[quoted from Yoshie's post]:
``..the chief danger lied in the fact that it [variolation] was too expensive for the poor, whose lives were therefore imperiled by the variolation of their richer neighbors...'' (Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana)
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It's interesting that following smallpox turns out to be a great way to unravel various tales of colonialism, imperialism, race, class and the Americas. I never thought of it until Thomas Brown brought up vaccination to use against Churchill.
I noticed a whole other literature on smallpox following the Spanish through their colonies in Latin America and the Philippines (that you indicated--also see note below), but I didn't look into it because I was focused on the Missouri River settlements and 1837.
(BTW the other two diseases I found referenced that decimated Native Americans were TB and Anthrax communicated by collections of buffalo hides at fur trading posts like those mentioned on the Missouri river.)
The other major direction of US expansion against both Native Americans and the Spanish was in Florida (Andrew Jackson's stomping grounds) and the Southwest which was going on in the same period.
That's why I was fascinated with the idea that John C. Calhoun was Secretary of War under Monroe (read race and imperialism). Of course Calhoun's agenda was extending slavery to the new territories to bolster the power of the southern states. While Monroe's Secretary of State was John Quincy Adams whose main interest must have been managing US power in relation to the geo-politics of England, France, and Spain in the Americas. (I don't know this history at all, so I am guessing.)
This whole period has fascinating parallels to the current US administration's cowboy diplomacy and nuclear saber-rattling against Iran, and North Korea. The position of various disenfranchised people in the Middle East including the Islamic groups takes on a different aspect when seen through the dirty lens of US history.
Anyway, opening up a US history and cultural studies conference in Colorado featuring Native American and Hispanic scholars and academics would be a great way to indirectly support Churchill---but mainly piss off the Right by developing study of the multicultural wars of the US past. Imagine various presentations on US government military, settlement, and `trade' policies and actions in the plains, Missouri, Florida, and Texas from say the Louisiana Purchase to the Mexican-American war.
While the immediate issue is supposed to be academic freedom, I moderately disagree a little. I think the real issue is suppression of multicultural and historical studies of the US. The Repugnant Lilies of Innocents don't want to see, hear or read about their own bloody past.
This multicultural and historical studies conference idea occurred to me because the scene developing around Churchill reminds me of McCarthyism and the old FSM (free speech movement in Berkeley).
While FSM got started over political speech on university property, the content of that speech was what pissed off the university administration. Most of it was about the HUAC hearings in SF, bogus anti-communist propaganda by the US government, civil rights, racism, and the Mississippi freedom riders. In other words the content was all stuff the university administration and state government didn't want to hear. (My first introduction to the Vietnam war was a long winded grad student tract on the history of US involvement dating from Wilson that had been mimeographed on stolen UCB machines the student protest groups ran.)
I think the same thing is going on over Churchill. Academic freedom of speech is only half the issue---it is also about the content of that speech--suppression of ugly US history. So I say ramp up the volume.
To that end, here is a post Charles Brown forwarded offlist on the subject, which I find fascinating---and just the kind of material the US whitewing repugnants hate to hear.
When you lift up a rock in the `American' past, you gotta be careful. Likely as not something dangerous is living under there...
CG
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Interesting post on smallpox, something I know a little about. One of my primary fields of historical research is Native American demography, and I have written quite a bit about smallpox. Here are several of my publications that touch on the issue:
Robert H. Jackson, Indian Demographic Decline :the Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687-1840. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994.
Robert H. Jackson, ."Epidemic Disease and Indian Depopulation in the Baja California Missions, 1697-1834," Southern California Quarterly 63 (1981), Pp. 308-346.
Robert H. Jackson, ."Causes of Indian Depopulation in the Pimeria Alta Missions of Northern Sonora," Journal of Arizona History 24 (1983), Pp. 405-429.
Robert H. Jackson, ."The 1781-1782 Smallpox Epidemic in the Baja California Missions," Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology 3 (1981), Pp. 138-143.
I am currently writing a book on demographic patterns in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay, and am documenting several particularly lethal epidemics in 1738-1740 and 1764-1765. In some instances about half of the people living on the missions died from smallpox.
Inoculation by variolation fell out of use following the introduction of the Jenner Cowpox vaccine in the early 19th century. However, given the potential for high mortality variolation was a relatively effective means of combating the contagion. We are talking about a period when doctors still subscribed to the Greek humoral theory of deisease or the miasma theory that disease was caused by clouds of noxious gas floating in the air. Inoculation by variolation was one of the first forms of treating contagious crowd diseases. In my article on the smallpox epidemic in Baja California, I document the use of inoculation by variolation at one of the missions. Death rates were considerably lower. Smallpox mortality might be 30%, but using inoculation by variolation lowered this to about 5%. Inoculation by variolation and the cowpox vaccine did not confer complete immunity. The Spanish govt. sent a medical expedition to the Americas in 1803 to disseminate the cowpox vaccine, transmitted by children who were vaccinated. Inoculation by variolation and vaccination generated fear and suspicion among the general population, because smallpox was and is such a horrible disease. There are many instances of people resisting being inoculated or vaccinated. When inoculation by variolation was first tested, the subjects were convicts condemned to execution. Edward Jenner tested the cowpox vaccine on orphan children. Smallpox recurred periodically in the 19th and 20th centuries (for example in New York City in the 1940s), because parents did not always have their children treated.
Robert Jackson