When germs made history

It sounds like the stuff of conspiracy theories or a disaster movie: a series of volcanic eruptions kicks off a deadly pandemic. But new research suggests that such an event may indeed have happened.

I magine you’re in Nebraska, standing on North America’s Great Plains, where the broad Platte and Missouri rivers join on their way to the mighty Mississippi. It’s 1804, and in the blistering 36°C hea

Tom Ough The Anti-Catastrophe LeagueThe pioneers and visionaries on a questto save the world336pp. Mudlark. £22. David Spears and Michael Geruso After the SpikeThe risks of global depopulation and the

‘Green sickness’, also known as the ‘disease of virgins’ – a diagnosis applied mainly to teenage girls from the 16th to the 19th centuries – is one of the most puzzling conditions in the history of me

This moment is surely imbued with the most global symbolism. It was when, according to the Old Norse-Icelandic sagas, adventurers sailed across the north Atlantic from settlements on the west coast of

Sometimes, a single narrative comes to dominate how we remember a year. So it is with 1776. This, as every history lover knows, was the date that the American colonies declared their independence, beg