America's First Plague
eBook - PDF

America's First Plague

The Deadly 1793 Epidemic that Crippled a Young Nation

  1. 319 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

America's First Plague

The Deadly 1793 Epidemic that Crippled a Young Nation

About this book

As disease spread, the national government was slow to react. Soon, citizens donned protective masks and the authorities ordered quarantines. The streets emptied. Doubters questioned the science and disobeyed. The year: 1793. The place: young America from Baltimore to Boston but especially in Philadelphia, the nation's largest city and seat of the federal government. For 3 long months yellow fever, carried by mosquitoes let loose from a ship from Africa, ravaged the eastern seaboard The federal government abandoned the city and scattered, leaving a dangerous leadership gap. By the end of the pandemic, ten percent of Philadelphians had died.
America's First Plague offers the definitive telling of this long-forgotten crisis, capturing the wave of fear that swept across the fledgling republic, and the numerous unintended but far-reaching consequences it would have on the development of the United States and the Atlantic slave trade. It is an intriguing tale of fear and human nature, a tragic lesson of how prejudice toward blacks was so easily stoked, an examination of the primitive state of medicine and vulnerability to disease in the eighteenth century, and a story of the struggle to govern in the face of crisis. With eerie similarities to the Covid pandemic, historian Robert P. Watson tells the story of a young nation teetering on the brink of chaos.

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Yes, you can access America's First Plague by Robert P. Watson in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in History & Early American History. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. CONTENTS
  2. IMAGES
  3. PREFACE
  4. “PESTILENCE”
  5. PROLOGUE. Ship of Death
  6. I. AMERICA’S FIRST CRISIS
  7. CHAPTER ONE. PLAGUE!
  8. CHAPTER TWO. REVOLUTION
  9. CHAPTER THREE. YELLOW JACK
  10. CHAPTER FOUR. PHILADELPHIA
  11. CHAPTER FIVE. THE FIRST TO DIE
  12. II. THE CAPITAL UNDER SIEGE
  13. CHAPTER SIX. “HELL TOWN”
  14. CHAPTER SEVEN. FEAR AND PANIC
  15. CHAPTER EIGHT. PHILADELPHIA RESPONDS
  16. CHAPTER NINE. BUSH HILL
  17. CHAPTER TEN. THE PHYSICIAN’S WAR
  18. III. TURNING POINTS
  19. CHAPTER ELEVEN. UNLIKELY HEROES
  20. CHAPTER TWELVE. A NATION WITHOUT A GOVERNMENT
  21. CHAPTER THIRTEEN. GHOST TOWN
  22. CHAPTER FOURTEEN. THE FALL FROST
  23. CHAPTER FIFTEEN. OF PESTILENCE AND POLITICS
  24. EPILOGUE. ONE HUNDRED DAYS OF TERROR
  25. APPENDIX A
  26. APPENDIX B. MAP OF PHILADELPHIA
  27. ABBREVIATIONS
  28. BIBLIOGRAPHY
  29. INDEX
  30. ABOUT THE AUTHOR