“Be still my heart; thou hast known worse than this.” – Homer

Crisis and Catharsis is a digital history project that was created by graduate students from Stony Brook University in response to COVID-19. Through story-driven content like podcasts, blogs, and image analyses, we explore how people in the past have persevered through periods of great adversity, much like the one we are currently facing together. This site shares a historical perspective on how people have found relief in times of crisis, focusing on artistic expression, like literature, music and art, but also expression in daily life, like cuisine and oral histories. We aim to cover a range of topics, while focusing on the forgotten survival stories of marginalized groups that typically do not get adequate recognition in popular narratives. 

Be it an epidemic, environmental disaster or political upheaval, and there is always a light at the end of the tunnel. Our focus is on stories of ingenuity and creativity, which we hope will inspire readers in the midst of our current global crisis, looking at how people of the past have found catharsis in crisis.