Building the Worlds That Kill Us
Disease, Death, and Inequality in American History
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Winner, 2025 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award
Across American history, the question of whose lives are long and healthy and whose lives are short and sick has always been shaped by the social and economic order. From the dispossession of Indigenous people and the horrors of slavery to infectious diseases spreading in overcrowded tenements and the vast environmental contamination caused by industrialization, and through climate change and pandemics in the twenty-first century, those in power have left others behind.
Through the lens of death and disease, Building the Worlds That Kill Us provides a new way of understanding the history of the United States from the colonial era to the present. David Rosner and Gerald Markowitz demonstrate that the changing rates and kinds of illnesses reflect social, political, and economic structures and inequalities of race, class, and gender. These deep inequities determine the disparate health experiences of rich and poor, Black and white, men and women, immigrant and native-born, boss and worker, Indigenous and settler. This book underscores that powerful people and institutions have always seen some lives as more valuable than others, and it emphasizes how those who have been most affected by the disparities in rates of disease and death have challenged and changed these systems. Ultimately, this history shows that unequal outcomes are a choice—and we can instead collectively make decisions that foster life and health.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rosner and Markowitz (Lead Wars)—history professors at Columbia University and John Jay College, respectively—present a disquieting examination of how socioeconomic status has determined who gets sick throughout American history. Beginning in the colonial era, Rosner and Markowitz discuss how European settlers penned Native Americans into ever smaller areas and separated them from traditional hunting grounds, causing widespread malnutrition that compromised Indigenous peoples' ability to fight off diseases brought by colonists. Elsewhere, the authors discuss how in the mid-1800s, impoverished young women employed in matchstick factories developed "phossy jaw" (a deadly disease in which the jaw gradually dissolves, "leaving its victims disfigured and unable to eat") from working with phosphorous; how in the 1930s, a mining company knowingly exposed miners to dangerous levels of silica hoping the men would move on from the company before they succumbed to lung disease (silica concentrations were so high the miners developed symptoms after mere months, instead of the usual years); and how Monsanto sold polychlorinated biphenyls, used in electrical insulation and pesticides, well into the 1970s despite knowing for decades that the potent toxins were leeching into food and water sources. The complex, occasionally enraging history reveals how apparently indiscriminate afflictions are fundamentally shaped by socioeconomic forces. This hard-hitting exposé will change how readers think about the nature of disease.
