Kathryn Meyer Olivarius | Necropolis: Disease, Immunity, and Power in the Cotton Kingdom

Antebellum New Orleans sat at the heart of America’s slave and cotton kingdoms. But it was also the nation’s "necropolis," with epidemic yellow fever killing thousands each summer and leaving countless more orphaned, widowed, and bereaved. Olivarius shows how this city became stratified between the "acclimated" and "unacclimated," why these immunity labels mattered, and how yellow fever was mobilized by white elites to further divide and exploit the population and increase inequality in an already unequal and violent slave society. 

About the Speaker

Kathryn Meyer Olivarius’s writing and research have been featured in The New York Times and The American Historical Review. Her first book, Necropolis, was published in 2022 by Harvard University Press. It won multiple prizes, including the 2023 Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians and the Book of the Year Award from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. She is a 2024 recipient of the Dan David Prize, the world’s largest prize for practitioners studying the human past.