show more thought-provoking, and most of what I disagreed with were “product of the time” problems rather than logical ones.
(For instance, McNeill seems to believe that all cultures strive towards a Western model and if they don’t achieve that, they “fail”; that the only civilizations in Africa and the New World were the Ancient Egyptians, Inca, Aztecs, and Maya; and that some diseases like syphilis and AIDS have different origins than is now believed. Given how progressive and thorough he seems to be in other ways, and that fact this book came out in the 1970s before genetic analysis was a thing, I don’t think any of that is his fault, really.)
The thesis itself, though, and how McNeill presents it? Pretty impeccable. He’s big on ecological balance, working off the idea that humans ideally have stable relationships with their local disease organisms, and it’s only when things get thrown off-balance that epidemics happen. He talks about disease barriers, like climate or mountain ranges, about the population minimums required for epidemics to start, about the waves of disease that create resistant humans—and about people dying en masse being just a fact of life, and about how having things like measles be childhood diseases is the best-case scenario. So yeah, it gets kind of grim.
Some of his logical chains were really eye-opening, though. His explanation for why indigenous peoples converted so quickly to Christianity has stuck with me, and I’m going to be looking at historical diseases differently from now on in general, but especially the ones in wartime. I also appreciated that he took the time to go into case studies, like with the Black Death, and to pull in facts about politics, religions, trade routes, revolutions, social customs, and all sorts of things to both bolster his argument and recontextualize events. For example, he talks about local beliefs as having arisen as protection against disease. If you live somewhere wild rodents transmit y. pestis and you believe that touching the ones that act sick is unlucky, well, you’re not wrong. And for all that McNeill is Eurocentric in outlook, he spends a lot of time discussing non-Western, mostly Asian, societies and outbreaks, which was also nice to see.
In general, I found this a very interesting book, challenging for its outlook more than its prose, though it has a pretty dense, dry writing style and I did have to reread pages to follow McNeill’s train of thought. It’s not a complete global history—that would be impossible—but it’s definitely valuable for its perspective. It was recommended to me, and I’m passing that on.
9/10
Contains: reasonably in-depth and clinical discussions of civilizations and societies weathering epidemic diseases; a rather mid-century outlook on what constitutes a civilization and the proper organization of society; racial terminology of a similar vintage; some explanations of disease science that were likely accurate 40 years ago but aren’t so now; a frequently cynical and morbid outlook show less
(For instance, McNeill seems to believe that all cultures strive towards a Western model and if they don’t achieve that, they “fail”; that the only civilizations in Africa and the New World were the Ancient Egyptians, Inca, Aztecs, and Maya; and that some diseases like syphilis and AIDS have different origins than is now believed. Given how progressive and thorough he seems to be in other ways, and that fact this book came out in the 1970s before genetic analysis was a thing, I don’t think any of that is his fault, really.)
The thesis itself, though, and how McNeill presents it? Pretty impeccable. He’s big on ecological balance, working off the idea that humans ideally have stable relationships with their local disease organisms, and it’s only when things get thrown off-balance that epidemics happen. He talks about disease barriers, like climate or mountain ranges, about the population minimums required for epidemics to start, about the waves of disease that create resistant humans—and about people dying en masse being just a fact of life, and about how having things like measles be childhood diseases is the best-case scenario. So yeah, it gets kind of grim.
Some of his logical chains were really eye-opening, though. His explanation for why indigenous peoples converted so quickly to Christianity has stuck with me, and I’m going to be looking at historical diseases differently from now on in general, but especially the ones in wartime. I also appreciated that he took the time to go into case studies, like with the Black Death, and to pull in facts about politics, religions, trade routes, revolutions, social customs, and all sorts of things to both bolster his argument and recontextualize events. For example, he talks about local beliefs as having arisen as protection against disease. If you live somewhere wild rodents transmit y. pestis and you believe that touching the ones that act sick is unlucky, well, you’re not wrong. And for all that McNeill is Eurocentric in outlook, he spends a lot of time discussing non-Western, mostly Asian, societies and outbreaks, which was also nice to see.
In general, I found this a very interesting book, challenging for its outlook more than its prose, though it has a pretty dense, dry writing style and I did have to reread pages to follow McNeill’s train of thought. It’s not a complete global history—that would be impossible—but it’s definitely valuable for its perspective. It was recommended to me, and I’m passing that on.
9/10
Contains: reasonably in-depth and clinical discussions of civilizations and societies weathering epidemic diseases; a rather mid-century outlook on what constitutes a civilization and the proper organization of society; racial terminology of a similar vintage; some explanations of disease science that were likely accurate 40 years ago but aren’t so now; a frequently cynical and morbid outlook show less
This is an interesting and somewhat scholarly look at how people and diseases have interacted and evolved together over time, from "man the hunter" to "the ecological impact of medical science and organization since 1700". McNeil examines macroparisitic and microparisitic effects on the growth of civilizations, focusing primarily on diseases and how epidemics have effected world history, the course of civilization and human evolution.
I found the sections where the author discusses the show more "living conditions" of diseases particularly interesting: how a specific disease inhabited a certain enviornment, how it arrived and survived in that environment, and how those environments may have been altered by human impacts such as agricultural activities, population growth (or lack thereof), how the disease spread to other areas etc. McNeill's comparison between human micro-parasites (bacteria, worms, viruses) and our macro-parasites (governments, armies ,raiders, plunderers) was a particularly thought-provoking and novel (to me) aspect of the book.
The book was originally published in 1976, so some details are a bit dated, but this doesn't detract from the overall thesis. The writing style is also a bit "old-fashioned" if that sort of thing bothers you. The author does, however, make use of historical sources that include as much of the globe as possible, so the spread between and effects of epidemics on Europe as well as of China, India, the Middle-East, the America's and Africa are discussed where possible (allowing for existing source material on these regions). show less
I found the sections where the author discusses the show more "living conditions" of diseases particularly interesting: how a specific disease inhabited a certain enviornment, how it arrived and survived in that environment, and how those environments may have been altered by human impacts such as agricultural activities, population growth (or lack thereof), how the disease spread to other areas etc. McNeill's comparison between human micro-parasites (bacteria, worms, viruses) and our macro-parasites (governments, armies ,raiders, plunderers) was a particularly thought-provoking and novel (to me) aspect of the book.
The book was originally published in 1976, so some details are a bit dated, but this doesn't detract from the overall thesis. The writing style is also a bit "old-fashioned" if that sort of thing bothers you. The author does, however, make use of historical sources that include as much of the globe as possible, so the spread between and effects of epidemics on Europe as well as of China, India, the Middle-East, the America's and Africa are discussed where possible (allowing for existing source material on these regions). show less
Written in 1975 and revised in 1997, Plagues and People remains an ambitious, timely study of the impact of disease on the course of world history. Historian William McNeil posits that two forces micro-parasitism and macro-parasitism are behind the emergence of plagues. Micro-parasitism refers to a shift in the ecosystem that allows a release of new parasites which invariably find homes in human hosts, often with deadly consequences. Macro-parasitism refers to the spread of disease through show more the human occupation and/ or domination of one group by another. Military campaigns, colonialism, and trade are key examples of this type of disease spread. Obviously, these forces can and often do overlap. McNeill's evidence demonstrates that historically, plagues have taken their most lethal form when they find a virgin population which has had no previous exposure and has not been able to develop antibodies. Sound familiar?
McNeill's analysis begins with changes in the ecosytem caused by the shift from hunting and gathering to agricultural societies and traverses world history through the AIDS epidemic of the 1980's. He examines the role of military victories and the impact of the Bubonic plague. Perhaps most distressing is his chapter documenting the devastation of native populations in the Americas as they encounter European diseases.
In 1975, very little had been written on the role of disease in history. William McNeill was a pioneer. Although, the book could be dense at times, I admired its breadth, scope and scholarship. I gained many insights that helped me to better understand our present situation and place it in historical context. show less
McNeill's analysis begins with changes in the ecosytem caused by the shift from hunting and gathering to agricultural societies and traverses world history through the AIDS epidemic of the 1980's. He examines the role of military victories and the impact of the Bubonic plague. Perhaps most distressing is his chapter documenting the devastation of native populations in the Americas as they encounter European diseases.
In 1975, very little had been written on the role of disease in history. William McNeill was a pioneer. Although, the book could be dense at times, I admired its breadth, scope and scholarship. I gained many insights that helped me to better understand our present situation and place it in historical context. show less
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Statistics
- Works
- 65
- Also by
- 10
- Members
- 5,417
- Popularity
- #4,601
- Rating
- 3.9
- Reviews
- 56
- ISBNs
- 173
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