The influenza epidemic of 1918 was one of the worst medical disasters in human history, taking close to thirty million lives worldwide in less than a year, including more than 500,000 in the United States. What made this pandemic even more frightening was the fact that it occurred when death rates for most common infectious diseases were diminishing. Still, an epidemic is not merely a medical crisis; it has sociological, psychological, and political dimensions as well. In Influenza and Inequality, Patricia J. Fanning examines these other dimensions and brings to life this terrible episode of epidemic disease by tracing its path through the town of Norwood, Massachusetts.

By 1918, Norwood was a small, ethnically diverse, industrialized, and stratified community. Ink, printing, and tanning factories were owned by wealthy families who lived privileged lives. These industries attracted immigrant laborers who made their homes in several ethnic neighborhoods and endured prejudice and discrimination at the hands of native residents. When the epidemic struck, the immigrant neighborhoods were most affected; a fact that played a significant role in the town's response—with tragic results.

This close analysis of one town's struggle illuminates how even well-intentioned elite groups may adopt and implement strategies that can exacerbate rather than relieve a medical crisis. It is a cautionary tale that demonstrates how social behavior can be a fundamental predictor of the epidemic curve, a community's response to crisis, and the consequences of those actions.

For years, opponents of outsourcing have argued that offshoring American jobs destroys our local industries, lays waste to American job creation, and gives foreigners the good jobs and income that would otherwise remain on our shores. Yet few Americans realize that a parallel dynamic is occurring in the healthcare sector—previously one of the most consistent sources of stable, dependable living-wage jobs in the entire nation. Instead of outsourcing high-paying jobs overseas—as the manufacturing and service sectors do—hospitals and other healthcare companies insource healthcare labor from developing countries, giving the jobs to people who are willing to accept lower pay and worse working conditions than U.S. healthcare workers. As Dr. Tulenko shows, insourcing has caused tens of thousands of high-paying local jobs in the healthcare sector to effectively vanish from the reach of U.S. citizens, weakened the healthcare systems of developing nations, and constricted the U.S. health professional education system. She warns Americans about what she’s seeing—a stunning story they’re scarcely aware of, which impacts all of us directly and measurably—and describes how to create better American health professional education, more high-paying healthcare jobs, and improved health for the poor in the developing world.

Britain's supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal. This coal not only powered steam engines in factories, ships, and railway locomotives but also warmed homes and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain's cities and towns became filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke.

In this far-reaching study, Peter Thorsheim explains that, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution. To them, pollution meant miasma: invisible gases generated by decomposing plant and animal matter. Far from viewing coal smoke as pollution, most people considered smoke to be a valuable disinfectant, for its carbon and sulfur were thought capable of rendering miasma harmless.

Inventing Pollution examines the radically new understanding of pollution that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one that centered not on organic decay but on coal combustion. This change, as Peter Thorsheim argues, gave birth to the smoke-abatement movement and to new ways of thinking about the relationships among humanity, technology, and the environment.