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My account of the Board of Experts was taken from the Proceedings of the Board of Experts and the Conclusions of the Board of Experts, 1878. Both are held in the Rare Books Collection of the Library of Congress. Statistics for the number of blacks and whites who died were taken from those reports, as well as Keating’s book.

The peculiar incidence of the fever among white children in New Orleans was taken from Carrigan’s book.

The Havana Commission

Biographical information about Juan Carlos Finlay was taken primarily from an article, “Carlos Finlay’s Life and the Death of Yellow Jack,” published in the Bulletin of the Pan American Health Organization (1989).

Biographical information about George M. Sternberg came from the George Miller Sternberg papers at the National Library of Medicine, John Pierce and Jim Writer’s Yellow Jack, Martha Sternberg’s George Miller Sternberg: A Biography and “The Trials and Tribulations of George Miller Sternberg—America’s First Bacteriologist,” published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.

Reparations

Historians agree that 5,150 people died during the Memphis 1878 epidemic. That number comes from Keating’s book written only one year after the epidemic. The number represents roughly one-tenth of the total population of Memphis, which was estimated to be just under 50,000 in 1878.

The evolution of Memphis from a cosmopolitan, diverse, progressive city to one in which Protestant fundamentalism and white supremacy flourished is taken from Memphis historian Gerald M. Capers in his book The Biography of a River Town. The quote suggesting that Atlanta owes its present position to the work of the Aedes aegypti in Memphis is from the same source.

The statistic taken from the National Bureau of Education census is also from Capers book: “The extent to which newcomers took the places of former residents in the years following 1880 is revealed in a census taken in 1918 by the National Bureau of Education. Of the 11,781 white parents residing in Memphis forty years after the great epidemic, only 183, less than 2 per cent, had been born there.”

Information about George Waring and the account of his death came from William W. Sorrels’s Memphis’ Greatest Debate; a Question of Water, as well as his New York Times obituary on October 30, 1898, the Commercial Appeal obituary, the Memphis Avalanche obituary and Waring’s own report, The Memphis Sewerage System.

Part III: Cuba, 1900 A Splendid Little War

The introductory quote for Part III is part of a letter written by Walter Reed to his wife, Emilie, on December 31, 1900.

The description of the sinking of the USS Maine was taken from Captain Sigsbee’s own book, The Maine, written in 1899, and held in the Rare Book Collection of the Library of Congress. I also relied on G.J.A. O’Toole’s The Spanish War: An American Epic 1898, an excellent book on the war. There is information from Hugh Thomas’s Cuba or the Pursuit of Freedom and Pierce and Writer’s Yellow Jack as well.

The four presidents who attempted to purchase Cuba at one time or another were James Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and William McKinley. The quote from Thomas Jefferson was taken from Yellow Jack. Robert Desowitz’s quote appeared in his book Who Gave Pinta to the Santa Maria?

Siboney

I based the majority of the “Siboney” chapter on Victor Clarence Vaughn’s autobiography, A Doctor’s Memories.

Additional information, including the Round Robin letter controversy, was taken from O’Toole’s The Spanish War. Shafter’s quote was also taken from that source. It has been disputed whether or not the Round Robin letter was Shafter’s idea or Roosevelt’s. The Spanish War uses Roosevelt’s own autobiography as the source for the account in which Shafter came up with the plan and wrangled Roosevelt into it; but, in a footnote, O’Toole adds that Roosevelt had written a letter to a friend four days before the meeting with Shafter in which he enclosed a draft of the Round Robin letter.

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