Necropolis

Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom
Erscheinungsjahr 2024
ISBN: 978-0-674-29555-1
Verlag: Harvard University Press

Buch, Englisch, 352 Seiten, Format (B × H): 144 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 431 g

Winner of the Frederick Jackson Turner Award Winner of James H. Broussard Best First Book Prize, SHEAR Winner of the Kemper and Leila Williams Prize in Louisiana History Winner of the Humanities Book of the Year Award, Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities “A brilliant book…This transformative work is a pivotal addition to the scholarship on American slavery.” —Annette Gordon-Reed “A stunning account of ‘high-risk, high-reward’ profiteering in the yellow fever–ridden Crescent City…a world in which a deadly virus altered every aspect of a brutal social system, exacerbating savage inequalities of enslavement, race, and class.” —John Fabian Witt, author of American Contagions “Olivarius’s new perspectives on yellow fever, immunocapitalism, and the politics of acclimation…will influence a generation of scholars to come on the intersections of racism, slavery, and public health.” —The Lancet In antebellum New Orleans, at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms, epidemics of yellow fever killed as many as 150,000 people. With little understanding of the origins of the illness—and meager public health infrastructure—one’s only hope if infected was to survive, providing the lucky few with a mysterious form of immunity. Repeated epidemics bolstered New Orleans’s strict racial hierarchy by introducing another hierarchy, a form of “immunocapital,” as white survivors leveraged their immunity to pursue economic and political advancement while enslaved Blacks were relegated to the most grueling labor. The question of health—who has it, who doesn’t, and why—is always in part political. Necropolis shows how powerful nineteenth-century Orleanians constructed a society that capitalized on mortal risk and benefited from the chaos that ensued.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Olivarius, Kathryn

Fachgebiete

• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Volkswirtschaftslehre Wirtschaftspolitik, politische Ökonomie
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Amerikanische Geschichte
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizin, Gesundheitswesen Geschichte der Medizin
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Mentalitäts- und Sozialgeschichte

Über Autor(innen)

Olivarius, Kathryn
Kathryn Olivarius is a historian of slavery, medicine, and disease whose writing and research has been featured in the <i>New York Times, Scientific American,</i> and the <i>Washington Post</i>. A winner of the 2024 Dan David Prize, she is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University.