Microscopic view of colorful spherical and star-shaped virus particles.
Close-up of an abstract painting with blue, yellow, and orange colors.

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

Close-up of an abstract painting with swirling blue, yellow, gray, and brown colors.
Book cover titled 'The Great Horse Fool' by Thomas G. Andrews, featuring horses, a red virus symbol, and a partly visible statue, with the subtitle 'A Forgotten Contagion and the Fate of Reconstruction America'.
Close-up of various spherical objects, some with textured surfaces and others smooth, arranged on a reflective surface.
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.”

A middle-aged man with a mustache, wearing a black shirt, sitting indoors with a blurred background.

Photograph by Christopher Sessions