Maintaining the health of communities has always been a difficult undertaking. Early modern urbanization gave diseases the opportunity to decimate entire households and neighborhoods. In response, city and community governments implemented methods of quarantine to contain epidemics and pandemics like the Black Death. Colonization throughout the early Atlantic world and the increase of global trade created conditions where disease outbreaks were more likely to form, either in cities or between Indigenous and colonial populations. These early modern methods of containing outbreaks soon followed communities to the Atlantic coast to try and control and prevent further epidemics from destroying populations. These events of outbreak and control of epidemics traces some of the earliest forms of public health discussions in North America.

This panels looks at some of the unique ways in which epidemics formed in the early Atlantic world, and efforts to contain and control them. Camden Elliott’s and Molly Nebiolo’s papers look at the different moments of time in which disease outbreaks were structured and how opportunities of warfare and urbanization allowed for epidemic spreading. Elliott shows how structures of epidemics appeared during times of war between the Wabanaki and settler colonists as people changed their relationship to space. Nebiolo’s work highlights how the makeup of planned cities allowed for disease outbreaks to spread and how Charlestonians advocated for healthier waterways and streets to further prevent disease outbreaks in the city. David Barnes and Nicole Breault show the power, and politics, of organized community governance in the containment of disease epidemics. Breault’s work looks to how community organized governance worked during smallpox outbreaks to enforce quarantine in the neighborhoods of Boston. Barnes’ paper traces how Philadelphia’s government fought to prevent major outbreaks of yellow fever after the four that hit the city in the 1790s and some of the points of compromise, and disagreement, that went into nineteenth-century public health initiatives.

The goal of this panel is to understand the moments in the early Atlantic when disease outbreaks happened or people imagined they might happen, and the different methods for controlling and preventing epidemics deployed during and after their outbreak. This panel will also look to some of the ways we remember this history of early American public health initiatives, in public facing work and in the digital tools that could highlight methods of articulation and prevention of diseases in the early Atlantic world.