Unspeakable Loss: North America’s Invisible Throat Distemper Epidemic of 1735–1765

While the New England throat distemper epidemic never achieved the notoriety acquired by other more notorious diseases of the colonial era, no single epidemic of that period proved more deadly to European settlers. This project asks why this epidemic escaped comment by contemporaries and past historians while raising interpretive questions informing our larger views of change, the priority of documentation, and the role of memory.