{"product_id":"9781538164884","title":"American Plague: The Deadly 1793 Yellow Fever Epidemic That Crippled a Young Nation","description":"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.","brand":"Rowman \u0026 Littlefield Publishers, Inc.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50021188829424,"sku":"9781538164884","price":28.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781538164884","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}