How the politics of race played out during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic

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Originally published at: How the politics of race played out during the 1793 yellow fever epidemic | Boing Boing

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Good piece. I’ve studied 1793 Philadelphia quite a bit and one really haunting thing was to see the classified ads for a few months after the city went back to normal. There was an enormous spike in advertisements for wet nurses. Presumably a larger-than-usual number of motherless infants.

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Welp, that’s depressing.

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Yeah. And I was working backwards through the records. So at first I had a “WTF is going on here” thing going on. Then a “oh god, holy shit” moment when I realized what I was seeing.

Followed, of course, by “There’s a dissertation here somewhere. At least an MA thesis.” It’d be interesting to compare this to some other epidemics, look at race and wet nursing pre- and post-epidemic, look at class assumptions, follow up on the people who placed the ads, etc etc etc. There’s some good stuff in there.

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Sounds like! It’s always exciting to find that kind of thing in the archives. Depressing, but also exciting to think of the stories you can tell out of them.

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