Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 Review

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(More customer reviews)If we think that America has never known an infectious epidemic other than the Great Influenza after World War I, we'd be wise to consider the smallpox pandemic that swept the length & breadth of the North American continent just as the Revolutionary fever did.
Pox American: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82 is a fascinating way to learn about the early years of our nation when cultures collided on this continent. Each chapter starts with a story of one man - a ship's captain exploring the Straits of Juan de Fuca or a New England volunteer in the Continental Army or a missionary riding the dusty Southwest trails. From these individual's stories we can see scope of the virus' reach. With pictographs, maps, charts & photographs, this author brings this contagion close to home!
Sometimes the dread disease was an invisible passenger upon an unsuspecting carrier that would arrive in a tribe of otherwise healthy people & within weeks, the entire community would be dead. Sometimes it was intentionally sent forth by our wily forefathers to do their deadly work.
Smallpox haunted our ancestors from coast to coast; from Russian promyshlenniki (hunters & traders) who first explored & then enslaved the residents of Alaska to America's breadbasket, where entire native communities of farmers & hunter-gatherers were wiped out in weeks to Hudson Bay, New Orleans, The South as well as Mexico City.
Elizabeth Fenn writes: "The pestilence can teach us the ways in which other upheavels - native warfare, missionization, the fur trade, and the acquisition of horses and guns...reshaped human life on the North American continent. The movement of the virus from one human being to another shows us how people actually lived in the late eighteenth century. For despite the political, social, and racial boundaries of the day, people rubbed elbows."
I cannot do justice to the scope & breadth of this author's research. Pox Americana is a compelling read, a dread-filled chronicle of another aspect of our story & Professor Elizabeth Fenn has written a rich & interesting story with a huge Notes Section, as befits a teacher of history!

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