Originally published on October 7, 2026 (Episode 478).
Introduction
In September 1872, in the countryside north of Toronto, horses began to fall ill. Their noses ran, they coughed, and their breathing became “labored and severe.” In the worst cases, the sufferers could do nothing other than stand in their stalls “as if benumbed and paralyzed.” Eventually, an increasing number of them began to die.
Within days of the illness being identified, it was spreading throughout the new Canadian Confederation. By mid-October it had invaded New England and upstate New York; by late October it had nearly ended traffic on the Erie Canal. In early November it reached New York City and Boston. Eventually, it would spread through nearly every corner of North America and into parts of the Southern Hemisphere.
About the Guest
Thomas G. Andrews is professor of history and faculty director of the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research and teaching encompass environmental, animal, Indigenous, labor, and western American history.
He is the author of Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the George Perkins Marsh Prize, and Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies. His latest book reconstructs the extraordinary equine influenza outbreak of 1872–73 and uses it to reconsider capitalism, urbanization, animal labor, Reconstruction, and the Panic of 1873.
For Further Investigation
Thomas G. Andrews, The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America (University of North Carolina Press, 2026).
—, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Harvard University Press, 2008).
—, Coyote Valley: Deep History in the High Rockies (Harvard University Press, 2015).
Clay McShane and Joel A. Tarr, The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
Jessica Wang, Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Rabies, Medicine, and Society in an American Metropolis, 1840–1920 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019).
William T. Taylor, Hoof Beats: How Horses Shaped Human History (University of California Press, 2024).
Mary Baxter, “What a Horse Flu Reveals about Societies at the Dawn of Industrialization,” an interview with Thomas G. Andrews for NiCHE.
Related Episodes
Horse: Timothy Winegard on the animal that transformed human history.
Mosquito: Timothy Winegard on the most lethal predator in human history.
Mad Dogs and Other New Yorkers: Jessica Wang on rabies, medicine, animals, and life in nineteenth-century New York
Tags: Thomas G. Andrews, Great Horse Flu, Equine Influenza, Horses, Reconstruction, Panic of 1873, Animal History, Environmental History, Capitalism, Urban History, History of Medicine, American West
