American Pandemic: The Lost Worlds of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic - Hardcover

Bristow, Nancy K.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199811342 ISBN 13: 9780199811342

Publisher: OUP USA, 2012

Synopsis

Between the years 1918 and1920, influenza raged around the globe in the worst pandemic in recorded history, killing at least fifty million people, more than half a million of them Americans. Yet despite the devastation, this catastrophic event seems but a forgotten moment in our nation's past.
American Pandemic offers a much-needed corrective to the silence surrounding the influenza outbreak. It sheds light on the social and cultural history of Americans during the pandemic, uncovering both the causes of the nation's public amnesia and the depth of the quiet remembering that endured. Focused on the primary players in this drama―patients and their families, friends, and community, public health experts, and health care professionals―historian Nancy K. Bristow draws on multiple perspectives to highlight the complex interplay between social identity, cultural norms, memory, and the epidemic. Bristow has combed a wealth of primary sources, including letters, diaries, oral histories, memoirs, novels, newspapers, magazines, photographs, government documents, and health care literature. She shows that though the pandemic caused massive disruption in the most basic patterns of American life, influenza did not create long-term social or cultural change, serving instead to reinforce the status quo and the differences and disparities that defined American life.
As the crisis waned, the pandemic slipped from the nation's public memory. The helplessness and despair Americans had suffered during the pandemic, Bristow notes, was a story poorly suited to a nation focused on optimism and progress. For countless survivors, though, the trauma never ended, shadowing the remainder of their lives with memories of loss. This book lets us hear these long-silent voices, reclaiming an important chapter in the American past.

About this title

Review:

Bristows accomplishments are manifold. She segues readily between personal stories and collective experience. She develops complexity, contingency, and a multiplicity of contexts, and she does so with precision and grace. Her research is prodigious, and her writing is accessible, jargon free, and economical... This fine book stands on its own as a tribute to the rich and tragic legacies that the 1918 pandemic left behind. (Elizabeth A. Fenn, University of Colorado Boulder.)

These chapters are well researched and carefully reasoned, but even more valuable for the general reader are the author's treatments of the effects of the pandemic on the humans who did not lead nations or armies of administer medical schools or hospital, but who nonetheless left hints of the great pandemic in personal notes, diaries, etc. (Alfred W. Crosby, Journal of the History of Medicine)

an outstanding contribution to a growing historical conversation about the meaning of memory in American culture as well as a refreshing addition to scholarship on the 1918 influenza pandemic (Karen Walloch, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences)

a prodigiously researched and often affecting history of the American domestic experience with the 1918 pandemic. (Michael Willrich, Journal of Social History)

About the Author:

Nancy K. Bristow is Professor of History at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of Making Men Moral: Social Engineering during the Great War. Bristow is the great-granddaughter of two of the pandemic's fatalities.

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP USA
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0199811342
• ISBN 13: 9780199811342
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304