Pox Americana

I can’t describe this book better than the author describes it: “While the American Revolution may have defined the era for history, epidemic smallpox nevertheless defined it for many of the Americans who lived and died in that time” (p. 273, 275).

Most of what I thought I knew about the Revolutionary War period ended up adjusted after reading this book. In straightforward prose that still manages to be poetic, Pox Americana forced me to examine both my educational history and the ways I had ingested and processed my education. 

I am a historian of early America, including the American Revolution, though I'm not a huge reader (or writer) of conventional military history. Published in 2001, Elizabeth Fenn's book was in many ways ahead of its time in emphasizing how military outcomes—and strategies—were often contingent on other seemingly unrelated factors. In this case, she argues that smallpox was a decisive force in the American War for Independence. The continental scope of her study, moreover, provides a link between that war and the ultimately successful military offensives that the independent United States inflicted on disease-weakened Native American peoples in the post-revolutionary… show more.

This is another book on disease and war and shows how smallpox was a lethal actor in the American Revolution. Smallpox gave the largely immune British forces an advantage over Americans, (white, Black, and Indian), who had never been exposed to the virus, which prompted General George Washington to order the inoculation of his troops. This was the first government immunization effort in American history. The book then follows the virus across the continent as it traveled with foreign traders and native peoples, devastating tribal populations from East to West.