Shows how narratives of contagion structure communities of belonging and how the lessons of these narratives are incorporated into sociological theories of cultural transmission and community formation.

Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. Imagined Immunities: The Epidemiology of Belonging 29
2. The Healthy Carrier: "Typhoid Mary" and Social Being 68
3. Communicable Americanism: Social Contagion and Urban Spaces 114
4. Viral Cultures: Microbes and Politics in the Cold War 157
5. "The Columbus of AIDS": The Invention of "Patient Zero" 213
Epilogue 264
Notes 271
Works Cited 323
Index 353

Priscilla Wald is Professor of English at Duke University. She is the author of Constituting Americans: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form and the editor of the journal American Literature, both also published by Duke University Press.