By Dan Gorman
Last fall, I taught HIST 191, "Contested Futures: Science and Religion in the United States," which introduced undergraduate students to topics such as Spiritualism and the paranormal, debates about evolution and creationism, the atomic bombings of WWII, and environmentalism.
Our final unit addressed anti-vaccine movements and the COVID-19 pandemic. On Thursday, December 2, playwrights Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen joined us virtually for a discussion of their documentary play The Line, which premiered on the Public Theater's YouTube channel in July 2020. The play collects the stories of real New York healthcare workers from the first wave of COVID, offering a remarkable account of the struggles that emergency responders faced in the beginning of the pandemic.
During Blank and Jensen's visit, we discussed oral history, assembling individual interviews into a narrative, the play's humanist and environmentalist implications, and historical research as a form of social activism. At the students' suggestion, we also discussed what a follow-up project about resistance to the COVID vaccines might look like.
I want to extend my thanks to the Department of History for supporting this workshop and to Blank and Jensen for sharing a copy of their script, which has not yet been published in book form.