Contact us on (02) 8445 2300
For all customer service and order enquiries

Woodslane Online Catalogues

9781469698434 Academic Inspection Copy

The Great Horse Flu

A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America
Description
Author
Biography
Reviews
Google
Preview
Seven years after the US Civil War and nearly 150 years before COVID, horses near Toronto began falling deathly ill with a sickness soon diagnosed as influenza. It took just a few weeks for this mutant flu variant to spread throughout southeastern Canada and into the northeastern US, infecting more than 90 percent of horses, donkeys, and mules wherever it struck. By the time the outbreak relented more than a year later, the Great Horse Flu of 1872 to 1873 had convulsed nearly every corner of North America and parts of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. This little-known scourge paralyzed the continent's horse-powered economy at a critical political moment. As hundreds of thousands of animals died and entire cities ground to a halt, the outbreak exposed the fragility of industrial capitalism and the US's deep dependence on animal labor. The Great Horse Flu triggered catastrophes including the Great Boston Fire; unleashed seething social and racial conflict; stoked partisan divides; and set the stage for the Panic of 1873. In the hands of Bancroft Prize-winning historian Thomas G. Andrews, the gripping story of this animal plague becomes a revelatory history of American Reconstruction itself-its possibilities, limitations, and demise-while also illuminating the grave perils that novel viral variants pose to animals, humans, and the world we share.
Thomas G. Andrews is professor of history and director of the Center of the American West, University of Colorado Boulder. A leading historian of labor, capitalism, and the American West, he is the author of Killing for Coal: America's Deadliest Labor War, which won a Bancroft Prize and is widely regarded as a landmark work of American history.
"We can better understand human history when we put disease back into it, as Andrews does with this fascinating and engaging work."-Amanda Kay McVety, author of The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century "Innovative and important. Andrews recovers rarely heard voices as he reveals the interconnections of North America through the lens of the epizootic."-Susan D. Jones, author of Death in a Small Package: A Short History of Anthrax
Google Preview content