![An American Plague: The True and Terrifying Story of the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793 (Newbery Honor Book) by [Jim Murphy]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/61-kOwiZFfL._SY346_.jpg)
This is a brilliant book to assign to adolescent children.
I recommended it be read with "Fever 1793," by Laurie halse Anderson.
This book is nonfiction, and it is easy enough to read but there are plenty of topics for deeper discussion-- and even if your adolescent child does not get all of these points, if they even just get three or four of them then they will have learned significantly from this book.
1. The free African society, and their role in helping during the panic.
2. An example of how Things Fall Apart over a disease outbreak.
3. What was the United States like in its earlier days.
4. A demonstration of how markets don't know any color. (The black people there were not good enough to share a church with the white people, but when it was found / assumed that they had a resistance to the horrible disease, people were bidding up the price for their services.)
5. Self-organization and voluntary societies-as opposed to waiting for the government to do any and everything. (The first free black people creating their own voluntary Association over two centuries ago is a huge/ discussable topic in its own right.)
6. The process of finding information (such as medical cures) by falsification.
7. Primitive medical techniques (Bloodletting/ Mercury/Jalap, etc) did exist and were used. Modern medicine didn't spring into existence all at once.
8. Participatory democracy as best managed by random samples of people. (I have read before that William Buckley said that he could probably build a better government with 2000 people randomly selected out of the phone book than with "professional experts.")
9. The first declaration of a State of Emergency.
10. Controlled experiments. (p.132)
11. Just because somebody can say that "my best friend is a black guy" that does not necessarily mean that they are helpful to you. An extremely vicious critic of the well meaning black people of the free African Society was actually an abolitionist. (Mathew Carey.)
12. Black people have been working marginal jobs for a very long time. Over two centuries, and even those that were free people.
13. (p.112) When people are trying to solve or understand some (poorly understood) problem, a lot of times their ego stake in their position can turn a conflict unnecessarily personal and bitter. (Of course, it is the environmentalists these days, but even just a couple of centuries ago the yellow fever incident was replete with situational resonances.)
14. (p.135) Governments learning what to do as a result of some natural disaster, compared with governments who are unable to mount disaster responses because they have not yet learned what to do. (Earthquakes happen on a regular basis in Japan, and so they know how to mount an appropriate policy response. Flooding happens regularly in the Netherlands, and so they know what to do. The United States did not know what to do as a result of the flooding by Hurricane Katrina.)
15. Everyone imagines dangerous lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) as most deadly to human beings. In point of fact, mosquitoes kill more humans than any other animal.
16. Even with all of our modern medicine, the events that happened in Philadelphia at the end of the 18th century could very well happen all over again. (As of the time of the writing of the book, yellow fever vaccine was not produced in large enough quantities to stem an outbreak. And yellow fever still has no cure-- even hundreds of years later-- and is known to have easy transmission and high fatality. As of the time of this review, one company is producing the vaccine.)
Of the book: 94 primary sources. An index. 139 pages of prose.
Verdict. Emphatically worth the time, and worth the money. This is a Newbery Honor Book, a national book award finalists, and has the Robert Sibert metal.
- File Size: 43978 KB
- Print Length: 188 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0395776082
- Publisher: Clarion Books (September 30, 2014)
- Publication Date: September 16, 2014
- Sold by: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00NS3UNQC
- Text-to-Speech:
Enabled
- Word Wise: Enabled
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #316,514 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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