The past four decades have seen the publication of numerous books on specific pandemic events that impacted the United States, from Colonial times to the present. This recent attention is due in part to the ease of defining the events in time and geographical space. These frequently covered events range from the first vaccination effort against smallpox in the 1720s, to European exploration of what would become the United States and U.S. expansion of its territories (and the biological consequences thereof) from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, to AIDS, which made its first appearance in 1981.
The earliest pandemic covered in recent literature is smallpox, which broke out in Boston, Massachusetts in 1721, a breakout that became associated with the use of inoculation as a preventative measure. Stephen Coss’s The Fever of 1721 (billed on the title facing page as “the epidemic that revolutionized medicine and American politics”) not only gives a detailed account of the epidemic but also emphasizes the social and political contexts (both foreign and domestic) of the outbreak, community reactions, and the varied responses to inoculation. Barbara Heifferon also examined the smallpox event in America’s First Vaccination: The Controversy of 1721–22. Focusing on the ideological positions taken in response to inoculation, Heifferon casts her book as a comparative case study and as an exploration of the emotional and cultural ways early Colonial society reacted to new scientific procedures during the pandemic.
The first pandemic to take hold in the new nation was yellow fever, which broke out in Philadelphia in 1793 and spread along the Eastern seaboard. Robert Watson’s America’s First Plague: The Deadly 1793 Epidemic That Crippled a Young Nation is among the most recent work on yellow fever. In Ship of Death: A Voyage That Changed the Atlantic World, Billy Gordon takes a novel approach to the Philadelphia outbreak. He recon-structed the voyage of the small Atlantic trading vessel Hankey, which dealt with West Africa and was the vector of the yellow fever pandemic at its ports of call in the Caribbean before arriving in Philadelphia. Although this was the first major outbreak of yellow fever, a century later a second outbreak occurred in Memphis, Tennessee, and led to a cure. Khaled Bloom takes on the Memphis outbreak in The Mississippi Valley’s Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878. John Pierce and Jim Writer offer a more general treatment in Yellow Jack: How Yellow Fever Ravaged America and Walter Reed Discovered Its Deadly Secrets. The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, the Epidemic That Shaped Our History, by Molly Caldwell Crosby, reviews the events in Memphis and discusses the work of the three-person Yellow Fever Commission sent to Cuba in 1900. The disease was prevalent in Cuba, and the commission’s task was to investigate and identify the principal vector of its transmission. The culprit was found to be the mosquito.
In 1832 cholera arrived in North America, a strain first seen in the Ganges basin of India and the Middle East during the late 1820s. Cases of this terrifying disease appeared in Detroit and Philadelphia and soon grew to epidemic level. Recent scholarship on the 1832 outbreak looks at it from a historical and global perspective. In her Strange Case of the Broad Street Pump: John Snow and the Mystery of Cholera, Sandra Hempel, a British journalist who specializes in health and social issues, examines the impact of cholera on Western society during the 1830s and the work of John Snow, who isolated drinking water as its vector. In the closing section of this volume Hempel considers the potential impact of global warming on the rise and spread of other infectious diseases. S. L. Kotar and G. E. Gessler’s Cholera: A Worldwide History also considers cholera as a planet-wide phenomenon. The authors draw heavily on primary sources such as newspaper accounts, personal letters, diaries, and government documents to tell the story of the origin and spread of cholera, documenting its successive outbreaks across the planet and the plethora of beliefs and superstitions attached to its etiology (for example that it was caused by a miasma rising from swamps or decaying bodies). In Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, Sonia Shah takes cholera as her focus in discussing the identification and trans-mission of contagious diseases.
Plague—the specter conjured up by the word itself—is not commonly thought of as relevant to medical history in the United States, yet at the beginning of the twentieth century this ancient threat was added to the national experience as part of a global pandemic originating in southern China. Bubonic plague had appeared in Yunnan Province in China in the 1870s, and although its initial outbreaks were limited to mainland China, by 1893 it had reached the port of Hong Kong and had begun to reach out beyond Asia along the steamship routes. The death from plague in 1900 of a member of the small community in San Francisco’s Chinatown marked the be-ginning of an effort to better define vectors of transmission of the plague and effectively contain and prevent the infection. This is a little-known chapter of the United States’ interaction with pandemic disease, and it is deftly chronicled by David Randall in Black Death at the Golden Gate: The Race to Save America from the Bubonic Plague.
In the second decade of the twentieth century, in the interval between the Memphis yellow fever outbreak, the San Francisco plague outbreak, and the beginning of World War I, two less-known pandemic episodes—eruptions of meningitis in Texas and Kansas City. Physicians Margaret O’Leary and Dennis O’Leary chronicled these in their companion volumes, respectively, The Texas Meningitis Epidemic (1911–1913): Origin of the Meningococcal Vaccine and The Kansas City Meningitis Epidemic, 1911–1913.
The 1918 outbreak of Spanish influenza is perhaps the best known of the United States’ pandemic events prior to COVID. The large numbers of fatalities and survivors across all age and ethnic groups generated an aware-ness of the dangers of influenza, which was memorialized in scientific journals, personal accounts, and even a rhyme for skipping rope.1 New York Times reporter Gina Kolata provides an account of this outbreak in Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It.
Cruel Wind: Pandemic Flu in America, 1918–1920 is Dorothy Ann Pettit’s rewrite, with Janice Bailie, of her doctoral thesis in the field of early-20th-century American history. Pettit undertook Cruel Wind after her retirement from a thirteen-year career as a registered medical technologist, thus combining two different analytical approaches to the 1918 pandemic. Another thoughtful exploration of the Spanish flu is American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic, by historian Nancy Bristow. The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919: Perspectives from the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas, edited by Maria Isabel Porras Gallo and Ryan Davis, expands the discussion beyond the geographic limits of North America to place the event in a regional and global context. The collection comprises thirteen essays by contributors representing academic institutions in Brazil, Canada, and Portugal as well as in Spain and the United States.2
Among the relatively recent works examining the impact of the influenza outbreak is Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World, in which author Laura Spinney (who combines the talents of novelist and science writer ) chooses the imagery of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, specifically the last, Death on his pale steed, to frame an exploration of the worldwide shifts wrought by the disease. Spinney’s book complements and extends the analysis begun in Parros Gallo and Davis’s collection (discussed above). Mosquitos have been identified as a vector for the spread of pandemic diseases in the Americas since the work done on yellow fever, most recently in a 2016 outbreak of the Zika virus in the Caribbean and Latin America in 2016. Locating Zika: Social Change and Governance in an Age of Pandemics, edited by Kevin Bardosh, presents case studies on the management of Zika by health practitioners and scholars representing Brazil, Venezuela, Ecuador, Mexico, Haiti, and Colombia as well as the United States. The final essay in the collection offers a detailed history of efforts to prevent and control outbreaks of dengue fever in Key West during the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.3 Among the proposals made was the introduction of a genetically altered strain of mosquito into the local population to attempt to disrupt the main vector of transmission. The effectiveness of this approach has not yet been determined.
1. There were various iterations, among them “I had a little bird / Its name was Enza / I opened up the window / And influenza”—reportedly sung to the tune of “Ring around the Rosie.”
2. In their introduction, the editors characterize the volume as intended to “enhance [the reader’s] under-standing of the 1918–19 influenza pandemic by elucidating specific aspects that have received minimal attention until now, such as social control, gender, class, religion, social national identity, and military medicine’s reaction to the pandemic and its relationship to civilian medicine; by showing the importance of the Iberian Peninsula as the key point of connection, both epidemiologically and discursively, between Europe and the Americas in the context of World War I; and above all by raising more questions” (p. 11).
3. Priscilla Bennett, “Reinventing mosquito control: Experimental trials and nonscalable relations in the Florida Keys,” in Locating Zika: Social Change and Governance in an Age of Pandemics, ed. by Kevin Bar-dosh (Taylor and Francis, 2019).
Mississippi Valley's Great Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1878 by 
