Course Details

The "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918 swept through the globe and killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide in less than two years. In the US, the public health and medical communities were ill equipped to deal with such a crisis. The country was at war, and the war was the government’s first priority. Young men were amassed into crowded military camps with little heed paid to increasingly desperate pleas from public health officials. The news was repressed in order to maintain war morale and ward off panic. Contemporary attitudes toward poverty, class, and race were baked into responses to the pandemic. When the pandemic was over, US society had changed in deep and lasting ways.