If the late eighteenth century was the Age of Revolution—an age when national identities and allegiances proved to be remarkably unstable, constituting and reconstituting themselves along rapidly shifting political and economic axes, it was no less an Age of Epidemic—an age when diseases like smallpox, typhus, and yellow fever helped determine the outcome of revolutionary struggles throughout the Atlantic World. This essay examines responses to the decade-long yellow fever pandemic that struck the West Indies and the coastal United States between 1793 and 1804 in order to frame categories like citizenship and national identity in terms of immunology, and to consider what early America and the contemporary United States can teach us about each other.
Cristobal Silva is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and an Editor of *The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation*. He is the author of Miraculous Plagues: An Epidemiology of Early New England Narrative (Oxford, 2011).
For a copy of the paper to be discussed at the workshop, please email Molly Farrell (farrell.73@osu.edu) or Lisa Voigt (voigt.25@osu.edu).
Sponsored by the Americas Before 1900 Working Group.
