History Shorts13 Jun 2025

Conversations: Would you eat black vomit to fight off Yellow Fever? w/ Kathryn Olivarius

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In this episode of History Shorts, we're joined by Dr. Kathryn Olivarius, historian and author of Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Her work unveils the chilling and lesser-known reality of how yellow fever shaped the antebellum South, not just as a disease, but as a tool of power, privilege, and control.

We explore how elites in New Orleans and other parts of the Deep South leveraged immunity to the deadly virus as a form of capital, how public health was weaponized to uphold slavery and white supremacy, and what this forgotten epidemic tells us about the intersections of disease, race, and economics, then and now.

In this conversation, we cover:

The concept of "immunocapital" and why surviving yellow fever was a form of social currency
How disease policy in New Orleans bolstered plantation slavery and racial hierarchy
Parallels between past and present epidemics—COVID-19, social privilege, and health disparity
What it means to build a society that accepts death among the poor as the cost of doing business

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