Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Debility and Power: How Climate Knowledge Made the Nineteenth-Century Us South

Debility and Power: How Climate Knowledge Made the Nineteenth-Century Us South

Lafay, Elaine

Hardcover

Series: Early American Studies

Medical Reference19th Century United States History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1512830275
ISBN13: 9781512830279
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: Nov 24 2026
Pages: 336
Language: English

An exploration of the powerful and surprising role of debility in the nineteenth-century US South and how it was weaponized to control both land and people

How could a place be at once a life-giving paradise and sinister threat to health? In Debility and Power, Elaine LaFay answers this question by exploring the powerful and surprising role of debility in the nineteenth-century US South, especially the region along the Gulf Coast. Debility, a protean ailment, encompassed shifting ideas of weakness, illness, and impairment over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Lafay argues that debility became a central, yet paradoxical, concept in American expansionism, informing everything from climatic knowledge to the brutal realities of slavery.

The book traces how debility threaded through understandings of the US South, its people, and its subtropical climate, which settlers found both tantalizing and terrifying. Even seemingly vulnerable white health-seekers who traveled south for their health acted as agents of colonialism, imagining a landscape emptied of its Indigenous inhabitants and populated with enslaved laborers. At the same time, LaFay uncovers how Black intellectuals and abolitionists wielded debility to mount a blistering critique of slavery as both a moral and physical failing of the nation.

Debility and Power reveals the myriad ways in which debility impacted the daily lives and political projects of nineteenth-century Americans, showing how imperial actors weaponized weakness and fragility to control both land and people. Nineteenth-century science and medicine buoyed these projects, from botany and climatology to theories about wind and ventilation on plantations. Ultimately LaFay argues that fears of debility, and especially debilitating climates, contributed to the naturalization of settler possession of Indigenous land and the justification for the brutal labor of enslaved people.

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