PANDEMIC IN PERSPECTIVE: THE SPANISH FLU OF 1918

Doug White.  Director, Center for Sustainability and the Environment (Albion College).  Mondays for two weeks.  10 am – 12 noon.  October 5, 12.

This class will be treated as a book club offering (lecture and guided discussion).  Held in Google Meeting or comparable virtual setting; instructions will be provided to participants.

The COVID-19 pandemic is having profound impacts on our personal lives and our society even if we have been lucky enough to personally avoid the virus itself.  To better appreciate the transformative scope of our current pandemic, we will read and discuss Laura Spinney’s Pale Rider, an excellent history of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918—the deadliest calamity of the 20^th Century.   Spinney argues that scholars have only recently fully recognized its consequences.  Spinney’s account is filled with astonishingly prescient parallels to our current circumstances.

From the book jacket: “The Spanish Flu of 1918-1920 was one of the greatest human disasters of all time  It infected a third of the people of the Earth—from the poorest immigrants in New York City to the king of Spain, Franz Kafka, Mahatma Gandhi, and Woodrow Wilson.  But despite the death toll of between 50 and 100 million people, it exists in our memory as an afterthought to World War I.  In this gripping narrative history, Laura Spinney [draws]. . .on the latest research in history, virology, epidemiology, psychology, and economics.”

Text:  Laura Spinney.  Pale Rider:  The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World.  New York:  Public Affairs Press, 2017.