Necropolis

I was on a conference panel with Kathryn a few years ago and got to hear her present part of what would become her book Necropolis, and I was already hooked. Nineteenth-century New Orleans was marked by both yellow fever and its opposition to public health measures that might have made the city safer. Instead, white Americans who survived the terrible disease (and Olivarius describes it in all of its nastiness), developed “immunocapital” giving them further opportunities to enrich themselves in the bustling port city. For those who were Black and enslaved, yellow fever meant either death or further… show more.