American epidemic timeline
A selective timeline of major epidemics, outbreaks, and public-health turning points in what is now the United States, including colonial, Indigenous, territorial, and modern settings where the historical record can carry the story.
Why this matters
This timeline is not a trophy case of disasters. It lets readers compare entries across ports, camps, households, prisons, schools, hospitals, reservations, food systems, water systems, farms, and sexual or injection networks, while keeping public-health interpretation attached to the sources that support it.
How to read uncertainty
A high-confidence entry means the event and interpretation are strongly sourced. A contested or uncertain entry means the mortality event or public-health lesson is important, but diagnosis, counts, or consequences are not clean enough to flatten into certainty.
Uncertain epidemic mortality event · unknown/contested · Coastal New England Indigenous communities
English settlement entered a landscape already altered by epidemic death, which later colonial writers converted into providential narrative.
No formal response; the source problem is itself part of the historical lesson.
The diagnosis is disputed. This entry should be read as a mortality event, not a confirmed pathogen claim.
