Learn about this Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) addressing the effects of disease on history taught by Dr. Gene Sessions and Dr. Craig Oberg.
While biologists have long understood the power of disease to shape events in world history, the depth of that power has rarely emerged in history books. A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC), developed at Weber State University by Brady Presidential Distinguished Professors Craig Oberg (Microbiology) and Gene Sessions (History), seeks to redress that imbalance through historical anecdote and scientific explanation as it investigates the effects of disease on religion, conquest and exploration, population movement and migration, war, politics, and arts and literature.
Gene A. Sessions is Brady Presidential Distinguished Professor of History at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. A native of Ogden, he received his Ph.D. degree from Florida State University in 1974. He is the author and editor of numerous works, including Mormon Thunder: A Documentary History of Jedediah Morgan Grant (1982, 2008), Latter-day Patriots: Nine Mormon Families and Their Revolutionary War Heritage (1975), Prophesying upon the Bones: J. Reuben Clark and the Foreign Debt Crisis, 1933-39 (1992), Camp Floyd and the Mormons: The Utah War (with Donald R. Moorman, 1992, 2005), The Search for Harmony: Essays on Science and Mormonism (with Craig J. Oberg, 1993), Utah International: A Biography of a Business (with Sterling D. Sessions, 2002, 2005), and Mormon Democrat: The Religious and Political Memoirs of James Henry Moyle (1975, 1998), for which he received the Mormon History Association’s annual award for best edited work.
He has also been a consultant on documentaries and committees exploring the Utah War and the Mountain Meadows Massacre and is past president of the Mountain Meadows Association. He and his wife Shantal have four children and seven grandsons.