Hello. And a very warm welcome to National Book festival prevents the library of congress. My name is marie. Author and im also the literary director of the library of congress. Much of my own writing has been about the history and the people of latin america and the purpose of this conversation is to share a little bit of that history and talk about how it compares with and connects to the pandemic that were living through right now, right here in april 2020. So many of us are at home, or living at home and sheltering in place. As science takes on the covid19 virus. Unfortunate habit truly skilled and knowledgeable holly joining me today, a scholar who wears many hats spanning history, science, archaeology and geography. John hessler is the director of the kids like election at the library of congress and a specialist on early america. He is author of the book recently a final library of congress all collecting for a new world. John is also a distinguished curator in the librarys younger and activision and an expert in math in general. How does nothing fit in with all of this. . He is an advisor to a number of leading edge institutions in this country. As he attempts to track the spread of covid19 and understand how it moves through populations and time. John, welcome. Thanks, great to be here. Lets with a history. The first recorded pandemic in the history of this hemisphere was actually the smallpox and then came on the ships of the conquistadors, the spaniards in 1500 and tour through the indigenous population of the americas in that early part of that century. What had been europes experience with moxie for that . This is a complex and interesting question. There have been a number of scholars in recent years who actually gone back and look at some of the death record from france and italy to actually track what the mortality rate and what the effect of smallpox was on european populations read this is well before the conquest in the middle ages and sorted into the early modern trend. Even though the mortality rate is fairly high so 20 to 30 percent for the virus were talking about that causes smallpox, there didnt seem to be any largescale epidemics. It seems to be very localized. It seems 20 to 30 percent of the people die, the rest may have gotten the disease and recovered and develop some kind of immunity. The smallpox is a very interesting virus read has a lot in common covid19 but theres a lot that is different. It has lots of different animal posts, its related to things like cowpox and monkeypox and a whole series of other diseases, other viruses. But the real evolutionary question for the smallpox virus is what is it one of those viruses is only found in humans but as far as the European Experience before hand there were people who died. It was an important disease but there dont seem to have been any largescale pandemics. Europeans including the spanish immune to it 1492 when columbuss expedition first arrived in hispaniola . At interesting question, the virus is a history as far as that goes read modern science started to look at the sort of enormous on the smallpox of that period and there had been interesting discoveries inrecent years. There was a particular child monkey who died in between 1543 1565 area that we actually look at very closely and sequenced some of the genomes and look at some of the diseases that were in the fleshy surviving part of that particular child mommy but what has been found is that the smallpox that is in that particular mommy has buried much in common with modern strains. Things like gene degradation timing and all that stuff. Assurance that really this is a particularly virulent reign of smallpox that seems to have come into existence and that 15 and beginning of the 16th century, having just in time for its importation to the new world so theres also community obviously with a 20 percent, 30 percent mortality rate. Many people recovered and there was immunity by the time they arrived in the americas but there was still plenty of europeans dying of smallpox. We know from early historians, early chronicles how devastating this particular variety of smallpox was or the native population. Some say 90 percent of all indigenous debts which were considerable in those years of conquest were attributable to smallpox. You tell us about that . This is an interesting and scholarly discussion. Some of the sources that we have, armenia for example as a chronicler, spanish chronicler who arrived in 1524. He wrote basically a diary or a memoir which wasnt actually published until 1903 in manuscripts until then and he near really talksabout the actual mortality rate. The piece filling insurance of 14 percent but some of the other sources we have sarah growing in the codex and people like cortez and self. Really talk in larger terms. Cortez writes about the bodies piled up in the streets and the owner being so bad that cant stand walkingthrough the streets. So im not going to show what the mortality rate was but it was certainly high and much higher in the 20, 30 percent that we would be talking about in europe at the time. The interesting thing is there is a peculiar timeframe we are dealing with and its really from april 15 20 to about january 1821 seems to be when the smallpox was reallyintroduced. There a early source, vasquez ceo who basically talks about and he writes a letter back to Charles Rifkin in august 15 20 and this is the first mention we have of smallpox in the new world from a spanish source and it basically says that he was very surprised and he arrived to cozumel that there were few Indigenous People and he attributes this to them dying of smallpox and then heads off to their cruise and find there immediately upon the arrival of the exhibition or his flotilla that the native peoples began dying of smallpox fairly rapidly so it was fairly rapid but we dont really know the number but it was very high. What fascinates me is how quickly you say it moved through thatpopulation. In my own research for my book at the library of congress, book sober sword and stone there is this chronicle that we know there was straight up and down the coast of latin america and we know that tribes working at getting with each other either to trade or because they were at war or for some reason or another and fax the smallpox epidemic reached the coast of peru what is now peru and ecuador and affected actually the emperor died of smallpox before stadler even arrived so before the conquistadors even arrived there was this quick communication. Theres interesting actually, theres an interesting sources like the annals of a mayan source but this panel, the earliest manuscript we have is from the 17th century but it relates a number of academics and the first one thoughts about seem to decide smallpox actually is before the arrival of the conquistadors, its a few months before that they did it but we dont really know whats happening from the island. The native populations moving from the island so one really important thing that cortez does tell us, he does say that the debt thats praying on the mainland is the same that he saw on islands so he definitely conflates the two. There are of course historians of the introduction of smallpox raised the possibility of it being done by ethiopian slaves and a slave who was one of the exhibitions wanted to introduce it. Whats interesting about that is we only have really one source. The rest of the sources copy from that but it shows an important aspect of the way that the spanish were thinking of this disease that they had the result of the disease and they had an idea that i be transmitted by who didnt have immunity that something new was going on so they work on theorizing it even just story ends were chronicling this in the earliest period contact but they were thinking about it. You work at the library of congress on and you are the director of this fantastic collection which is a permanent exhibit at the library and its a collection of all kinds of artifacts. Textiles and objects of jade and all sorts of things and now even, can you tell us those artifacts, what do those chronicles and objects . Do they educate us in any way about the pandemic or how the disease spreads . Whats interesting is theirs important sources. The actual indigenous sources themselves, there are extremely important ones. The codex which was put together by the group as images, engravings such as Indigenous Peoples with smallpox. We see things like the codex cruise which is the earliest from 1550s, the earliest image we see of actual smallpox in the indigenous population. We have other things. For instance the library most importantly we have things like the codex capsule which kind of show us the botanical information. We have copies of hernandezs work from positions who was on an expedition in the 1550s and 1570s. Basically chronicling plants and indigenous medicines. He chronicled over 3000 plants and so did autopsies on Indigenous People had died of smallpox and he was an amazing source so a lot of these sources, a lot of these sources that really give us some insight into the indigenous mind, into what was going on in their world and how they pictured their world you must insight into how they reacted to it. We talked about the spanish and how the senate are reacting but how are they reacting to it . What are they thinking about and like all populations they have their own medicine. They have their own ways of thinking about and the codex continued a lot of that information but we also have actual sources which tell us about attempts and prints that they are using, theres something called the sand tomato which is a climbing by which rooms are prepared and use as coming to help smallpox. And hernandez basically tells us that are not a lot of names for this and various other uses for it. He also tells us that in fact it doesnt work, but the only way to help smallpox is to burn the gallbladder of a hummingbird. So theres this mix in the indigenous world of how their reacting to disease on the spiritual side, from attempting to control their world through ritual but theres also a very detailed and extremely complex at nobody and meniscal and pharmacologic sources they are trying to use and in any collection, the historical collections that are at the library and in other libraries around the world are really important in looking at this. Not only looking at the academics but what was the healing costs and whats the human reaction and we see that here today. Even the maps that are being generated we have all kinds of scientific maps that people are generating but also people doing drawings of their lockdown masks trying to perceive their way, how theyre feeling in this time. Of course when a novel virus appears, no medicine is equipped todeal with it. But how sophisticated exactly was, you use these tremendously highly developed precolumbian empires, how specifically what their medicine . Their medicine is incredibly sophisticated. The plants that they use and some of the other things they use to develop medicine is still something we dont understand that well. Theres really important manuscripts, one called the diaz manuscript which gets deep into f nobody and medicines. A lot of those medicines today we see that they have analgesic properties or they have Certain Properties to anesthesia properties. And there is a movement and there has been a movement for many years to look at nobody in some of these traditional treatments for whats going on today. To help cancer treatments and things like that area so it was very sophisticated where were not really sure exactly how it develops because the developing, when youre living in a place where theres 50,000 different plants and you come in on two or three that are going to have certain analgesic properties, how you get there is an interesting question. What is the empirical way Indigenous People dispel this but when the spanish arrived, there was quite a very healthy medicinal and way of looking at diseases, looking at treatment. Besides the ritualistic aspects of it. So tom, the question of ancient knowledge medical sophistication rings us to the question of how does all this time to the present day . What can history tell us about whats going on right now and what were going throughright now . What do we know with any certainty about the patterns of disease in the early americas and what does that history really teach us about the viral spread of covid19 today . One of the interesting things is specifically one can look at patterns of viral transmission. Obviously we dont have maps from the earliest period of the americas but we have these ideas of how the virus spreads that we have letters, we have kind of knowledge of sources and also look back in history of the people who back to the records of the european transmission and we can begin to sense even with clients whats going on. Something to see in your isnt really causing a large pandemic causing an epidemic of people that see that record are telling us that he had serious hormonal location for your and then we see all of this incidental textual knowledge thats coming through telling us people are dying in the americas. The ice ideas from the earliest spanish chroniclers of the nonlaw sources of how the disease is being transmitted so it gives us a sense of the way its moving and kind of the trend frame. We start looking at it from a more scientific perspective however. Especially today theres a lot more scientific tools to look at so in the case of smallpox, the archaeological evidence and has been unearthed combined with this ancient dna and the technology we have today give us a sense of how those historical sources are correct or incorrect, however it may be but they give us a package of a way that these things actually occurred. That these things spread. Other sources as we get into epidemics that have occurred throughout the history of the americas and we see more diaries and things like that, we get a sense of how some of this spreads but obviously its of course not as good as what we have today, what we are looking at and how we are trying to figure out the spread of covid19 and where covid19 came from. So starting and analyzing former diseases like the great influenza of 1919 or aids or sars can predict patterns of transmission and you spent a great part of your career in the study of maps and the scholarship of mapping and youre now working with a number of organizations mapping covid19 and the possibility it was originally transmitted from an animal host so i realize this is ongoing work and theres much study thats still to be done but tell us what exactly mapping has told us about covid19 so far. Whats interesting is we are in a situation now where because we have a worldwide pandemic and we have people capable of mapping dna where getting a good sense of what the overall genetic structure , what the genome of transfer is. Now covid19 is interesting. Its part of a larger group of corona viruses. Pomona meaning crown in london or in latin and that really is because it looks like a crown and it has these spikes coming out of it which is michael pro teams and its part of a larger family of viruses which for the most part find their hosts in the genus of horseshoe bats for the most part and what weve really found is the sequence that a immuno acid sequence of covid19 which is actually sars covid2 is the original name of it. 96 percent of that genome is found in the version that is found in this particular back. People believe that it came from a bad. Making the cross over to human beings and what the mechanism of that crossover is is not well understood but what its allowed us to do is allow us to as it spreads around the world and the genome sequence, we can develop whats called a five genetic trait that tree is made up of a couple of things. It basically shows where the test was done. In other words a person in and so we have a location. We also have a time so we got a location and a time and we got the actual genome and what were trying to do, what we are trying to map is the mutation through time and through space. In the case of covid19, we can look at the figures that are on the screen and you see the actual virus through time and we cans look at some of the important moments here. You see the rise of it in wuhan and the purple you see is all the transmission through china. When we start looking at the colors in the tree you can see them as they are read and those reds are really the transmissions to northamerica. And to the united states. There is 2 groups, theres one of the top and one at the bottom. Whats interesting and what the mapping can tell us is the fact that the parts that is the original seattle and illinois are actually from china so they have the mutations that are very much like the chinese virus but the one thats up at the top is really from europe. It has mutations that come from a european strain so we can see and get an idea and a very detailed idea. Like we could never before, theres this new technology that is mapping this pandemic in a way that we have never really done before and the detailsthat we can get. All this is in a sense theoretical, these genetic traits are built by very complex computer all the rhythms and mathematics and transportations of the virus since it goes along but theres a historical metaphor caused the pico genetic traits you see before you are like i said based on mutations which are errors in the virus so these are very much like the way that amy evil historian would look at a manuscript and look at mistakes in the manuscript as it moves through time and space and you can get a sense of here is the initial manuscript and heres how it changed and it went to this place and because this error happens to be in a manuscript that came from germany and its also in a manuscript that is in england, you can say they came from the same place, theyve got the same errors so the error is transmitted through time and space and to a certain extent thats what were doing with the viral mapping. Theres a lot of data being put out, theres 1 million organizations on tis, aig who are basically making this data, all of this sequence Data Available in real time and so there are people all over the world who are ableto work on this project. Those links are really remarkable. They are so interesting but lets take a moment briefly to talk about the book youve written, copublished with a Publishing Office at the library of Congress Called selecting for a new world and it describes the rich trove of precolumbianartifacts at the library holds. What role does any library or any archive have in the ongoing mapping and understanding of covid19 . Can you make those connections for us west and mark. You can, every archive corrects for some reason and when were talking about the precolumbian collections in the americas , at the library of congress and the context collections, because lack and other collections, the ginsberg collection, kind of straddle the line between contact material and precolumbian material. And when we look at that, material as a whole, it really is giving us a snapshot of really some important moments in the history of the world. When we think about what it must have been for europeans to arrive in the americas, what it must have been for the Indigenous People to have the europeans arrived, its like no other historical moments at either group had faith. So collecting that material really gives us an insight not only into the broader histories and big events but turns us into how the real lives of those people reacted and howartisans reacted. What might be considered people like hernandez, the scientists of the day. And it builds up a picture of a moment in time and i think were in a situation now which is no different where were talking about the covid19, we obviously have a huge amount of scientific and geospatial and biological research to try and fight what it is a profound historical moment for the world. That its something that weve really never seen before, certainly in any of our lifetimes and in the lifetimes of several generations before us. And the closest thing in any recent time is of course the 1918 flu pandemic. But i think collecting in this house the same role. We are collecting maps and data talk about how scientists are actively trying to map the genome. How people are actually trying to fight the disease. These are the really obvious things but we also at the library and the library of congress, its one of the great institutions of the world for doing this. We collect the cultural moment, collect the photographs and collect people and thoughts. Collect peoples drawings, collect how it is that they fought through this moment in time. Theres been some great mapping on the web and several news organizations that i think i picked it up call lockdown where people are drawing the maps of their neighborhoods. How theyre perceiving them now and these are not just geospatial maps, they have all sorts of cultural information, forinstance this is close, this is open, this is where my dog likes to walk. The shop is no longer close so libraries, like the library of congress, these institutions. They have a responsibility and the library is one of those great places to take that responsibility seriously both from a scientific side and from the cultural side and have they have a huge part toplay. Not perhaps at the very moment but certainly as we get through this and begin looking back at what happened to us. Is a really, its an expert in your testament to the sort of memory bank that an institution like this can be there in a great Cultural Institution that actually can tell us something about what has gone before. An epidemic will come and go, pandemics will come and go and this is really so enlightening. To see how they can connect. We have questions that came in from some to john that i want you to come around from the country. Heres one from cleveland ohio. My name is caroline, im a historian of european history and my question is how will historians write objectively about this pandemic of 2019 2020 without the political nature and controversies over covid19 revisionism. I think the question and i think historians that same problem with almost any event that they are trying to write about that has importance peoples lives. Obviously any of us whove been informed of whats going on right now see that theres differential effect and how covid19 is protecting various different populations. Theres a demographic effects, a geography effect and a race effects and in that sense its no different in any other historical event. And i think historians will take their perspectives. They will probably in the and have more evidence for an earth shattering event like this and they had for a lot and i think historians will simply get down to the business of doing their work. Objectivity, thats an open question. Whether history in itself no matter how its written is completely objective, its an open question. But i think historians will get down to doing the hard work of writing about what happens and the mistakes that were made the great things that weredone. In any world shaking event, there are going to be the heroes and villains and i think thats why we look at historians that live historians looked at places like the library of congress that we collect all the evidence we can and not there for them to interpret area. And heres the other question from monterey california. Whats the transmission of diseases look like in california at the time of the court to let expedition. Was it immediate . Did that first group of explorers bring the disease with thator did it come with later waves of europeans . Is an interesting question, theres a couple of different answers. I do believe that they did bring the disease with them. There are two particular indigenous groups of the conga who were really affected by both measles and smallpox in expedition theres an amazing diary called kreskin diaries which give a really sort of day by day almost interpretation of the two years that expedition , i think it was two years ago, might have been longer was traveling in the region and the earliest part of that is narrated very well in these diaries and it really actually even talks about the movie indigenous perspectives and so its a really great resource but those two groups were affected nearly immediately on the arrival of the expedition. So it was i think a fairly immediate effect and one of the things that have been really well studied obviously smallpox is something that attracts historians and the flu pandemic of 1918 has been very well researched. Theres some books written on it. But some of these molar contacts and some of the effects that had on the more mobile indigenous groups as you mentioned were all the way going downinto peru. Have not really been written about in a detailed way. And its somewhat of a good moment right now historically now that were in involved in Something Like covid19. Kind of look at what kind of sources can we bring, how can we look at this both looking at the sources that we have from this using ancient dna. To kind of enlightened. In how this disease moves during these period. You so much for this conversation that are very few people who can arrange from history, precolumbian history to covid19 at this time, mapping it and chasing down and seeing where its going and how its going so were very grateful to you, thank you for joining us here at the National Book festival prevents. Thank you for having me, everybody say say. Thank you so much. Book cd continues, television for serious readers. Good afternoon everybody. Thanks for coming, thanks for coming out red