The My name is David Reamer. I am an academic and public historian published both academically and publicly, including an ongoing history series for the Anchorage Daily News.

One of my most recent research

topics has been the history of epidemics, pandemics, and quarantines, and the

associated fears within Anchorage in the past century. So and the anything about past pandemics and quarantines in Alaska and you said you were digging into it.

What have you learned since then?

Yes, it was a lot of primary digging. There hadn't been anything written about Anchorage

during any of the previous disease scares.

The most interesting to me was the Spanish flu of 1918 to 1919.

And what did that look like?

Well, in Anchorage, and in Alaska,

you start hearing of the first cases in October of 1918.

And in Anchorage, you have a city that's unprepared. They've heard the

rumors, they've heard of the Spanish influenza for months now since May of

1918, but they've always considered it something somewhere different, something other people

dealt with. There's no indication that they were preparing or were prepared for what happened.

Not that they truly could have prepared for a pandemic,

but it's interesting that they always talked about Spanish influenza in terms of what was happening elsewhere

rather than what they can do to prepare.

And in October you have this time when,

as part of that, you have doctors telling people that

don't worry about it.

They're explicitly telling people there's no influenza in Engridge.

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