"I Have a Responsibility to Tell Their Stories"

"In an e-mail Professor Foner praised 'Sick From Freedom' as offering 'a highly original perspective' that 'deserves wide attention.' And Professor Downs makes no bones about wanting to place health issues at the center of multiple scholarly conversations about the war and its aftermath.

"'I wanted to say, "You’re not allowed to do the history of labor or the history of the family or the history of citizenship unless you go through my book,"' he said. 'I wanted to be able to tell a story about these people’s lives that wouldn’t get pushed aside as melodrama.'"

Jennifer Schuessler in The New York Times interviews historian Jim Downs about his new book, Sick from Freedom.