“[A] searching reappraisal of the origins of epidemiology…Those who lead epidemiology and public health today should read Maladies of Empire. They might wish to reflect on the origin of their discipline, the histories they choose to ignore, the myths they prefer to propagate. And they might wish to consider the debt they—we—owe to those who were, and in some cases still are, abused, mistreated, and manipulated in the name of public health.” —Richard Horton, The Lancet

“Downs has now given global context to nineteenth-century advances in medicine and public health, beyond the dominant histories rooted in Western Europe and the ancient world. In Maladies of Empire, he centers slave ships, people living in colonized countries, prisoners, and wars in the narrative of medical discovery, at the foundation of epidemiology… He covers lost and untold stories and makes visible things that need to be seen.” —Mary T. Bassett, Nature

“Maladies of Empire provides an illuminating, painstaking, yet engaging interrogation of original records and sources, filling critical gaps in the development of epidemiology. Indispensable and compelling.” —Harriet A. Washington, author of the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Medical Apartheid

“In this brilliant and timely book, Jim Downs uncovers the origins of epidemiology in slavery, colonialism, and war. Controlling large populations through violence and burgeoning state bureaucracies allowed for new insights into the genesis and spread of human disease. A most original global history, this book is required reading for historians, medical researchers, and really anyone interested in the origins of modern medicine.” —Sven Beckert, author of the Bancroft Prize—winning Empire of Cotton: A Global History

“Maladies of Empire shifts the site of medical knowledge from European cities to the international slave trade, colonial lands and wars, and the resulting movement of populations. This vivid and brilliant analysis of these critical sites fundamentally changes our views of the origins of epidemiology and the transnational flow of medical knowledge about disease transmission. This excellent work will surely become required reading for historians of medicine, disease, and empire.” —Evelynn M. Hammonds, coeditor of The Nature of Difference

“In this meticulously researched and beautifully written work, Jim Downs transforms our understanding of the relationship between the history of medicine, colonialism, and the institution of slavery. Maladies of Empire illuminates the critical connections between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century comprehension of disease and the evidence gathered from captive Africans, enslaved plantation workers, and soldiers throughout the Atlantic world. Charting the origins of modern epidemiology in the inequities of forced labor, Downs makes foundational contributions to the histories of medicine, colonialism, and slavery. Everyone interested in the connections between race and disease should read Maladies of Empire.” —Jennifer L. Morgan, author of Reckoning with Slavery

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“Downs capably blends authority and warmth in this thoughtful reexamination of an era.” —Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe

“Intelligent and thought-provoking.” —Kirkus Reviews

“the sheer act of Downs’ acknowledging that not all gay men subscribed to the popular ‘three Big B’s’ of the time —’the Bars, Beaches, and Baths’ —and found their identity validated through the communal practices of Christian worship and cultural hubs (like the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop) is a refreshing and invigorating experience. Stand By Me proves a deeply moving read, one that passionately and urgently argues for us to acknowledge some of the forgotten history of gay liberation. —Nathan Smith, San Francisco Chronicle

“Downs draws on LGBTQ materials long underrrepresented in superficial media accounts of gay life. Past chronicles have defined the gay community by focusing on ‘free love’ and HIV/AIDS. Downs upends this, detailing more inclusive and representative subjects, tracing the history of gay rights as part of the ongoing battle for civil rights, and covering the gay religious movement. . . A valuable addition to LGBTQ and social-change collections.” — Whitney Scott, ALA Booklist

“Exhaustive, but never exhausting. . . Stand By Me is not duplicative of other accounts. It is to our movement an equivalent to Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. . . Downs challenges our movement not to let the horror of AIDS or the rush to assimilate cloud the memory of our roots. Stand By Me calls us to dig more deeply into the past in order to guide our future.” — Jim Mitulski, Lambda Literary Review

“Stand By Me brings the 1970s back to life, not as it it imagined to be, but as it actually was. In compelling prose, Jim Downs has recovered the stories of heroic individuals who risked much to come out, to build community, and to fight for social justice. Some of these episodes are tragic and some inspiring. All of them deserve to be remembered.” —John D’Emilio, author of Intimate Matters

“An important challenge to our understanding of an event that scholars and laypeople alike have preferred to see as an uplifting story of newly liberated people vigorously claiming their long-denied rights.” — The New York Times

“Downs has written a scholarly book about emancipation that should open a whole new discussion about how it was achieved. If there is any doubt about his assertions, he has included 56 pages of footnote.” — The Washington Post

“Jim Downs’ exceptional research has resulted in a major study. . . Highly recommended.” —Civil War News

“As Jim Downs makes clear in this carefully documented work, the Union leadership, domestic and military, was wholly unprepared to deal with the breakdown of the system of slavery that followed the Union army with every foray into southern soil. . . However, one may ‘spin’ the story, one comes away from this book with no doubt that the path out of slavery was a minefield of death and disease that needs its proper acknowledgement in histories of reconstruction.” —Margaret Humphreys, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.

“Downs’ Sick from Freedom is a signal contribution to the vastly understudied question of freed-people’s health and a formidable challenge to the dominant analytical framework that has heretofore framed our understanding both of the transition from slavery to freedom in the American South and the meaning of death and dying in the era of the Civil War. It, quite simply, remaps a field. Against an archival record of statistics - of so many bodies sicj or dying and denied access to local and state hospitals and asylums—Downs gives us the story of a people, of individual men, women, and children ‘dying to be free.” —Thavolia Glymph, Duke University

As the Director of the Program in African American History, Jim hosted a Juneteenth Program in June 2025 with three MacArthur Fellows--Jennifer L. Morgan (NYU), Dorothy Roberts (UPenn) and Ruha Benjamin (Princeton).

Public Facing Essays

Jim in conversation with Scott Hancok (Gettysburg College), Drew Gilpin Faust (Harvard), David Blight (Yale) and Stephanie McCurry (Columbia) on the past, present, and future of Civil War Studies

Edited Volumes

Reckoning with History

With essays by Michael Green, Katrina Vanden Heuval, April E. Holm, Kellie Carter Jackson, Matthew Taylor Rafferty, Elizabeth A. Herbin-Triant, and Ashli White.

Beyond Freedom

With essays by Justin Behrend, Carole Emberton, Eric Foner, Thavolia Glymph, Chandra Manning, Kate Masur, Richard Newman, James Oakes, Susan E. O’Donovan, Hannah Rosen, and Brenda E. Stevenson

Connexions

With essays by Sharon Block, Susan Cahn, Stephanie M.H. Camp, Ian Carter, Ernesto Chávez, Marisa J. Fuentes, Wanda S. Pillow, Marc Stein and Deborah Gray White

Why We Write

With essays by Catherine Clinton, Caitlin Crowell, John D’Emilio, Drew Gilpin Faust, Jennifer Fronc, Jill Lepore, Jennifer Morgan, Timothy Patrick McCarthy, and Jung Pak

Taking Back the Academy

With essays by Kathleen M. Brown, Drucilla Cornell, Eileen Egan, Glenda Gilmore, Nancy Hewitt, Jesse Lemisch, Vania Markarian, John McMillian, David Rosner, and Anita Seth

Academic Articles

As part of a graduation tradition at Gettysburg College, Jim received a “stole of gratitude” from one of his advisees.

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History in the Headlines

In 2019, Jim Downs and Catherine Clinton co-founded History in the Headlines, a series that brings leading scholars and thinkers together to engage in meaningful conversations about polarizing topics. Downs has also edited volumes in the series.

A conversation about the history and significance of the reproductive rights movement in America

Just over fifty years ago on January 22, 1973, the United States Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade assured millions of women that abortion was a protected constitutional right due to a woman’s right to privacy. In the context of the burgeoning women’s rights movement, it seemed like an inalienable victory: women might become equal to men in their right to determine what would happen to their bodies. This was a hard-won fight that reached back to colonial America and slavery, but on June 24, 2022, the decision was shockingly reversed by the Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. What happened? What transpired socially, politically, legally, in religious institutions and in popular culture in the half-century when “the right to choose” led to this stunning transformation in American society?

An enlightening, history-informed conversation about the January 6 insurrection

On January 6, 2021, more than two thousand rioters stormed the doors of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, D.C., hoping to interrupt the peaceful transfer of power from former president Donald Trump to his successor, Joseph Biden. The deaths, property damage, and vicious rampage that ensued were witnessed on live television as an unprecedented attack on the democratic process and those who strive to protect it.

A compelling conversation about the history of voter suppression with Stacey Abrams, Heather Cox Richardson and other leading thinkers.

Historians have long been engaged in telling the story of the struggle for the vote. In the wake of recent contested elections, the suppression of the vote has returned to the headlines, as awareness of the deep structural barriers to the ballot, particularly for poor, black, and Latino voters, has called attention to the historical roots of issues related to voting access.

Perhaps most notably, former state legislator Stacey Abrams’s campaign for Georgia's gubernatorial race drew national attention after she narrowly lost to then-secretary of state Brian Kemp, who had removed hundreds of thousands of voters from the official rolls. After her loss, Abrams created Fair Fight, a multimillion-dollar initiative to combat voter suppression in twenty states.

An enlightening conversation between top historians on memorialization, the proper role of public intellectuals, and how history happens

Nine killed in Charleston church shooting. White supremacists demonstrate in Charlottesville. Monuments decommissioned in New Orleans and Chapel Hill. The headlines keep coming, and the debate rolls on. How should we contend with our troubled history as a nation? What is the best way forward?

COMING SOON, APRIL 2026,

The next volume of series, U.S. History at the 250th. From the Revolution to the History Wars.

A conversation with Sandra Enriquez, Sandy Grande, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Annette Gordon Reed, Erika Lee, Robert Parkinson, Marc Stein, William Sturkey

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Media

Jim has been featured in the New York Times for his first book, Sick from Freedom: African American Illness and Suffering during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Richard Perry, The New York Times

Liberation as Death Sentence

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Jim in The New York Times with Stacey Abrams, Heather Cox Richardson, Carol Anderson, Kevin Kruse, Heather Ann Thompson for their book on Voter Suppression.

For Stacey Abrams, a Date With History— or at Least the People Who Write It

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Courtesy of Jaci Downs Photography

The Philadelphia Inquirer: Jim Downs, a history professor at Gettysburg College, is one of 2025’s Guggenheim Fellows.

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Jim in The Hartford Courant when he was awarded a Mellon New Directions Fellowship, which allowed him, after tenure, to return to school and gain training in medical anthropology and global health at Harvard University.

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Online Lectures

C-SPAN

Jim was in conversation with Isabel Wilkerson, Eric Foner, and Khalil Gibran Muhammad on the history of Emancipation to the Great Migration

Emancipation & the Great Migration

Jim was in conversation with Lázaro Lima, Chair of the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies and Professor of Latinx Studies

Stand by Me

Sick from Freedom

Jim presented his analysis of the smallpox epidemic from Sick from Freedom as an Organization of American Historians Distinguished Lecturer at the UT Rio Grande Valley School of Medicine.

YouTube

Jim on Politics and Prose (P&P Live) with Dr. Vanessa Northington Gamble

P&P Live!

Jim giving a book talk on Maladies of Empire at Harvard Medical School

Better Together Dialogue

Jim giving a book talk at Springfield College

Maladies of Empire Lecture

History Extra Podcast

Jim on the History Extra Podcast (UK) How Slavery and Empire Shaped Epidemiology

History Extra Podcast

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