What’s changed since the 1918 pandemic? (A history lesson with Nancy Bristow)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2020

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

How does our response to the coronavirus pandemic compare to our response 100 years ago, when what is commonly known as the “Spanish Flu” swept through America? Historian Nancy Bristow helps Annie understand the lessons American society learned from the 1918 influenza epidemic, and what we haven’t yet gotten right. Nancy Bristow is the History Department Chair at the University of Puget Sound, where she teaches twentieth-century American history with an emphasis on race, gender, and social change. She is the author of ‘American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic’. Twitter: @univpugetsound @NancyKBristow Further reading: American Pandemic on Bookshop.org, an independent site that’s raising money for independent bookstores that are closed during the pandemic: https://bookshop.org/books/american-pandemic-the-lost-worlds-of-the-1918-influenza-epidemic/9780190238551 Or on IndieBound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780190238551 Cities that went all in on social distancing in 1918 emerged stronger for it: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/03/upshot/coronavirus-cities-social-distancing-better-employment.html Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com/ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's Annie. I'm a policy researcher at Civic Ventures and I help produce this
0:10.0	podcast. A few days ago I called up Nancy Bristow, the chair of the Department of History at the University of Puget Sound.
0:15.9	She's the author of the book American Pandemic, The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic.
0:21.7	And I talked to her about how our response to this
0:23.9	pandemic compares to society's response almost exactly a hundred years ago. I hope
0:28.0	you enjoy. Here's Nancy.
0:32.0	My name is Nancy Bristow. I'm a professor of history at the University of Puget Sound and I've written a book on the flu pandemic of 1918.
0:42.0	Do you consider yourself a historian of pandemics?
0:45.0	I don't. I consider myself a social historian with certain interest in American catastrophe, but most recently my work has shifted to explorations of racial violence in the United States.
0:59.0	What led you to the catastrophe interest?
1:01.0	Well, actually I didn't even realize that's what I was doing,
1:04.1	but my first book looked at the First World War
1:07.6	and relationships between soldiers and civilians,
1:10.0	but I was fascinated by that war.
1:12.0	And I really stumbled into my project on the flu pandemic.
1:15.5	It was a family story that I'd never heard and when I heard it I knew I had to pursue it.
1:20.3	I'm really excited to talk to you.
1:22.1	I think our listeners and you know the
1:24.3	podcast team too where we're all thinking about the idea of normalcy and what
1:28.8	normal you know in the future will look like in terms of the economy and and just society in general and I know that's something you've thought a lot about too, but I'd love to start with just drawing the the general similarities and differences between this crisis and the 1918 pandemic.
1:45.5	Well, the thing that's most important to note is that we're dealing with a different
1:49.3	virus.
	...

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