Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: the great smallpox epidemic of 1775-82, (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). Pages, ix, 384, index, bibliography. Review by Samantha Pilcher. Elizabeth A. Fenn is the author of Pox Americana. She received her Ph.D. from Yale and is a current Professor and Chair of the Department of History at the University of Colorado Boulder according to their website. Fenn is the author of three books relating to early America but Pox Americana was her first solo authored book. In the forward of the book, Fenn relates that her interest in the topic sparked from an undergraduate essay on the Native Americans of the Hudson Bay fur trade. The resulting book Pox Americana not only covers the changes to the Indian culture across the country but the small pox effect on the American …show more content…
Vague data in this case means missing values for sample size. To accurately portray the trends of small pox in various ethnicity’s such as Caucasian, Hispanic and Indian Fenn would need sources that include sample size. While discussing the effects of small pox on the Spanish Fenn does refer to the burial records kept by the Catholic churches which had numbers of death and dates but often lacked the reason for death. Fenn assumed small pox spread based on swells in the death toll from church to church that match patterns of small pox. Again the accuracy is lacking. Least accurate I think of her primary sources are Indian winter counts essentially the big event of the year that Indians chose and recorded by picture. The pictures that indicate small pox only dictate that it affected that Indian population but does not list numbers. The majority of Fenn’s research took place in the archives of library’s looking at the above mentioned primary source. Fenn only cited three or four secondary source books on the
In his book, Andres Resendez tries to unearth the harsh treatment of Native American Slavery. He argues that it is a big part neglected in our history, seeing as what you hear the majority of time is an in depth study of African American societies and just a quick gloss over Indian ones. In his book, Andres utilizes many excerpts and retells the TRUE story of Native American enslavement. One part of the book, goes on to explain how a Californian Captain managed to enslave hundreds of slaves and establish Indian Slave plantations and horrific conditions. “American schoolchildren are taught that smallpox was the epidemic that gutted Native American populations after exposure to Europeans; an illness to which they had no immunity ravaged
Smallpox was also a threat. One settler describes it as a “cloud over this province.” It drove off people and killed the people who stayed. It was also one of the major causes of the decline in the Native American population. There were definitely other kinds of diseases, but Smallpox was the most common.
The novel Fever 1793 , written by Laurie Anderson, is a narrative which describes the yellow fever epidemic in the late 1700’s. This epidemic caused the deaths of 5,000 or more people in a town of 50,000 in only 3 months. A young girl named Mattie from the town of Philadelphia has to deal with the deathly illness spreading around the world. The novel begins with the death of Mattie’s childhood friend, Polly. The citizens continued their daily lives shrugging off the death as a fluke and tried to ignore the fact that something was very wrong.
In Philip J. Deloria’s book, Indians In Unexpected Places readers are provoked with questions. Why is there an Indian on an automobile? Why is she getting a manicure? Why is the young man in football apparel? Indians have been secluded into a stereotype of untamable and wild animals.
(Doc C). The people were often contiguous with deadly diseases. One of the most common were the measles. (Doc F). Some of the “immigrants” could have been spies, or even attackers working for other countries/cities.
Penn experienced this he lost a third of his passengers to smallpox, it had been spreading quickly. Especially in Europe, and it came with the Europeans that came to Pennsylvania. A big issue with smallpox was that the native Americans were really sensitive to it, so most of them got really sick and
Britannica (2023) evaluates the significance of the disease which stood up like a wildfire against the Aztecs. They state that “Aztecs had no immunity to European diseases. Smallpox spread among the Indigenous people and crippled their ability to resist the Spanish,” expressing the outcome of the disease which devastated the Aztecs in numerous ways. This source interprets the cause, effects and the outcome of the disease, and how it contributed over a significant time period. PBS.org (1996), presents an image of the capital Tenochtitlan, where initial meetings were held to make a peaceful agreement, turning out ineffective.
One of the biggest summer nuisance would be the mosquito, but more specifically the Ades aegypti mosquito. The Aedes aegypti is the vector for yellow fever and the cause of the numerous deaths. In her book The American Plague: The Untold Story of Yellow Fever, The Epidemic the Shaped Our History, Molly Caldwell Crosby presents the idea that the mosquito is not just the only reason an epidemic occurred in the 18th century. This story accounts for the disease that broke out across the world and nearly destroyed almost all of North America’s population, which some believe could have been avoided by simple quarantine analysis and sanitary methods.
Slide 1- Introduction Good morning/afternoon everybody, today I have been assigned with informing you all about the Aztecs, or more importantly, the reason for their annihilation. Now you may be thinking that it was mainly to do with a war, but it is actually almost solely a disease called the variola disease or as it’s more commonly known, small-pox Slide 2-What were the symptoms and effects Now you may be wondering what made the disease so dangerous to the Aztecs. The main problem of the disease was the fact that not only did it kill 3/10 people effected it also severely lowered the victims fighting capabilities meaning that when the Spanish attempted to fight the Aztecs, it became much more favourable to the Aztecs. (Healthline, n.d.)
The European conquerors had built up an immunity to certain diseases that were common in Europe. Some of the diseases that decimated the Indian population included the following: smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, and the bubonic plague. Centuries of living near livestock had basically inoculated the European settlers against these diseases. However the Indians were not used to such diseases, resulting in a dramatic decline in the Native American population. According to Diamond, smallpox was a major role in the domination of the Americas by the Europeans.
Among the many things spread and shared in the Columbian Exchange, the trading of diseases is perhaps the most significant. The natives of the Americas had never experienced the serious diseases that European explorers carried over to the New World. From smallpox to influenza and malaria to cholera, Native American populations were drastically decreased due to their poor immunity. Between the numerous amounts of European diseases, though, measles was the most remarkable in that its effects were both widespread and enduring. Measles, also known as rubeola, is a respiratory infection caused by the measles virus.
During these epidemics accounts by Europeans, and natives were taken documenting the terrible conditions people faced. “The people were overcome by intense cold and fever, The disease was rampant everywhere, It was uncountable the number of people who died this year (DOC 7)” This document shows how terrible diseases were for the native populations, because the natives had not evolved and lived in the same environment as the Europeans they could not tolerate certain illnesses that the Europeans could. In Document 8 you can see an illustration of a man in méxico suffering from a disease in which you are covered in bumps and slowly die. Another reason why disease ran so wildly at the time were because of how Europeans lived.
Throughout history, there have been many literary studies that focused on the culture and traditions of Native Americans. Native writers have worked painstakingly on tribal histories, and their works have made us realize that we have not learned the full story of the Native American tribes. Deborah Miranda has written a collective tribal memoir, “Bad Indians”, drawing on ancestral memory that revealed aspects of an indigenous worldview and contributed to update our understanding of the mission system, settler colonialism and histories of American Indians about how they underwent cruel violence and exploitation. Her memoir successfully addressed past grievances of colonialism and also recognized and honored indigenous knowledge and identity.
This led, in part, to the devastating effects of Old World diseases on Native American population. The smallpox epidemic probably resulted in the greater death toll in Native Americans. Scarcely any society on Earth remained unaffected by this global ecological
Smallpox outbreaks have occurred from time to time for thousands of years, but the disease is now eradicated after a successful worldwide vaccination program. The last naturally occurring case in the world was in Somalia in 1977. After the disease was eliminated from the world, routine vaccination against smallpox among the general public was stopped because it was no longer necessary for prevention. In 1970, when smallpox was nearly eradicated, a previously unrecognized orthopoxvirus named monkey pox was identified in humans.