The Great Horse Flu: A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America

Coming October 6, 2026

  • "Imagine if America suffered a prolonged power outage, or if all the gas pumps suddenly went dry. With compassion and the deft hand of a preeminent historian at the top of his game, Andrews explores a largely forgotten crisis of comparable proportions: a devastating pandemic that infected millions of horses across North America, paralyzed the economy, and nearly brought national life to a halt."

    —Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder

  • "A monumental contribution to the history of contagious disease . . . . Deeply compassionate, The Great Horse Flu illuminates the many ties that bind us across species, space, and time."

    —Elizabeth Fenn, author of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775 -82


  • "Brilliant and beautifully written. Thomas Andrews fundamentally changes our understanding of the Reconstruction era by exploring relationships among animals, human and non-human alike."

    —Ari Kelman, author of A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling Over the Memory of Sand Creek, winner of the Bancroft Prize. 

  • "Few historical moments, and even fewer history books, bring an entire continent into view. But Thomas Andrews’s remarkable history of the Great Horse Flu has done it.”

    —Beth Lew-Williams, author of John Doe Chinaman: The Forgotten History of Chinese Lives Under Racial Law

AVAILABLE THIS OCTOBER FROM UNC PRESS
FOLLOW THE TIMELINE OF THE GREAT HORSE FLU

An excerpt from The Great Horse Flu Chapter 2:

“The Great Horse Flu burst out of the Three Townships like a rodeo bronc busting out of a starting chute. The malady’s metastasis into a continent-wide outbreak transcended the ken of human perception. In the country-side north of Toronto, a viral variant evolved within a single cell of a single creature–presumably a horse–then hijacked that cell’s reproductive machinery and began churning out copies and near-copies of itself. Those copies next began to invade ever more of its host’s epithelial cells. Within a day or so, this horse would have started to shed the novel strain into their surroundings with every outward breath.”

Photograph by Christopher Sessions