The disease cholera first arrived in North America in 1832, at the ports of Quebec and Montreal. From there it spread along the waterways of the continent, reaching great cities, small towns, and isolated farms. It killed more quickly than any disease Americans had yet endured, and it killed horrifically. Its victims vomited, suffered from explosive diarrhea and terrible spasms, turned blue, and finally entered the coma that preceded death. A healthy man at breakfast could be a corpse at midnight—or even sooner.

In this conversation, Paul Kelton explains how newspapers allowed Americans to watch the pandemic approaching; why medical authorities blamed alcohol, diet, poverty, race, and supposed moral failure; and how public-health measures intensified the danger for Irish immigrants, impoverished workers, incarcerated people, enslaved African Americans, and Indigenous peoples forced westward. Cholera’s movement through Jacksonian America initially followed its waterways. It then benefited from its systems of confinement, enslavement, human trafficking, and dispossession.

Paul Kelton is Professor and Robert David Lion Gardiner Chair in American History at Stony Brook University. His research focuses on Indigenous North America, early American history, and the relationship between colonialism, medicine, and epidemic disease. His latest book is Hidden Terrors: The Scourge of Cholera in Jackson’s America.

At his death on December 24, 1873, the Baltimore merchant Johns Hopkins left $7 million. which established both a hospital and the first American research university bearing his name. From its beginning Johns Hopkins pursued a distinctive and often eccentric course, moving from early dominance and innovation to decline and then renewal, all amidst recurring debates over what direction the university should take.

Those debates concerned questions that remain unsettled. Should a university emphasize advanced research or undergraduate education? Should research be pursued wherever an investigator’s curiosity leads, or directed toward practical ends? How much influence should donors, foundations, corporations, and governments possess? And what happens when an institution created to be different becomes the model everyone else follows?

In this conversation with Andrew Jewett, author of Johns Hopkins: The First 150 Years, we see that Hopkins’s history is more than its own. It is also the story of the creation of the American research university and its development into one of the most powerful—and increasingly uneasy—set of American institutions of the twenty-first century.

Since the invention of the printing press, printers have published books. And ever since books have been published, they have been sold. Yet today’s guest observes that, remarkably enough, there is a “paucity of literature on the history of the buying and selling of books.” While there have been plenty of studies of publishing and reading, “the commercial transactions that allowed books to pass from the producer to the reader are seldom explored.”

In his new book, The Bookshop: A History of Bookselling from the Dawn of Print to the Twenty-First Century, my guest Andrew Pettegree attempts to remedy that deficiency. In his large net he captures such specimens as self-publishing, book pedlars, publishers’ representatives, printing on speculation, paperbacks, bookstore chains, and book clubs—nearly all of which turn out to be much older than one might expect. At the heart of his story is the intertwining of publishing and bookselling, which remained merged into the middle of the twentieth century and has, in many ways, become entangled once again in the era of digital books.

Andrew Pettegree is Bishop Wardlaw Professor at the University of St Andrews. Trained as a historian of the European Reformation, he is now one of the leading historians of communication, printing, publishing, and the book trade. As part of this study, he is the founder and director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue, a free resource that now describes more than 1.6 million editions published between 1450 and 1700, and has located almost seven million surviving copies in libraries, archives, and museums around the world.