Career shifting: Fenn plies two trades Photos: Jimmy Wallace

lizabeth "Lil" Fenn is probably the only historian now working in academe who lived in a tepee her senior year in college and worked for eight years as an auto mechanic. But Fenn '81 has distinguished herself from her peers in a more significant way than leading an unusual private life. With the recent publication of Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82, she lays out a painstakingly researched argument that shows how smallpox shaped the fate of the North American continent in ways previously unimagined.

The book's title makes it sound like a relatively modest treatise of interest primarily to history buffs or fellow scholars. But, in fact, Pox Americana is, well, revolutionary. Fenn shows how the spread of smallpox was inextricably linked to the social, economic, and political currents of the time, from the mission churches in Mexico to the Canada fur trade to George Washington and his Continental Army. She shows how the disease altered the balance of power in North America by decimating certain Native American tribes; how the spread of smallpox was fueled by conditions of war such as increased mobility; and how the disease may even have influenced the outcome of the American Revolution.

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" I really had no idea about the dimensions of this until I started researching my prospectus," says Fenn, who joined the Duke faculty last year as an assistant professor of history. "People are used to thinking about the thirteen colonies or Canada or New Spain as being separate from one another. No one had ever pieced it together before. As I conducted my research, I had one of those light-bulb moments when I realized that this was not just a small outbreak in Western Canada. It was immense."

Fenn's scholarship is groundbreaking, according to John Mack Faragher, a professor of history at Yale University and her graduate adviser. "The central idea of this project is to demonstrate that groups in North America were linked together in fundamental and earth-shattering ways that were not of their choosing," he says. "And Lil did not have an easy time of it. There was a fair amount of intellectual resistance to what she was doing, because it threatened people in cubbyholes--historians who thought that you should only focus on specific categories like geography or the fur trade or the Revolutionary War. But I knew that she could pull it off, and that this was going to be a really big book."

Indeed, Pox Americana, which came out in 2001, is in its third printing and has earned two awards for historical writing. As notable as the book has become, however, its evolution was slow and the path toward it, circuitous. Academe was never at the top of Fenn's career choices growing up, even though her mother, Ann Fenn '53, taught junior-high-school social studies and her paternal grandfather taught Chinese at Yale. (Her father worked in personnel management and helped launch off-track betting in New York.) Fenn applied to Duke because it was a compromise between her parents' preference for conservative Vassar College and hers for the less-restrictive University of New Hampshire. Because her knees were shot from playing basketball in high school, she took up crew, waking before dawn for workouts and practice.

The first vaccination: Edward Jenner used pus from the hand of a dairy maid in 1796 Image: © Bettmann/Corbis

She also reveled in her coursework. In the history department, she immersed herself in Larry Goodwyn's course "The Insurgent South" and Peter Wood's "Colonial America." In anthropology, she sought out socio-cultural anthropology courses with Virginia Dominguez, now at the University of Iowa, and courses examining themes of democracy and economic culture with Rob Weller, now at Boston University. One Weller class in particular, "Peasants and Peasant Rebellions," still resonates. "All of the students enrolled were hungry for engagement, for classes with deep, global, historical resonance that illuminated the world as we saw it," Fenn says. "What impresses me as I think back on it was how intensely we thought about things. Weller's class addressed questions that mattered. They mattered then, and they matter today: Why and when do people rebel? How do movements form? Why do they succeed? Why do they fail? From the American Revolution to the civil-rights movement to the international peace movement today, I still think these are really pressing questions."

With only five people in the class, the group bonded outside the classroom as well. "We called ourselves the Peasant Rebels," she recalls, laughing at the memory. "We actually crashed a conference on peasant rebellions at the National Humanities Center that specifically excluded undergraduates. 'No!' we insisted when they tried to throw us out. 'We're the Peasant Rebels!' "

Fenn first became aware of smallpox's indelible impact on history when she read about an outbreak of the disease among the Native Americans in the Hudson Bay fur trade; at the time she was conducting research for her senior thesis. Her thesis won the William T. Laprade Prize in History for best honors essay, and she graduated cum laude with distinction in history. During her senior year, Fenn actually pitched her tent in a tepee she'd bought the year before while on spring break in Florida. She lived off Old Erwin Road in a place called Fancytown, a loose cooperative of hippies and sharecroppers.

" Everybody thinks that I must have wanted to be an Indian or something, but that wasn't the case," she says. "I'm not the type to hang a dream catcher on my rear-view mirror. I had friends in Wyoming who lived in teepees, and I simply thought they were really neat, cheap, functional dwellings. With a wood-burning stove and a floor made of plywood, my teepee was pretty far from the authentic Plains Indian home."

In its own weird way, her tepee contributed to the success of her thesis. "I rode my bike up 751 in the morning, took a shower in Card Gym, stayed on campus all day, and rode home at night," she says. "And when it got too cold and I got too lazy to chop wood for heat, I stayed even longer, because the library was warm."

After graduation, Fenn went to Yale for graduate school, earning her master's in history in 1985. She perfunctorily pursued some coursework toward her Ph.D. but became increasingly disengaged from the academic milieu. Even before grad school, she had toyed with the idea of joining the proletariat by becoming a machinist--a holdover, in part, from her Peasant Rebel days. One day, while working on her run-down Datsun 510, she says she realized how much she looked forward to having it break down. That meant she would have to consult the comprehensive service manual--not the cursory owner's manual--to learn how to fix it. Once, while changing the oil, she accidentally poured the Styrofoam tab from the oil container into her engine. Certain that she'd destroyed her car, she called the guys down at the local parts shop and told them what had happened. No problem, they replied, just take off the valve cover.