Conversations: Would you eat black vomit to fight off Yellow Fever? w/ Kathryn Olivarius

We want to hear from you! Help shape the future of History Shorts by taking our quick 2-minute survey: Take a 2-Minute Listener Survey! Your feedback means the world to us, and you might get a shoutout in a future episode! In this episode of History Shorts, we're joined by Dr. Kathryn Olivarius, historian and author of Necropolis: Disease, Power, and Capitalism in the Cotton Kingdom. Her work unveils the chilling and lesser-known reality of how yellow fever shaped the antebellum South, not just as a disease, but as a tool of power, privilege, and control. We explore how elites in New Orleans and other parts of the Deep South leveraged immunity to the deadly virus as a form of capital, how public health was weaponized to uphold slavery and white supremacy, and what this forgotten epidemic tells us about the intersections of disease, race, and economics, then and now. In this conversation, we cover: The concept of "immunocapital" and why surviving yellow fever was a form of social currency How disease policy in New Orleans bolstered plantation slavery and racial hierarchy Parallels between past and present epidemics—COVID-19, social privilege, and health disparity What it means to build a society that accepts death among the poor as the cost of doing business SUBSCRIBE, LEAVE A REVIEW, OR A RATING! SUPPORT THE SHOW: https://www.patreon.com/c/HistoryShortsPodcast  LEARN MORE: https://www.historyshortspodcast.com/  BUY Kathryn's book!   EPISODE SPONSOR: https://www.thecollector.com/  Peter's This Week's Top Picks from The Collector: 4 Diseases That Impacted & Altered Human Existence History of Slavery in the United States From Beginning to End