March 14, 11:30-12:30, Shearer Weber Dining Rooms 2&3
Bloomsburg University Professor of History Jeanette Keith

Death on the Mississippi: Memphis, 1878

In 1878 a particularly virulent variety of yellow fever swept up the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Memphis. Folk wisdom held that African Americans were immune to yellow fever, but whites were not. As stories of hideous fever deaths reached Memphis, panicked whites fled the city. Approximately 25,000 scattered through the South and Midwest. Fearing contagion, communities quarantined themselves and turned refugees away at gunpoint. Back in Memphis, the population shrank to 19,000 by mid-August. Those who stayed were mostly black or Irish, and poor. Almost ninety percent of them had the fever before the epidemic ended in mid-October. Of the five thousand who died, most were white. African Americans who counted on their fabled immunity to the disease bet wrong: in this case, blacks came down with the fever too, although most of them survived.

Yellow fever destroyed and remade Memphis. The story of the epidemic is a dramatic one, and it has become legendary in Memphis itself. The role of fever as turning point in the city's history is less recognized. In both cases, I hope that serious research will help me get behind the legends and myths to write solid social history. Yet as a social historian, I find myself left with questions that seem to me to fall outside my academic purview. Why is it so hard to incorporate epidemics and other natural disasters into historical narrative? Why are non-academics so fascinated by epic stories of disease, while most academics are not? What is it that people look for in histories of epidemics?