S04E07 | The Disease of Unemployment: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on Today’s Ailing Economy

C19: America in the 19th Century

The coronavirus pandemic in 2020 resulted in not only a devastating loss of life, but a loss of jobs too. As the virus swept the United States, so too did unemployment. What Americans experienced last year during the pandemic was unprecedented in some ways, but the link between crises in health and employment is nothing new. To gain some historical perspective on our most recent epidemic of unemployment, this episode travels back to the depressions of the late nineteenth century to uncover how American economists and thinkers used metaphors of contagious disease to first conceptualize what it meant to be unemployed. Produced by Hillary Roegelein (University of Maryland, College Park), a specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and unemployment history, this episode raises historical and philosophical questions about the advantages of and limitations to thinking about unemployment as a disease. Roegelein is joined by two other scholars of nineteenth-century American culture. Sari Altschuler (Northeastern University) turns to the Cholera outbreak of the 1840s to offer insight into the way pandemics repeatedly give rise to major shifts in cultural, economic, and intellectual thought. And Historian Richard White (Stanford University) explains the history of unemployment and its conceptual development in the United States before 1930. Additional production support was provided by Paul Fess (La Guardia Community College, CUNY). Full episode transcript available here: https://bit.ly/C19PodcastS04E07