Seven years after the American Civil War, and nearly 150 years before the COVID-19 pandemic, horses near Toronto began contracting a deadly disease that was quickly diagnosed as influenza. It only took a few weeks for this mutant type of influenza to spread throughout southeastern Canada and into the northeastern United States, infecting more than 90% of horses, donkeys and mules wherever it went. By the time the epidemic had subsided more than a year later, equine influenza had taken holdThe North American War of 1872 to 1873 paralyzed almost every corner of North America, parts of Cuba, Mexico, and Central America.
This unknown scourge has paralyzed the continent's horse-dependent economy at a critical political moment. As hundreds of thousands of animals died and entire cities stopped working, the epidemic revealed the fragility of industrial capitalism and the United States’ heavy dependence on animal labor. The Great Equine Influenza Epidemic led to disasters such as the Great Boston Fire, and unleashed...It unleashed a simmering social and racial conflict, stoked party divisions, and paved the way for the Panic of 1873. In the hands of historian Thomas J. Andrews, winner of the Bancroft Prize, The riveting story of this zoonotic epidemic becomes a revealing history of American Reconstruction itself—its possibilities, limits, and demise—while also highlighting the grave risks that new viral variants pose to animals, humans, and the world in which we live.
