Post #4227892

@petergleick@fediscience.org Apparently this is the world the current administration yearns for: «Against a backdrop of intensifying slavery, yellow fever transformed New Orleans into a city of the dead, claiming as many as 150,000 lives between 1803 and the outbreak of the Civil War. The disease also created a horrific form of what Kathryn Olivarius, a historian at Stanford University, describes as “immunocapitalism”: a “socially acknowledged lifelong immunity to a highly lethal virus, providing access to previously inaccessible realms of ... power.”» From Karin Wulf's commentary of Kathryn Olivarius's book titled "Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom,". https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-yellow-fever-intensified-racial-inequality-in-19th-century-new-orleans-180979934/