Pox Americana

$ 18.00

A devastating smallpox epidemic was sweeping across the Americas when the American Revolution began, deeply affecting the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America.

Military action and political uprising increased the movement of people and microbes, spreading contagion to American soldiers with no immunity, to enslaved people who had escaped to British military camps where they were promised inoculation, and to Indigenous nations in every part of the continent.

How did an epidemic of this now-eradicated virus transform North America just as the United States was struggling to become a nation?

Elizabeth Fenn is a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Distinguished Professor of History at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.