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Podcast: New Books in African American Studies
Episode: Kathryn Olivarius, "Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom" (Harvard UP, 2022)
Description: Disease is thought to be a great leveler of humanity, but in antebellum New Orleans acquiring immunity from the scourge of yellow fever magnified the brutal inequities of slave-powered capitalism.Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of Americaâs slave and cotton kingdoms. It was also where yellow fever epidemics killed as many as 150,000 people during the nineteenth century. With little understanding of mosquito-borne virusesâand meager public health infrastructureâa personâs only protection against the scourge was to âget acclimatedâ by surviving the disease. About half of those who contracted yellow fever died.Repeated e...