San Antonio College Library

Publisher description: A horrifying epidemic of smallpox was sweeping across the Americas when the War of Independence began, and yet we know almost nothing about it. Elizabeth A. Fenn reveals how deeply variola affected the outcome of the war in every colony and the lives of everyone in North America. By 1776, when military action and political ferment increased the movement of people and microbes, the epidemic worsened. Fenn's research shows us...

"Malaria, now known as a disease of the tropics, badly weakened the Roman Empire. It killed thousands of British troops fighting Napoleon in 1809 and many soldiers on both sides of the Civil War. It turned back travelers exploring West Africa in the nineteenth century and brought the building of the Panama Canal to a standstill. Even today, malaria kills someone every thirty seconds. For more than one thousand years, there was no cure for it." "Using...

Historian Maier shows us the Declaration as both the defining statement of our national identity and the moral standard by which we live as a nation. It is truly "American Scripture," and Maier tells us how it came to be. She describes the transformation of the Second Continental Congress into a national government, unlike anything that preceded or followed it. She lets us hear the voice of the people as revealed in other "declarations" of 1776. Detective-like,...

Blindfolding children from birth? Playing a piano made of live cats? Using tobacco to cure drowning? Wearing "flea"--Colored clothes? These actions may seem odd to us, but in the eighteenth century, they made perfect sense. As often as we use our senses, we rarely stop to think about their place in history. But perception is not dependent on the body alone. Carolyn Purnell persuasively shows that, while our bodies may not change dramatically, the...

"Among his many accomplishments, Benjamin Franklin was instrumental in founding the first major civilian hospital and medical school in the American colonies. He studied the efficacy of smallpox inoculation and investigated the causes of the common cold. His inventions - including bifocal lenses and a "long arm" that extended the user's reach - made life easier for the aged and afflicted. In Doctor Franklin's Medicine, Stanley Finger uncovers the...

Berkeley-as-philosopher was--at least to the historian of early America--only a modest fragment of the whole man whom some Americans came to know and many more came to honor. Se early did George Berkeley enter into an unborn nation's cultural blood-stream that, centuries later, he has not been bled out. The story here recounted concerns the many-sidedness of that restless genius, particularly as it expressed itself in or left its mark on a portion...