Major funding for backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment

for the Humanities, and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

From Virginia Humanities, this is backstory.

Welcome to backstory.

The show that explains the history behind today's headlines.

I'm Nathan Connolly.

I'm Joanne Freeman.

And I'm Brian Ballot.

100 years ago, Europe was bogged down in the final years of the First World War, which

had cost millions of lives.

But a more deadly onslaught was to come.

As early as the spring of 1918, soldiers started getting sick, not just here in the United

States, but all across the world.

They were coming down with something like the flu.

And historian Nancy Bristow says that the flu was nothing new.

In fluenza, the grip, they use those terms interchangeably, has become a domesticated

illness.

It's something they expect to see every year.

And indeed, they expect some people to die of it every year.

But as the infection spread from soldier to soldier and then soldier to civilian, doctors

realized this flu was not what they were used to treating.

Right away, they can see that the pace of infection is very fast.

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