Flu Pandemic of 1918

What the history of the 1918 Flu Pandemic can help us understand about today's public health measures.

The first flu children encounter shapes their immune systems. This had a surprising effect on Black and white mortality rates in 1918.

A 1918 letter sent a historian diving into the archives to learn more about its author.

Heroin, Aspirin, and The Spanish Flu.

The past provides a key lesson to minimize the damage from the omicron surge.

Why do some political incumbents adopt aggressive measures to slow the spread of infectious diseases while others do not?

We have no historical precedent for this moment.

Remembering a year of hell and devastation—the year of the Spanish flu.

As the U.S. anticipates a vaccinated summer, historians say measuring the impact of the 1918 influenza on the uproarious decade that followed is tricky.

Until the Covid-19 pandemic, the catastrophe of the Spanish flu had been dropped from American memory.

A 1918 debate offers a portrait of the challenges facing local officials during a health emergency.

At the first hint the virus was receding, people pushed to get life back to normal. Unfortunately another surge of the disease followed.

Many Americans were living under quarantines, and officials warned people to stay home for the holiday.

The president contracted influenza while attending peace talks in Paris, but the nation was never told the full, true story.

Once the COVID crisis is over, it may take us quite some time to process and psychologically recover from this tragedy.

A majority of the estimated 675,000 American deaths from the influenza pandemic of 1918–19 occurred during the second wave.

How masks became gendered during the 1918–1919 Flu Pandemic.

Using history to guide us in the difficult present.

Ordinances, arrests, and celebrations during the influenza epidemic.

Thinking about our future, we look back on the aftermath of a century-old pandemic.

Images from a century ago of people doing their best to keep others and themselves safe.

Female nurses served their country domestically and abroad by caring for soliders striken by the influenza pandemic.

A graphic essay about the brutal toll taken by the epidemic on indigenous communities in Alaska.

Illuminating a path forward.

Influenza pandemic of 1918 in the United States.

In Philadelphia, authorities faced a familiar challenge: to protect public health while maintaining individuals' rights to act, speak, and assemble freely.

We examine the 1918 flu to understand whether social distancing has economic costs or if slowing the spread of the pandemic reduced economic severity.

A new book suggests that the plague’s horrors haunt modernist literature between the lines.

The ways that authorities in Richmond, Virginia, responded to the 1918 Flu offer a lens onto what – and who – was most valued by those in power there.

From atomizer crazes to stranded actor troupes to school by phone, daily life during the flu pandemic was a trip.