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This is America in Pursuit, a limited run series from Thuline and NPR.

I'm Ramtin Arablui.

Each week, we bring you stories about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in America that began 250 years ago this year when those rights, unalienable rights, were laid out in the Declaration of Independence. But Americans had to

fight for them, beginning of course, with an all-out revolutionary war that lasted years.

So for our first episode, we're going to go back

into the archives to bring you a story from that revolutionary fight, which you probably know

the basics of. People were mad about taxes and were tired of answering to a king. The Boston Tea

Party broke out, George Washington and his crew took up arms and defeated the Imperial

British Army with unconventional tactics. But there's a big, or should I say small, part of

this story that's rarely mentioned. Mosquitoes. It's still the animal that kills more

human beings on the planet than any other animal to this day, and that's including other humans.

That's Dr. Tim Weingard.

I'm a history professor at Colorado Mason University, also the head coach of the hockey team, being Canadian.

And I wrote the book, The Mosquito, A Human History of Our Deadliest Predator.

The specific mosquito we're talking about today is known as the Anopheles,

a species of mosquito that thrives in marshes and swamps,

and is known for spreading malaria, a deadly disease that has changed the course of history in all kinds of ways.

We like to think we get to make our own history, that we did this as human beings.

And that's not necessarily the case.

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