John M. Barry

John M. Barry is an American historian, nonfiction writer and Distinguished Scholar at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. A Brown University graduate, he has also advised federal officials on pandemic preparedness and served on Louisiana bodies concerned with flood protection and coastal restoration.

His books often place science and public policy inside large historical narratives. The Great Influenza follows the 1918 pandemic through laboratories, military camps and strained public institutions, paying particular attention to medical research, government communication and public trust. Rising Tide traces the 1927 Mississippi River flood and the political and social consequences that followed it.

Barry’s other books include The Ambition and the Power, about Washington politics; The Transformed Cell, written with cancer researcher Steven Rosenberg; and Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul, a history of religious liberty and the separation of church and state. Rising Tide received the Society of American Historians’ Francis Parkman Prize. In 2020, Barry was selected for the Louisiana Writer Award.

Begin with The Great Influenza. It is the clearest introduction to Barry’s method: carefully reconstructed history that moves between individual researchers, institutional decisions and consequences on a vast scale. Readers drawn to his account of disaster and governance should continue with Rising Tide.