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In the early 1980s most accounts presented AIDS as a radical break from the historical trends of the twentieth century, at least in the industrialized nations: a sudden, unexpected, and disastrous return to a vanished world of epidemic disease. The problem the epidemic raises for historians and for others who use historical methods is to understand the intricacies of the relationships among people and the institutions they have created in the closing decades of the twentieth century. The history of AIDS is a problem in contemporary history. We then introduce the essays in this volume, essays that lead us in the directions we have proposed as both necessary and useful. In this essay we summarize and criticize the brief historiography of the epidemic and suggest research questions and methods that may lead to more valid and useful historical writing. Now, a decade after AIDS was first recognized, there is increasing evidence that analogies to the past can be misleading, as they usually are in the history of war or economies or anything else. This interest led many commentators to employ history, and sometimes even historians, to explain what this epidemic has in common with devastating infections in the past.
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Fee and Fox (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. Fox, "Introduction: AIDS, Public Policy, and Historical Inquiry," in AIDS: The Burdens of History, ed. The Contemporary Historiography of AIDS Elizabeth FeeĪIDS "has stimulated more interest in history than any other disease of modern times," as we wrote in the introduction to AIDS: The Burdens of History in 1988.