Kathryn Olivarius

I am an historian of the nineteenth-century United States, interested in the antebellum South, Greater Caribbean, slavery, capitalism, and disease. I am a 2024 recipient of the Dan David Prize, the world’s largest prize for practitioners studying the human past.

My first book, Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, Belknap imprint, 2022) concerns yellow fever, immunity, and inequality . During the nineteenth-century, epidemic yellow fever struck New Orleans every second or third summer, killing up to ten percent of the city’s population. This virus was shrouded in mystery. There was no cure, no inoculation, no conclusive evidence of disease transmission, and no satisfactory explanation for why it killed some while leaving others healthy. It was, moreover, a sudden and miserable way to die, with victims vomiting up partly coagulated blood, roughly the consistency and color of coffee grounds. The only way to protect oneself from the scourge was to bet “acclimated,” that is fall sick with the disease, survive, and gain lifetime immunity. About half of all people died in the acclimating process. In time, a disease hierarchy--what I term immunocapitalism--developed: the city became stratified between those whites who possessed immunity to yellow fever (the “acclimated”), those who remained vulnerable to the virus (the “unacclimated”), and those whose immunity status could only socially and economically benefit others (Black slaves and most free people of color). Disease was therefore no great leveler. Rather it heightened inequality in an already violent and unequal slave society.